Indecision 2024

[dyqik]

Also, this fine is bigger than the inflation adjusted price of the Louisiana Purchase.

Which bought about 1/4 of the land area of the US.

[Woodchopper]

Also, this fine is bigger than the inflation adjusted price of the Louisiana Purchase.

Which bought about 1/4 of the land area of the US.

That’s a nice illustration of GDP growth.

[dyqik]

The LP was a very good deal.

[Woodchopper]

The thoughtful and committed Democrat Ezra Klein argues that due to cognitive decline Biden isn’t up to the task of defeating Trump and that the Democrats should choose another candidate in an open convention.
https://youtu.be/NnsCxDOIqcA?feature=shared

[Stranger Mouse]

Letitia James did a press conference last night. The total figure she used was 463.9 million because of pre judgement interest. Plus the 88 million total from the E Jean Carroll libel trial of course.

I wonder if he will get the money from a Putin adjacent donor/business investor. And I wonder if the GOP. would care if he did.

He’s got more civil/criminal/state/federal proceedings coming up. The moral arc of the universe is long etc etc.

[headshot]

The court has also appointed a financial monitor, which is going to make it much harder for Trump to wash money from dodgy sources.

[Woodchopper]

The thoughtful and committed Democrat Ezra Klein argues that due to cognitive decline Biden isn’t up to the task of defeating Trump and that the Democrats should choose another candidate in an open convention.
https://youtu.be/NnsCxDOIqcA?feature=shared

And the article is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opin ... essay.html

ETA

Biden, enraged, does what people have been asking him to do this whole time. He takes the age issue head on. And he gives a news conference full of fury.

And then, when he is about to leave, he comes back to take one more question — this one on Israel and Gaza, where he says that America is no longer lock step behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s invasion, and then describing the effort he put in getting President Sisi to open the Egyptian border for aid, he slips. He calls Sisi the president of Mexico. Makes the kind of slip anyone can make, but a kind of slip he is making too often now, a kind of slip that means more when he makes it than when someone else does.

[…]

I was stunned when his team declined a Super Bowl interview. Biden is not up by 12 points. He can’t coast to victory here. He is losing. He is behind in most polls. He is behind, despite everything people already know about Donald Trump. He needs to make up ground. If he does not make up ground, Trump wins.

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest audiences you will ever have. And you just skip it? You just say no?

The Biden team’s argument, to be fair, is this: Who wants to see the president during the Super Bowl, anyway? And even if they did the interview, CBS would just choose three or four minutes of a 15-minute interview to air. What if CBS chooses a clip that makes Biden look bad?

That’s all true. But that’s all true in the context of a team that does not believe that the more people see Biden, the more they will like him. There’s a reason other presidents do the Super Bowl interview. There’s a reason Biden himself did it in 2021 and 2022, that Trump said he’d gladly take Biden’s place this year.

[…]

the Biden campaign does not deploy Biden like he is a desirable asset.

Biden has done fewer interviews than any recent president, and it’s not close. By this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had given more than 400 interviews and Trump had given more than 300. Biden has given fewer than 100. And a bunch of them are softball interviews — he’ll go on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, or Jay Shetty’s mindfulness podcast. The Biden team says this is a strategy, that they need apolitical voters, the ones who are not listening to political media. But one, this strategy isn’t working — Biden is down, not up. And two, no one really buys this argument. I don’t buy this argument. This isn’t a strategy chosen from a full universe of options. This is a strategic adaptation to Biden’s perceived limits as a candidate. And what’s worse, it may be a wise one.

[…]

that news conference mattered. That news conference had a point. It had a purpose. The purpose was to reassure voters of Biden’s cognitive fitness, particularly his memory. And Biden couldn’t do that, not for one night, not for fewer than 15 minutes. And these kinds of gaffes have become commonplace for him. He recently said he’d been speaking to the former French president Francois Mitterrand when he meant Emmanuel Macron. He said he’d been talking to the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl when he meant Angela Merkel.

None of these matter much on their own. The human mind just does this. But it does it more as you get older. And they do matter collectively. Voters believe Biden is too old for the job he seeks. He needs to persuade them otherwise, and he is failing at that task — arguably the central task of his re-election campaign.

And that can become a self-fulfilling cycle. His staff knows that news conference was a disaster. So how will they respond? What will they do now? They will hold him back from aggressive campaigning even more, from unscripted situations. They will try to make doubly sure that it doesn’t happen again. But they need a candidate — Democrats need a candidate — who can aggressively campaign, because again — and I cannot emphasize this enough — they are currently losing.

Part of my job is talking to the kinds of Democrats who run and win campaigns constantly. All of them are worried about this. None of them say that this is an invention or not a real issue. And this is key: It’s not the age itself they are worried about. The age of 81 doesn’t mean anything. It’s the impression Biden is giving of age. Of slowness. Of frailty.

The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are also acting out the things people want to believe about their president — that the president is in command, strong, energetic, compassionate, thoughtful, that they don’t need to worry about all that is happening in the world, because the president has it all under control.

[…]

Step one, unfortunately, is convincing Biden that he should not run again. That he does not want to risk being Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a heroic, brilliant public servant who caused the outcome she feared most because she didn’t retire early enough. That in stepping aside he would be able to finish out his term as a strong and focused president, and people would see the honor in what he did, in putting his country over his ambitions.

[…]

I have this nightmare that Trump wins in 2024. And then in 2025 and 2026, out come the campaign tell-all books, and they’re full of emails and WhatsApp messages between Biden staffers and Democratic leaders, where they’re all saying to each other, this is a disaster, he’s not going to win this, I can’t bear to watch this speech, we’re going to lose. But they didn’t say any of it publicly, they didn’t do anything, because it was too dangerous for their careers, or too uncomfortable given their loyalty to Biden.

[dyqik]

The thoughtful and committed Democrat Ezra Klein argues that due to cognitive decline Biden isn’t up to the task of defeating Trump and that the Democrats should choose another candidate in an open convention.
https://youtu.be/NnsCxDOIqcA?feature=shared

and is being soundly mocked for it by sensible people.

All the polls taken show Biden has the best chance of any plausible alternative. Klein wants Democratic party insiders and rich donors to overturn the will of the Democratic primary voters in a closed room deal that will throw out the votes of the Democratic party base.

ETA:
In addition, recent election results show that polls are often missing by 8-10 pts.

what do you think would happen to the GOP base turnout if the RNC replaced Trump with someone like Haley in a back room deal at the convention? The same applies here.

[Stranger Mouse]

Couple of insane clips of Trump today
https://x.com/noliewithbtc/status/17589 ... 08245?s=61

https://x.com/ronfilipkowski/status/175 ... 91806?s=61

2024 is going to curdle my frontal lobe isn’t it?

[Chris Preston]

Trump does have something over $350 million to raise in 30 days if he wants to appeal his case in New York. Selling a million pairs of sneakers to his rubes might just get him there.

I would expect to see more and more outrageous fundraising by Trump. He needs to not only fund all his legal efforts, but also to campaign. Of course, Trump won't be dipping into his own funds.

[dyqik]

Trump does have something over $350 million to raise in 30 days if he wants to appeal his case in New York. Selling a million pairs of sneakers to his rubes might just get him there.

I would expect to see more and more outrageous fundraising by Trump. He needs to not only fund all his legal efforts, but also to campaign. Of course, Trump won't be dipping into his own funds.

He has to post a bond for $450 million, plus 20%, to appeal. What the terms of a bond for someone convicted of inflating assets that secure loans (which look a lot like bonds in this respect) would be...

Oh, and he has to post a bond 20% over the judgement plus interest to appeal the $180m fine in the Carroll defamation case.

[Woodchopper]

The thoughtful and committed Democrat Ezra Klein argues that due to cognitive decline Biden isn’t up to the task of defeating Trump and that the Democrats should choose another candidate in an open convention.
https://youtu.be/NnsCxDOIqcA?feature=shared

and is being soundly mocked for it by sensible people.

All the polls taken show Biden has the best chance of any plausible alternative. Klein wants Democratic party insiders and rich donors to overturn the will of the Democratic primary voters in a closed room deal that will throw out the votes of the Democratic party base.

ETA:
In addition, recent election results show that polls are often missing by 8-10 pts.

what do you think would happen to the GOP base turnout if the RNC replaced Trump with someone like Haley in a back room deal at the convention? The same applies here.

John Stewart expresses this better than I can, but it’s noticeable that the attempts to rebut Klein’s argument that I’ve seen don’t do the one thing which would settle the argument, which is to point to recent examples of Biden publicly mastering tasks which require concentration, focus and memory, such as lengthy unscripted interactions with a neutral or even hostile audience.

Of course Democrat voters will be pissed off if he steps down or even gets replaced at the convention. But I expect that they’ll be far more angry if it becomes obvious that the candidate endorsed by the party leadership can’t cope with the normal bread and butter of election campaigning. If Biden has experienced cognitive decline it will be obvious, either because he repeatedly fails in public or because his staff prevent him from appearing in any unscripted or uncontrolled environment.

Of course all this could be baseless and maybe Biden is as sharp as he ever was. If so that’ll also be obvious on the campaign trail.

[dyqik]

It is all baseless GOP smears.

Biden does in person events all the time, and copes fine. What he doesn't do is kowtow to media pundits like Klein.

His schedule is public if you want to actually check this.

[lpm]

It is not a baseless smear. It is a successful smear. The false narrative is now locked in.

No candidate can campaign without making silly mistakes and verbal muddles. Even Obama made "dementia-esque" comments such as saying he had visited 57 States.

It is going to happen. Biden is going to lose multiple news cycles from verbal or physical stumbles. It will be a key part of the campaign.

And voters clearly don't want either candidate. It is reckless to stick with a candidate you know the electorate doesn't want.

[monkey]

It can be both baseless and successful.

[Woodchopper]

Nate Silver weighs into the debate in support of the Democrats needing to replace Biden.

[…] Idon’t begrudge people who took their time to realize that Biden’s re-election would be a heavy lift. The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving and it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age — Biden turned 81 in November (Trump is 77) — was an enormous problem for voters and one that Democrats weren’t going to be able to spin away. Still, as of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn’t run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats.

Since then, Biden’s situation has become considerably worse. If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65/35 favorite. But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably the underdog. If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/its-time-f ... use-to-put


Alternatively Josh Marshall argues that replacing Biden would not improve the Democrat’s chances of beating Trump. He concludes:

In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

I think the Democratic Party has thought — or is in the process of thinking — about this, is addressing it, not ignoring it, pick your vague verb. In addition to many strengths, including incumbency, Biden has a big campaign liability: his age. Democrats have decided that even with this liability he’s probably the best shot to defeat Donald Trump. And even if he’s not, there’s no viable path to switching to anyone else. Accentuate the positive, back burner the negatives, and run the campaign.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/no ... -heres-why

Notably Marshall doesn’t try to refute arguments that Biden has experienced cognitive decline.

[IvanV]

The Economist had a piece on it a few weeks ago. It concluded that replacing Biden would have been the best thing, had it been done in good time. But that time has now past, and the Democrats should now get on trying to re-elect him rather than sniping about it, as that only helps Trump.

[TopBadger]

The Economist had a piece on it a few weeks ago. It concluded that replacing Biden would have been the best thing, had it been done in good time. But that time has now past, and the Democrats should now get on trying to re-elect him rather than sniping about it, as that only helps Trump.

Seems sensible to me - they've hitched their wagon to Biden. Shame there doesn't seem to be an Obama 2.0 somewhere in the party... Are they keeping Harris as VP? I'm not close enough to US politics but I'm left with the impression that she seems to have morphed into something of an electoral liability... and given Biden's age she has a significant chance of taking over in the next term (assuming Biden wins).

[headshot]

The Economist had a piece on it a few weeks ago. It concluded that replacing Biden would have been the best thing, had it been done in good time. But that time has now past, and the Democrats should now get on trying to re-elect him rather than sniping about it, as that only helps Trump.

Seems sensible to me - they've hitched their wagon to Biden. Shame there doesn't seem to be an Obama 2.0 somewhere in the party... Are they keeping Harris as VP? I'm not close enough to US politics but I'm left with the impression that she seems to have morphed into something of an electoral liability... and given Biden's age she has a significant chance of taking over in the next term (assuming Biden wins).

Well, Harris is a successful black woman, which of course make her an electoral liability in many US states.

[IvanV]

... Are they keeping Harris as VP? I'm not close enough to US politics but I'm left with the impression that she seems to have morphed into something of an electoral liability... and given Biden's age she has a significant chance of taking over in the next term (assuming Biden wins).

Yes. She has unimpressed since impressing on the campaign trail in 2020. People talked of her taking over after Biden had done 2 years, but there was no further talk of that since then.

But then people say that the purpose of a VP is to make the president(-ial candidate) look good, and discourage people from assassinating the president. That, at least, seemed to be the purpose of J. Danforth "Potatoe" Quayle, who abundantly succeeded in making George HW Bush snr look relatively good.

[dyqik]

Nate Silver weighs into the debate in support of the Democrats needing to replace Biden.

[…] Idon’t begrudge people who took their time to realize that Biden’s re-election would be a heavy lift. The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving and it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age — Biden turned 81 in November (Trump is 77) — was an enormous problem for voters and one that Democrats weren’t going to be able to spin away. Still, as of late September, I thought that (i) it had become too late for a full-fledged primary challenge to Biden, and (ii) Biden voluntarily announcing that he wouldn’t run for a second term was a close call but probably failed a cost-benefit test for Democrats.

Since then, Biden’s situation has become considerably worse. If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65/35 favorite. But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably the underdog. If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/its-time-f ... use-to-put

You can rely on Nate Silver being absolutely wrong about everything, because he has no idea of what he's talking about. Since about a year before he left 538, his output was pure "DC pundit insider who hasn't actually talked to anybody real".

[Woodchopper]

Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/na ... rcna140335

[Al Capone Junior]

I hate to have to say this out loud, but we need a popular, liberal celebrity to step up here. Taylor Swift for president!

[Al Capone Junior]

I hate to have to say this out loud, but we need a popular, liberal celebrity to step up here. Taylor Swift for president!

I'd vote for her

[Woodchopper]

An interesting perspective

In our paper, we find class politics remains important to understanding changes in party membership. Specifically, when it comes to distributional policies, less-educated individuals prefer “predistribution” (e.g., labor market interventions such as the minimum wage, unions, protectionism, trade policies, and public employment) and well-educated individuals prefer “redistribution” (tax and transfer spending), policies that could be seen as compensating the “losers” of market liberalization or trade opening. The Democratic Party’s shift towards redistribution over predistribution helps explain its loss of less-educated voters. Using more than 200 historical polling datasets asking opinions about policies dating back to the 1940s, we show that this relationship between education and economic policy preferences is stable and shows no change even as less-educated voters stop identifying with the Democratic Party.

[…]

we provide evidence that educated donors have started to play an increasingly important role in Democratic primary races relative to Republican primary races. This shift is partly due to reforms of the Federal Election Commission (as well as party reforms) in the 1970s, which reduced the political influence of labor unions. In particular, we document a rise in out-of-district donations by educated individuals in Democratic primaries, meaning educated people who cannot vote for candidates are playing a larger role in selecting who will represent the Democrats in the general election. It is thus not surprising that they are choosing candidates that better appeal to educated voters like themselves.

[…]

we can observe the changing faces of the parties by examining the biographies of Congress members themselves. In the decades immediately after World War II, Republican legislators were significantly more likely to hail from Ivy League universities. The reverse is true today, with the inflection point again occurring in the 1970s. During the same decade, Democrats in their Congressional speeches began to speak in a manner requiring higher levels of education to be understood relative to Republicans.

Finally, we study how voters have reacted to this change in the Democratic party. We harmonized more than 800 surveys to show that the educational gradient in party identification has been quite stable until an inflection point that we estimate as occurring in 1976 (Figure 4). Since then, the educational gradient in Democratic partisanship has been on a constant rise. While until 1976, every additional year of education predicted a three percentage point decrease in the likelihood of identifying as a Democrat, the exact opposite is true today–every additional year of education predicts almost a three percentage point increase in the likelihood of identifying as a Democrat.

[…]

We then provide evidence that the shift towards the New Democrat faction of the party has been met with consistent disapproval from the least-educated voters, indicating a clear disconnect between this demographic and the evolving political stance of the party.

[…]

In summary, we argue that the Democratic Party’s economic policy shifts have played a significant role in the partisan realignment that has occurred in the United States over the past few decades. This is not the entire story, as we find that at most half of the party’s realignment toward better-educated voters can be attributed to voters’ perceptions of the party’s economic policies. Our research’s interpretation is that economic policy, when distinguished between predistribution and redistribution, is an underappreciated determinant of partisan realignment by education. We conclude that, at least in the United States, class politics is still alive and well.

http://www.promarket.org/2024/02/26/how ... ed-voters/