Politicians who refuse to retire is a huge, bipartisan problem in the US affecting both genders. Putting an age limit on the president or members of congress would probably have to be done via a constitutional amendment, because the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that states cannot add eligibility requirements that are not in the constitution. One reform that would help in Congress would be to modify the seniority system. Right now, members of Congress gain seniority as long as they keep being re-elected, so you end up with a situation where all the most powerful committees are headed by ancient legislators teetering at death's door. Since those committee chairs are very powerful, they get lots of campaign donations which help keep them in office until God calls them home. I think modulo arithmetic should be used to calculate seniority. A member of the House should have their seniority set to their time in office modulo 10 - after five terms they are reset to seniority zero. For senators, maybe modulo 18 could be used.
We have a built-in filter for this already, which are the primary and general elections. The problem is not politicians refusing to retire, but voters refusing to vote them out.
The Democrat/Republican party system is what gives incumbents such a lead over challengers. I don't think term limits are the fix, I think we need to change how campaigns are financed - because right now, the parties pick who gets money in downticket races, and incumbents have their own war chests. That leads to challengers being outspent.
I just keep thinking about how the national party rolled over for Dianne Feinstein in the 2018 senate election, even though she lost the support of the state party. No big democrats were willing to drop their support of her, and the national party wasn't going to spend money on a primary/general challenge to a seat that would stay blue.
US states are rapidly banning ranked-choice voting †, in efforts to prevent loss of their two-party systems. Campaign finance reform is definitely necessary, but so is the fundamental nature of how citizens choose representation.
This is naked anti-democratic power-mongering. The only reason to ban it outright (rather than, say, letting people try it and switch back if they find it "confusing") is because you're afraid that people might get the hang of it and think it should be used for state and national elections as well.
Voters do find it confusing. Not all of them, but enough that it matters. E.g.: In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin only won as District Attorney in the final stage of the final vote count because his supporters were more likely to know about and use RCV than moderate, conservative, and/or low-information voters.
1. How much of that is due to its inherent complexity, and how much is just due to its novelty? If they had grown up in a society where RCV was the default, how many of those people would still have been confused?
2. People misunderstand that FPTP requires tactical voting as well; are the number of people who will continue to misunderstand RCV if it were to become common higher than the number of people who currently misunderstand FPTP?
Consider that anyone who suggests you to vote third party to "end the two-party system", before the voting system has changed, fundamentally misunderstands how FPTP works as well.
It also completely blocks extremists. They are ranked first by their supporters but last by every single other voter. This effect is mostly visible in a 3+ party system though.
> Since those committee chairs are very powerful, they get lots of campaign donations which help keep them in office
Incumbency is a huge thumb on the scales. A functional system needs to have certain checks on those in power that balance the playing field, otherwise democracy is a sham.
The two party system is a problem, but term limits are meant to solve a different issue.
Maybe not even modulo but something like seniority increases monotonically for five terms but decreases monotonically for each subsequent term after the fifth term.
Senate: 1 Term. 6 years. Not able to then serve in the House.
House: 2 Terms. 4 years. Not able to then serve in the Senate.
1 Term House + 1 Term Senate. 8 years total.
Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.
Exactly this. California has enacted term limits and it hasn’t gone well.
Lobbyists run everything because the politicians are all too new. It also completely disincentivizes long-term thinking because the system guarantees they will be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost.
I heard an interview from a state rep in Florida complaining about term limits, something like "your first term is like your Freshman year, you don't know anything, your second is like your Sophomore year, etc" and her point was that you can't get anything done without being able to serve at least 6 years or so.
I think that's kind of bogus. If you can't figure out how to be an effective politician in your first term then you don't deserve to be elected for a second!
I heard AOC talk about this and it does make sense. There's just a lot to learn about how things actually get done and only so much time in the day. It's not as simple as "Write bill, pass bill, job done". You have to figure out who are the people who actually have power in an agency, what their priorities are, how to word the bills so they will actually achieve what you want, etc. There's a lot to it.
I disagree with POTUS term limits. If the citizenry want someone to stay in office, like we did for FDR, we shouldn't be forced to pick someone else.
Furthermore, having term limits on just one branch of government decreases the power of that branch without decreasing the power of the other branches creating a new balance of power (or imbalance).
Imagine having to vote for someone other than FDR in the 1940 election. Germany had swallowed most of Europe that year. I couldn't imagine being forced to vote for President Wendell Willkie or James Farley to lead us into war because the guy I want can't serve due to term limits.
Term limits are a dumb way to enforce change where there are definite benefits to institutional knowledge by the members, otherwise they are targets for capture by staffers and lobbyists.
Have a minimum (25 for House, 35 for Senate, POTUS, Judge) and maximum (75) age for all positions.
Term limits are actually bad for democracy. The most effective politicians are the ones who have learned how to do it over time. There's this bizarre American idea that being an elected official shouldn't be a job. It definitely should.
The problem here wouldn't even be solved by term limits, because Joe Biden has only been president for <4 years. The problem is that he has started to rapidly decline. Unless you institute some kind of Logan's Run Rule, you can't avoid elderly people in positions of power.
The actual, less fun solution, is for the party apparati to start elevating younger people to positions of power and influence. And that only happens if the members of that party start to demand it. It worked on Joe Biden, and he stepped aside.
Democracy is not there to be effective. It was meant to be a sociopath shredder, a wannabe kings and nobles grinder. But they reached critical mass and defanged the tax system, the most important containement vessel.
That's not true. Democracy is an end in and of itself, a system of government that at its best accurately reflects the will of the people. Preventing tyranny is a means to an end (preserving democracy) not the final goal.
And democracy is most certainly not a sociopath shredder. It runs on the power hungry. There are just supposed to be enough checks and balances to prevent any one person or minoritarian cabal from amassing too much power.
A whole generation is unwilling to acknowledge their mortality, step aside and make room (although unlike politicians many aren’t because they can’t afford to)
Hypothetically, but parties are also incredibly weak right now.
In California, we run an Open Primary system for every partisan office outside the POTUS so parties can’t even guarantee they’ll get a candidate into the general election even if they are otherwise eligible to put nominees forward and sometimes it’s Democrat vs Democrat (this has been happening for US Senate elections) or in some legislative districts Republican vs Republican.
Then coming from the opposite direction, you had a complete outsider in Trump effectively takeover the Republican Party in 2016 and he’s still holding the reins in 2024. Bernie Sanders almost managed something similar with the Democratic Party and they just barely held strong enough to keep that from happening. Twice.
Frankly political parties are incredibly unlikely to come together to impose any restrictions that would impose any kind of extra burden on their elder members, let alone age-gate them.
I missed the part where you explain how Bernie Sanders is a meaningful analog to Donald Trump, such that his primary defeats should be hailed as “holding strong” against an insurgent candidate?
Well the unknown variable is whether like Trump he would prove to be more popular than the party he ran under after a successful Presidential election effectively taking it over so you got me there; but they were in 2016 both outsiders who came into their parties to run for President under an already successful Party-brand and made a helluva run, one more successfully than the other.
Either way, neither of them should have gotten as far as they did.
And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
It's because no other profession has the combination of (1) forcing people out of a highly trained role so young (with no options to reuse those skills in any other roles - forcing folks to go have to go back to square one and get a new professional education to move anywhere else), along with (2) the peculiarities of a government pension.
Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.
Shouldn't it be up to the individual to determine whether they want to take that bargain? What about those people who did well enough in their previous careers for retirement not to be a concern and desire a new technical challenge that serves the public?
If you can make an exception to the rules to force them to retire early, you can make an exception to the rules to let them earn pension benefits faster.
> Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.
If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36.
Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.
I've heard that the bottleneck is apparently the the number of students that can be admitted to the FAA Academy to be trained, not the number of applicants.
I don't know what the state of the art is, but in the 2010s there was a huge mess where a 'biographical evaluation' test was required of ATC applicants, with the timing such that you took it after the FAA prep courses. The evaluation was thinly veiled racism, utterly uncorrelated with ATC performance, and one of the big outcomes was that anyone taking the prep courses was very likely to get weeded out by the biographical evaluation and thus suffer a total loss of his time and financial investment in the course.
So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.
The real reason is that pilots work in shitty conditions and their education is expensive. And skills are not transferable making it all pretty bad deal.
It's really difficult to game timed and proctored aptitude tests. We've refined these systems pretty well over time. I can't imagine how anyone would game a test like, say, the LSAT unless they had the answers in advance or fraudulently substituted someone to take the test for them. And both cases are pretty easy to detect nowadays.
From a somewhat low-paying job that has no transferable skills? How big is the pension? If it's not nearly as large as the person's prior paycheck, it doesn't sound like a good deal at all.
You are joking, right? You cannot seriously claim that NATCA is anything but a paper tiger if you knew anything about the history of ATC unionization in the USA. President Regan fired all 11,000 members of the actual strong ATC union, PATCO, and barred them from government jobs for life. NATCA never bothered to negotiate their rights back. Some REALLY strong union.
They collect pensions in their 50's. I'm not sure what metric you judge a union by, but most people look at things like pay and medical and when they collect pensions.
Their ability to collectively bargain effectively. It doesn’t matter how good their current compensation is - they aren’t getting the fair market rate without the ability to bargain as a union. Its an example of government and corporate interests colluding to suppress labor wages.
Median pay is $127,805 and by law the salary is capped at $221,900. Training salary starts at under $67,000 in the Bay Area and is much lower elsewhere. They can't strike and are actively being outsourced. Look up the KSQL controller on youtube to see how well that's going.
They have an incredibly valuable and high stress job, and should be compensated appropriately. We don’t know their actual value, because as stated, they are not allowed to negotiate on even terms thanks to Ronald Reagan and the conservative anti-labor movement.
The president has a large support staff to keep the lights on most of the time. Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots. They have plenty of time for golf.
> Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots.
Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.
None of that support staff is constitutionally allowed to make the call to respond to an imminent or ongoing attack. We need a commander in chief and we need to know who that person is -- which was the whole point of the Presidential Succession Act and the 25th amendment. This isn't even a Biden thing -- we had similar issues with Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan, and I'm sure that some administrations had similar issues that were never reported or written about afterwards.
Isn’t that true of airplanes as well? In theory support staff in the flight control room could instruct e.g. a flight attendant or even a passenger to land an airplane. However it is still not a good idea, chances are it will fail, so you do as much as feasible to prevent both pilots from becoming incapacitated in a large commercial plane.
Ironically, FDR pulled a Biden but succeeded. By early 1944 he was already dying of cancer and hid it, as he hid his disability. He made it through the election, and then died a few months after his inauguration leaving Truman in charge. Of course, FDR was more popular than Biden, but I do believe it was his closest election.
I heard just last night that domestically it’s now 68 years (or somebody is trying to make it 68), but this sucks for pilots who’ve been flying for a long time and are now doing mostly international flights, because the intl age is still 65. The upshot is they have to fly only domestically from 65-68 (and this can require retraining on smaller planes they don’t have currency with).
It's still bad, because at that age, close to retirement, they surely don't want to deal with all the nonsense and mayhem that US domestic passengers cause.
It's measurable biological certainty that reaction times as measured in milliseconds and fine motor control degrade with age. Vision and hearing also degrade. The nature of hands on control of flying a plane means there are no ways to compensate for this.
None of this applies to a politician making decision in a time span of hours, days or months and who can delegate tasks as they wish.
Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?
I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.
Donald Trump doesn’t need to be nuanced, or even marginally informed, so his cognitive decline is hardly relevant to his role as Head Performatively Outraged Xenophobic Tax Cutter.
A counter argument for no, or better a higher age, limit is experience. I'm talking President. But some kind of limit, maybe 80 or 75, with some kind of fitness check up at Walter read Military hospital required for any over 40, 50, there are cases or 'early dementia'.
With a better voting system (e.g. Approval or Condorcet) and nothing preventing a dozen candidates from running, that would be much more feasible.
These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.
why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to
Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. Using a voting system that “the common man” doesn’t fully understand is unfortunately kind of elitist/classist in its effects even though i understand that’s not the intention of the many who wish for it.
> Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice.
"Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out.
"Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).
This is just the thing you “voting system optimizers” miss!
Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works. “If you just shut up and do what you’re told by the political scientists, it’ll all work out.”
It’s the ‘how it works’ part that loses people. Strategies employed by those who understand it fully can even advantage more savvy voters over the ones just strictly following instructions. For instance, manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices. People know that they don’t know fully how systems besides FPTP work, and it makes them feel like these are a way to cheat them.
The instructions are simple, the mechanism and the possible ‘optimization strategies’ are more complex.
I’m not saying people are stupid, just not experts in this flavor of nerdery, and suspicious.
> manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices
This is not a useful strategy for good preference-ordering systems. "strategically" not making a second or third choice is on balance much more likely to cause you to fail to get your preferences, because the scenario you thought you were hedging against didn't happen.
> Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works.
It's easy to understand how approval voting works, as well. That's the primary advantage of approval over Condorcet: ease of understanding. "Vote for anyone you approve of and would be satisfied to see in office. This way, you can vote for candidates you like more, as well as candidates you think have a better chance of winning, and you don't have to choose whether to vote strategically to keep someone you don't like out of office or to vote for your favorite candidate. We tally all the votes, and the person with the most votes wins, which means they're the person approved by the most people."
While Condorcet is a bit more challenging to understand (the easiest explanation being based on "who would beat everyone else in a head-to-head race", leaving aside the cycle-breaking mechanisms), it's much more resilient against the need for strategic voting. In Condorcet, there isn't an incentive to vote strategically; just write down your preferences.
Approval does have scenarios in which strategic voting may be desirable, notably when a less mainstream candidate is close to overtaking the mainstream candidates and enough people are willing to drop their approval of the closest mainstream candidate. That's a dangerous strategy to try, because it also gives an opportunity for the most popular opposing candidate to try to win. The existence of that strategy is one of the biggest arguments for Condorcet over Approval.
So, the massive tradeoff here is:
Do you want a system that's trivial to explain to people with no additional complexity under the surface, trivial to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for, and is better than FPTP along most axes, but still retains one of the notable flaws of FPTP, namely having particular scenarios that still encourage strategic voting? That's Approval.
Or do you want a system that's better than FPTP along pretty much every axis, encourages and benefits from honest voting with no "strategy" required or desired, but is a bit harder to explain to people and has some additional complexity under the surface, and is harder to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for? That's Condorcet.
Also, frankly, if you're going to talk about systems that present voters with something easy to understand on the surface but have complexity under the surface that most people don't understand and that does cheat people, we already have that system in place: FPTP with the Electoral College, gerrymandering, myriad forms of voter suppression... Compared to that, both Approval and Condorcet are simple.
Yeah I do find the commenter you responded to is, shall we say, overly concerned about the mental capacities of the average voter. "Mark each one you like" is not that hard and not substantially harder than "mark the one you like most".
I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot (ones I've seen have three columns for 1st, 2nd, 3rd preference, and there should be at most? exactly? one mark in each column). Also vote counting has too many ifs and whens and seemingly arbitrary rules how my ballot will be counted in case my 1st choice doesn't clearly make it on first count.
Writing down candidates names will make for some fun days when it comes to counting. Plus, what if multiple candidates have similar names? And, a ballot with a scribbled "Miller!!1!" on it, do you mean Ms Annie Miller from Portland Oregon? That one? Lastly, when was the last time another person was able to read your scratches?
>I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot
Here in Australia you number the box next to the candidates name from 1 to N this is not normally an issue for the local seat in the lower chamber (house of representatives) where there are a manageable number of candidates, but in the upper chamber where senators are elected on a state wide basis you end up with sometimes farcical situations like the infamous "tablecloth ballot paper" which had 264 candidates.
There has been some attempt to reform this such as forcing people/party's to pay a registration fee in order to appear on the ballot (this is done to cut down on so called nuisance candidates but it is arguably undemocratic, although I believe you are eligible for a refund of the fee if you poll above some threshold % of votes which is a fair compromise in my opinion).
The deposit system in the UK seems to work fine for us.
It's not enough (£500 currently) to be a meaningful expense to any candidate actually trying to win, but it's enough friction for 'fun' campaigns that we get enough to be funny but not enough to really interfere with anything.
And, yeah, ours is called a deposit because if you get 5% of the vote you get it back - and the phrase "lost their deposit" to reference a candidate who thought they were real utterly cratering on election day is pretty widely known.
Of course the UK's system of government is largely a patchwork of oddities that, put together, mostly work for us, so how well any particular oddity will work in another system is invariably debatable.
Fond though I am of ranked choice conceptually, there are a lot of people I would not enjoy (nor be particularly successful at) talking through voting under such a system.
Given especially US multi-race ballots, I find it a lot harder to see the incremental complexity of approval voting having a noticeable effect (though note for calibration that there's plenty of criticism out there for how confusing many multi-race ballots are as is).
Your assessment may be swayed when you discover that the current de-facto bipartisan state of US politics is a logical and near-inevitable outcome of a first-past-the-post voting modality.
Yeah, ballot design for preference voting is an interesting UX problem. Any design needs to be obvious for voters, reasonable to count unambiguously, and support mail-in paper ballots (tangent: which ideally 100% of people would have the option to use).
You could list the candidates in random order with a number next to them, and then have people write down those numbers in order. That, like anything else, would have failure modes, though.
An NxN matrix for N candidates allows using "marked or not" detection, but it creates a huge ballot even with just a handful of candidates.
Voting is already a pricey endeavor. Simply do the UX studies and find what works. Than publish the studies, and after a couple of cycles run a meta-analysis, and we should have close to optimal strategy.
Dowdall's method assigns 1, 1⁄2, 1⁄3... points to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... candidates on each ballot, then elects the candidate with the most points. Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted, which gives each one very different properties.
Ranked voting systems are usually contrasted with rated voting methods, which allow voters to indicate how strongly they support different candidates (e.g. on a scale from 0-10).[1] Rated voting systems use more information than ordinal ballots; as a result, they are not subject to many of the problems with ranked voting (including results like Arrow's theorem).
That's a bucket full of problems. I remember that I had a similar problems years ago when I wanted to consolidate several lists about the "daily usefulness" of Chinese characters. How much does it weigh when you put A, B, C in that order? is A=1/1, B=1/2, C=1/3? or maybe A=0, B=-1, C=-2? To quote the above, "Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted". This should be a red flag! I'm happy to see that alternatives to first-past-post are tried out in some locations such as Alaska, Maine and Australia, but why ranked voting?
Ranked voting is only good when you think of yourself as a sole, lonely voter. You put the candidates into this order: A, B, C. But there will be other voters with other preferences. Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD. Now you have three favorites A, E, F that are preferred choices, and there's that also-ran B who only was second best. But B got three second-best votes whereas each of A, E, F only got one vote.
So answer my question: how many second, third, fourth votes will it take to surpass a given number of first votes? If there's another ballot in the same election with GCBD on it, now you have B with 3x2nd and 1x3rd place. You cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide these numbers. There's no clear answer (although practical procedures can and have been proposed and used) and that bugs me. The entire thing looks like a game of Bridge, Skat or Poker to me, full of justifiable but ultimately very arbitrary rules, hard to explain and tricky to get right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method says that much to me. One also has to account for unranked candidates and decide whether it should be possible to give one rank to several candidates, and then whether (as done in sports) the next rank must be left empty.
It just goes on and on, the list of options to do the ballot and to do the counting is truly mind boggling. This is the reason I've come to much prefer preference voting over ranked voting. Ranked voting is much too complicated for general use in a general election whereas preference voting is simple and clear and the number of "design choices" as it were is drastically reduced when compared to ranked voting.
"preference voting" and "ranked choice" are largely used as synonyms, as both involve an ordered list of preferences. When I mentioned writing out a list of numbers in order, I was talking about ballot UX design here.
The ordinary case of preference voting is extremely explainable: if more people prefer A to B than prefer B to A, A beats B; pick the candidate that beats everyone else. "It's like running a bunch of head-to-head elections all at once."
They're also really easy to tally into a table: "A ranked above B" is a point for A over B; "B ranked above A" is a point for B over A; A and B ranked equal relative to each other doesn't add anything to either of those two cells.
The corner cases like cycles almost never come up. And even then, it's relatively easy to explain a high-level understanding of the most common methods: "if there's a loop of people who each beat the next one in the loop, ignore the one with the smallest margin of victory". If A beats B in a landslide, B beats C in a landslide, and C very narrowly beats A, A wins.
Also:
> Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD.
Every ballot implicitly ranks every option, and the usual assumption is that if someone doesn't even care enough to list a candidate, they prefer every candidate they did list over any candidate they didn't list. (There are UX design ideas that could let someone say "this candidate is last" without ordering every candidate, but that adds complexity.) So these ballots are:
A > B > C > D > E = F
E > B > C > D > A = F
F > B > C > D > A = E
Writing it out that way shows that B beats A by 2:1, B beats E by 2:1, B beats F by 2:1, B beats C by 3:0, and B beats D by 3:0. No corner cases or cycles here; a majority of people prefer B to every other candidate.
Pleas do not google preferential voting, no country has ever implemented it. Definitely not Ireland.
The current system is the best thing in the world.
On serious note.
This will never be allowed in US as the whole 3rd candidate is wasted vote argument goes away. And suddenly there is a crack in the door for a other candidate to win.
Sure or some simplified version of ranked choice voting. Perhaps where only the top two choices get counted instead of having unlimited ranked choices (which can get messy and be harder to audit).
Once you've already had people rank their choices, why ignore meaningful information they've given you? In particular, models like IRV encourage people to continue ranking a compromise candidate on the top, to avoid the scenario where the compromise candidate is eliminated.
In models that ignore some of people's preferences, voting "1 Preferred, 2 Lesser Evil, 3 Greater Evil" is dangerous, because your preference for Lesser Evil over Greater Evil is ignored. This creates an incentive for people to keep voting the way they do now, with the compromise candidate on the top.
Approval makes sense because it's easy to explain. Condorcet makes sense because it's relatively close to ideal at the cost of making it slightly more complex to vote. Any model of the form "Ranked choice, but ignore some of the preferences" is the worst of both worlds: more complex to vote, but doesn't produce as good of an outcome.
I think the poster's point above was a form of ranked choice voting where you get exactly 2 choices, instead of 1 choice as in the current system. So you can vote "I like X best, I like Y second best" and that's it. This doesn't ignore anyone's choices, and is easy enough to understand. Details can be quibbled over (maybe 3 would be better than 2, for example), but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express.
All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support. They're not going to overhaul the voting system when they can't agree on the national vote even mattering.
It ignores preferences below the top 2, just like the current system ignores preferences below the top 1. It's probably an improvement, but the minor advantage in ballot design doesn't seem worth rolling out a half-measure.
> but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express
In practice, 99% of ballots will only include the candidates listed on the ballot. Perhaps set a limit of N write-in candidates for some reasonable N, to avoid someone playing edge-case games like "you are legally obligated to count my ballot containing 200 million names!!!1!". But there's no obvious reason not to allow as many rankings as candidates on the ballot plus number of permitted write-ins.
> All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support.
There's widespread opposition from the party that regularly loses the popular vote. I do hope it passes someday, though; it'll be a first step towards serious voting reform.
The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.
> Sadly, this has never
> happened, anywhere, ever.
Didn't this literally just happen?
If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.
However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.
Polls are not an election, indirectly or otherwise. The people who care most about polls are a) pollsters, and b) hacks writing tedious process stories.
My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate.
ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics.
LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation.
ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you.
The paradox of government is that the people most qualified to hold office - almost any office - are deterred from it by the sheer awfulness of the jobs. Someone deselecting themselves is in the general category of the dissuaded, even if they've done it before.
I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that.
I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results.
Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.
A very important point in politics that doesn't often get discussed is that simply holding a legal office doesn't give you any actual powers. The most likely result of a sortitionist system would be that the bureaucracy controls the state, and that the officially appointed leaders are strictly figureheads.
Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them?
So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.
>I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that.
Me neither, but it reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Songs from Distant Earth". In it, a distant colony of Earth has a very small population, since the planet is all a big ocean, except for a few small islands. The small society has a mayor, who's randomly chosen from the population for a limited term. The only disqualification (other than obvious things like age) is that the post can't go to someone who actually wants to do the job. It's similar to how no one in their right mind actually wants to sit on a jury, but people do it because of civic duty.
>Didn't this literally just happen?
>If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.
No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares.
>However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted
This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.
From an outsider perspective, the US bipartisan system seems to be a big problem. There are almost no meaningful choices. Moving to transferable vote would perhaps improve things? But I doubt that would happen anytime soon, because the current system is a live-lock of two wrangling powers that don't want more competition.
First we have to git rid of our ludicrous electoral college system. This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved.
> This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
The NPVIC is a fucking awful solution that would backfire on the idiots supporting it eventually. Talk about vote disenfranchisement on a massive scale—it could literally invalidate entire states worth of votes just because California, Texas, Florida, and New York decided to vote the same way. Which means that candidates would ignore literally every state except the 4-5 with the largest population because they are the only ones that would matter.
California might be 60/40 but that 40 would matter a lot. Republicans would go to Bakersfield Dems to Santa Cruz. Right now you only campaign in a handful of swing states vs getting whatever you can.
Yes and that would be a good thing, if people stopped thinking that by-state voting for the presidential office is a good thing in the first place. The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address. You can't move to to upstate New York to improve your influence because New York City will weigh you down. But you can move to New Hampshire and then of course the weight of your vote will improve much.
> The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address
Say huh? It is literally the same thing as now but in reverse and much much worse. At least now your vote has a chance of counting for something if only influencing your elector. If you live in a state that has agreed with the compact and has a small population, your vote doesn’t mean a damn thing even if you vote for the popular vote winner. Your vote is not yours, it’s the mob’s.
Your whole argument rests on the historically accidental choice that and how states should be apportioned seats in the electoral college. Everything about these procedures is arbitrary, much more so than the principle of "one man, one vote". Of course others have—of late in this forum—also aksed why it shouldn't be that big landlords get several votes. That's how they did it in Prussia in the 1800s. Commenters at they time remarked it is not clear whether it's the farmer or his many pigs who are allotted first class in elections. To sum it up, I'm for the simple and clear rules.
Oh and of course if you're for a small-state bonus in presidential (i.e. federal, nationwide) elections why is it that geography of all factors should be the one distinguishing point? How about skin color or profession? You as the artisanal baker that you are by vocation, don't you feel that artisanal bakers are always underrepresented in parliaments? Shouldn't your vote as an artisanal baker be given more weight, just like the way that citizens of New Hampshire get preferential treatment the Way God Intended?
I understand fully that states can choose to allocate their electoral votes however they want, but the geography factor is what is in the constitution. The current method of democratic influence of state electors to keep is simply better than waiting to see what your neighbor has done before you act in my opinion.
If you don’t believe that geography and states is the correct framework we should use, go work to amend the constitution. Why “break it from the inside”? Go make your case and let your argument win on its merits and get the votes. Stop trying to game the system, go change the system.
What? I sure propose to change the system, not to game it. I hate gaming systems, one should always be upfront and tell the truth. I clearly state, and if not before I do now, states and electoral districts should not be able to influence the outcome of presidential elections.
In a national vote, your vote is exactly as strong regardless of where you live: one person, one vote.
In the current system, some people's votes, those of the least populous states, count for far, far more than some other people's votes (those in the most populous states).
Plus, today, if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly in favor of one party, your preference for the other party doesn't count in the slightest. If you're a blue Texan or a red New Yorker, there is 0 point to you even going to the polls. In a national voting system, your votes would truly matter as well.
The logic is the same regardless of how it is implemented. If the majority of electors are guaranteed to vote according to the result of the national(federal) popular vote, than all voters are equal, and it also then matters if a million people voted R in California or 10 million did (whereas today that is entirely irrelevant). And this all includes the voters of the states that don't join this coalition.
It may feel nice if your state casts its votes for your preferred candidate even if they lose the general election. But it is absolutely 100% entirely irrelevant rationally. And this is the only thing lost if the law change goes through.
People who advocate a national direct democracy should work to change the constitution. States are the selection entity for the country’s executive office.
No, they are not. Not anymore than anyone else's vote who voted for a candidate who didn't win.
You are only disenfranchised if your votes can't affect the outcome in practice or in principle. Like, say, the votes for president of Republicans in California or those of Democrats in Texas in practice. Or the votes of those in Puerto Rico even in principle.
First of all, a direct democracy is something else, it is a system where citizens vote for laws and other issues directly instead of appointing representatives such as congress or the president. France is not a direct democracy, even though they elect their president through a direct vote (like all other democratic nations that exist today except the USA).
Second of all, the constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to appoint their electors. It follows that any system chosen by that state is as constitutional as any other system.
I would also add that a major improvement to the current rotten system would be for states to appoint their electors proportionally, instead of winner-takes-all. That would solve by far the biggest problem with the current system, which is not that Maine gets more representation per citizen than California, but that voting Republican in California is entirely useless.
I asked you for a justification on why the states deciding to decide their electoral votes based on the national popular vote should only happen through a change to the constitution.
Your reply was that the constitution doesn't say that the USA is a direct democracy.
So, I explained that adopting the national vote wouldn't make the USA a direct democracy. I also explained that the constitution doesn't say that the states need to decide the electoral votes based on local popular votes only.
So, I refuted your argument in two different ways. I'm not sure where you feel I didn't respond to it.
That is a work-around for the worst flaws of the EC, but keeps in place the unfair distribution of EC votes that favors small states. It also will not allow any meaningful alternative to first-past-the-post voting, which is what people here keep asking for. We can't have ranked-choice voting for president without a constitutional amendment.
No, the majority of electors are bound by law to vote a certain way based on their state's decision. The electors themselves are manifestly irrelevant to the whole process, and have been for maybe a hundred years.
The real problem of the system is the state based system, where winning a narrow majority in a state is equivalent to winning a landslide, since you get the same amount of power. Also, the fact that different people get different leverage based on whether they live in a smaller or larger state is highly unfair.
The electors themselves have not actually decided an election in a hundred years or more (as in, electors deciding against the official choice of their state). While they legally could, I would bet you however much you want that they would get literally lynched, if not arrested and replaced, if they tried to. For all practical purposes, the USA has a weighted state-based popular vote system, where the president is the one who wins a majority in states with enough weight.
Edit: researching a little bit more, the electors have never changed the result of the presidential election. The closest they ever came was in 1836 when enough electors ignored their state's vote for vice-president, and still the VP who won the by-state popular vote got elected later in congress. The president was separate and won the electoral college per the popular vote as normal.
So, this concept that electors serve some purpose to safeguard democracy from populism is a pure fantasy. It may be a fantasy that the founders shared, but it has never panned out in reality.
Yeah it's bizarre to think about, but a lot of royalty lived until their 70s and 80s, even in ancient times.
Turns out just having steady access to food, living a low stress lifestyle, and not having to wade through literal shit on the streets was all it took for some lucky ancient humans to have the same lifespans as modern humans.
Also, food in general wasn't poisonous. And if those royals actually lived even a modestly healthy life (not drinking too much, not using lead based makeup, or their doctors poisoning them with mercury etc), then they could easily live a lot longer.
The common man wasn't running for president back then. The first person approaching anything of the sort had the most contested election ever up until that point, and also almost kicked off the civil war 40 years early. That age limit was not written with a yeoman farmer president in mind.
Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living.
Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia?
Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia.
Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine.
This is flawed. How are is a voter supposed to be able to pick the best, with inaccurate/no information? It's impractical. Like a laws passed to protect a person by name would be impractical. It doesn't scale.
The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.
Seems more like a competition issue. In general if both parties weren't entrenched to this degree, they would be out competed by a group with increased transparency. "Vote for the black box behind the curtain!" vs "Vote for the person who's talking to you!" should be a pretty easy win at the poll. IMHO what we are seeing is a systemic result of the lack of competitive elections and winner-take-all and how it interacts with parties. The parties are far too comfortable. If they expected to have to compete, they wouldn't select vegetables.
I highly recommend Australia's ranked choice voting. We still have two party politics, but if a party goes too far from the electorate they'll lose to an independent or minor party. It allows candidates to target the reasonable majority instead of encouraging fishing for the votes on the fringes.
We'd have to replace our first past the post voting system if we wanted to make more parties viable and unsurprisingly most of the people our flawed system keeps in power aren't very eager to change it.
Very ironic coming from the same party that claims they need to "protect democracy". They aren't even allowing "open and fair" elections in their own candidate selection process, yet we're supposed to believe they will do that on a national level?
As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.
> No one is required to vote for a party's nominee.
How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.
> In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.
There was a primary, every state except Florida held one. Dean Philips is the only notable person who ran against him, but you did in fact have a chance to vote/caucus for someone other than Biden if you were a democrat.
Like a lot of things never codified into law or the constitution — 250 years ago it seemed obvious that the voters wouldn’t do things that seem utterly insane, and that surely nobody who’s very openly, shamelessly corrupt would be elected and still maintain that support even when exposed. So here we are.
So the Framers figured nobody on the cusp of senility would run, and if he did, he wouldn’t get the votes. Because both would be ridiculous.
Especially considering that the only democracy they envisioned was the House, since everybody else was to be picked by nondemocratic means (essentially then, by an aristocracy, who would surely be wise enough to make a good decision).
> it seemed obvious that the voters wouldn’t do things that seem utterly insane, and that surely nobody who’s very openly, shamelessly corrupt would be elected
Credit where credit is due, it actually seemed obvious to Benjamin Franklin that such a thing was inevitable .. hence the need for close attention to the machinery of government and regularly updating the constitution.
See:
I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well-administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it,
It seems similar to the construction in the phrase, "When two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." I'm also reminded of Jefferson's quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."
I think I agree with you/them - eventually, the stochastic processes of politics will yield despotism, that natural attractor from which we may break away only with difficulty.
I'm all for it. But when the average senator is over 60 and rising, and the majority voter base themselves are generally 60+, it'll be a hard law to pass from both fronts.
And as others mentioned, this is a bipartisan stance, so it's not a matter of political leanings. Old people represent most of our voter-base and thus most of our represenatives.
> But when the average senator is over 60 and rising, and the majority voter base themselves are generally 60+, it'll be a hard law to pass from both fronts.
I have less problems with boomers in general than a lot of people do, but honestly this is one of those things that's going to improve as time goes on and boomers die off.
The thinking at the time was: how can someone under the age of 35 ever have enough accomplishments to be elected president? They believed that would only happen if they were the child of a famous person or former president.
The Constitution was largely written as a departure from the monarchical British system. By not allowing presidential candidates younger than 35, this would prevent hereditary transmission of the presidency. Past 35, a candidate is more likely to stand on their own merits rather than their family or connections.
Quite right! We can only regret that similar minimum-age limits weren't put in place for other offices.
Here in ye olde Europe (and I believe the same for the U.S.), it is unfortunately common to see extremely young, as in literal college students, parliamentarians -- most of them handsome, well-spoken and opinionated; and some also coincidentally the children of famous politicians or businesspeople :-)
Because those "«people»" choose it for everybody else
I.e., your statement is translated to "that large masses of possibly unqualified people choose wrongly qualified people as having power over other people, with important regard to people in their right mind". It is not a value; it is a concern tackled in systemic planning.
Sometimes. On the other hand a surprisingly large number of women are raped and dont fight back because they are overwhelmed with various forceful factors. I imagine being raped feels quite unhappy, possibly even more so than missing 3 meals.
I'll have to look more into the 'seasoning' islands full of slaves in the Caribbean during the slave trade years. IIRC they were treated as bad as you can get, were the majority, and didn't consent yet practically didn't overthrow their dictator in most circumstances (Haiti might count as an exception).
For the same reason that the president needs to have spent at least 14 years in the USA prior to be elected: so that the people can know the candidate.
The minimum age requirement was intended to provide a safeguard against the election of individuals who might lack the maturity and experience needed for such a significant role.
The obvious argument on the other end of the age spectrum is the lack of personal stake. You are making policies that will not affect your own life much at all.
Additionally, we all make decisions collectively in society even though many of them do not affect us personally. I'd argue old people do have interests in many decisions, but perhaps you are not aware of them
If you have 5 maybe 10 years left you cant create a plan for the next 20 years and be around to defend it, explain it or refine it. You cant discourage or encourage to take risks.
An old person may have accumulated tremendous valuable experience in their field but it is increasingly hard to start over in a new field.
This is even before our mind and health decays and some of us get to walk the earth as shadows of our former self.
Also, there is no required experience or competence. There should be but there isn't. Aging to 35 helps very little.
And in fact people who have greatly declined and are still leagues above most of the rest - because the rest was what it was -, are very real.
So, no, decline is fully independent from state, just like a derivative, a trend, does not determine a value. There exist GDP growth of 15%/yr: they do not indicate a big GDP.
We are’t picking random people from a Walmart parking lot.
Nobody has greatly declined and is still among the best choices. I’d happily set the same standard at say 75-80 for Congress and Judges here, but Presidents need to be able to quickly deal with complex and novel issues. That’s exactly the kind of problems where age has the biggest impact.
Would that occasionally reject some still capable people? Yes, but there’s over 330 million people in the US, we can pre filter and still have plenty of options.
Your statement seems to indicate that you cannot see that some people are more competent, lucid, capable, effective, wise etc. than other: such blindness disqualifies from discourse.
Big reason for that is that the requirements also have age requirements, which ensures that nobody who is even 35 is electable today.
So the end result of those age requirements is that you prevent people from getting the necessary experience to become good leaders, resulting in way older politicians than most countries. Politicians being too young isn't an issue anywhere, politicians too old however...
35 doesn’t guarantee anything, neither does does 70+. But in the real world Trump would be 82 at the end of his term, and he was the younger candidate.
I mean to me it seems like that argument can be exactly applied to maximum age which makes it similar consideration.
If you're too old and your memory is faltering, you're "loosing experience". If your conginitive function is declining, your maturity is also essentially declining, all but in pedantic "maturity=age(ageism)" sense
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
Because age is no indication of fitness for any kind of activity or role. It sure would be nice, if persons with high responsibilities would periodically undergo a fitness test. I'd think the founding fathers saw the election process as such fitness test and the electoral college as the judge of fitness of the presidential candidate.
> age is no indication of fitness for any kind of activity or role.
This is a generalization that overlooks the nuanced reality of human aging. Physical and cognitive functions become more pronounced in advanced age, such as above 70 or 80. Sure, age alone does not universally determine fitness for activities or roles, but it is a very important factor to consider. I am fine with fitness tests.
Because the Founders didn't think of it, and though it would obviously be a good idea now, it's no longer possible to get enough consensus on literally anything to amend the constitution.
This mess has shown that you don't need an age limit for the presidency? He was going to lose the election exactly because of his perceived cognitive decline related to his age.
The DNC is at fault for selected him as the candidate.
I've made that argument. Someone that agrees with it is Jimmy Carter.
My opinion is if the voters are happy to send a geriatric congressman to Washington to sleep through meetings that's fine. But he shouldn't be chairing committees and other offices.
That said Reagan was suffering the beginnings of dementia during the last year or two of his presidency and the world didn't end.
That's not to say it couldn't have. The Constitution and its new SCOTUS interpretation places such a heavy emphasis on the executive branch that even with safeguards and a 25th amendment, maybe protecting the electorate from itself is warranted.
The same reason we don't have a race or sex limit on the Presidency. We should only have competency limits regardless of any other factors. My grandfather died at 101. He was extremely sharp until he was 98 and on no medication. I'd vote for that 95 year-old over either of our current choices without hesitation.
“Competency” is hard to evaluate, especially objectively, and that raises a whole host of other issues because it can’t be resolved expediently. Who raises a competency question? Who decides on it? When can the question be raised? What happens if we don’t have an answer by the time of the election, because it’s tied up in appeals?
Objective qualifications are much simpler. We could argue for months about whether a president is competent, but it takes like 7 seconds to decide whether they’re older than some arbitrary bar.
And at 98 did your Grandfather lead a country? How about a company? Manage a store? A team of employees?
All these anecdotal superhuman tales fail the smell test.
There is this hyped longitudinal study, but it doesn't say what roles these "superagers" were in, only that they had slightly better cognitive outcomes than their peers.
No one has cognitive capacity or neuronal volume of a 35 year old at 65, not to speak of 95.
It is delusional to think anyone can escape the effects of aging at this point in time.
There's a constitutional requirement that the candidate must be at least 35[1], which seems arbitrary to me. That was decided in 1787. I wonder what age they would have picked as a maximum age back then. I say that because (at least these days) it seems almost impossible to change, and people live a lot longer. Like we might be stuck with "Any age between 35 and 57" because people died young in 1787 relative to now.
It's worth noting that the age requirements selected then were less about wisdom and experience, and more about residency in the US. The chief fear at the time was a European power manipulating the country to put a puppet in charge, so to avoid this they wanted to limit power to those who had resided in the US for a long time, but they also didn't want to preclude themselves from holding offices in the future. These numbers (35 for president, 30 for senator, and 25 for house representative) represent a compromise - note that the constitution's primary authors were 36 and 31 at the time it was signed, and the youngest signer was 26.
There is an argument that in a well functioning democracy voters should be able to decide who is qualified to lead them. It shouldn't matter if the person is 20 or 80 if they are able to fulfill their obligations and win the support of voters. With a well informed population and an electoral system that fairly represents voter preferences there should be no need for arbitrary rules.
Setting aside the argument if any electorate is really capable of making that decision - the world has elected many questionable leaders - the big question is "what if the conditions change halfway through".
That likelihood increases with age, and even the most well-informed population does not have the ability to withdraw their consent if it does.
How does a primary help with the "conditions changed" part?
As for electing questionable leaders, no, primaries don't necessarily address that either. If you look back through US presidents, you can find a good sampling of really bad choices. (Season according to party preference).
I don't think that second part is completely fixable in democracies. I do think some systems are more vulnerable to it than others, and primaries in a first-past-the-post world are one of the worse systems.
Bear in mind that your life expectancy is higher as you get older. E.g. the life expectancy for a 72 yr old is not 73, its higher. But I agree with the general point about an age cap.
Hey, I resemble that remark! (Even if I am younger than Biden or Trump.)
But all seriousness aside, what makes you think that matters? I'm not going to vote for someone because they're old, in fact to some extent the opposite--I'd rather have a 50 or so year old as president. Are there polls that say old people vote for old people just because they're old?
Put simply: it would require a constitutional amendment, and those are hard to come by. The Constitution only sets a minimum age for offices — no maximum ages.
the glib answer is that every election is a decision on that politician’s age or term limit, which is almost certainly the position SCOTUS would take here.
in reality, the advantages of the incumbent in an era of safe districts, where the real election is a primary with poor turnout composed mostly of older voters, are almost insurmountable.
and we are currently witnessing what happens when someone hits an age limit the national electorate is unwilling to accept.
Because it's ultimately a distrust of people. You do not trust people to realize that the candidate is old ? Where would you draw the line on limits? Age, IQ, gender, weight, height ?
Of course, we should find the balance between all these limits and "intellect of the crowd".
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president
In fact there is an age limit for an American president. They should be >= 35 y.o. We need to augment it with an upper limit. My choice would be <= 75 y.o.
If there's to be an age limit, I think it should be tied to the average retirement age plus 7 years. This accounts for changes in life expectancy while also allowing representation for retirees.
IMO, on evidence for when the brain starts to age in a significant way, and supplemented individually based on a robust battery of tests that represent cognitive fitness (something more demanding than n-back and stroop tests).
Unfortunately, I think fantasies about living forever and politics around ageism will prevent this from ever being implemented in our lifetimes.
(No really, you cannot conclude anything from circumstantial states that only increase chances of some conclusion, but not determine it as true, strictly. It is also one of the basic principles evident past consideration of prejudice and racism...)
I see little reason to believe "democracy" is in any way designed to be optimal (for citizens anyways), and lots to believe it is not (and it would seem intentionally not).
Because it doesn't solve a real problem. If you try to articulate why it is that a particular old person is president and then dig in a little bit, it quickly becomes apparent that the real problem is something else. For example, in this case, the problem isn't the Biden is old. The problem is probably somewhere in how the Democrat party of the US is picking candidates.
> Putting politics aside …
I admire your optimism in saying that then putting a political question to the room.
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
In a democracy we let the pleb decide if they want a 81 year old as president (or a 18 year old). It works as intended. Putting age limits on fixed-term elected officials would go against the spirit of free elections.
> you must be younger than
> the average life expectancy
> (currently 73yo) - while in
> office.
As an aside, it's a common error to think that overall life expectancy is relevant to this sort of thing, it's not. That number includes those who die in infancy, etc.
If you wanted to limit it by "life expectancy" you'd want to limit it by the statistical expected remaining years of life at the candidate's current age.
For example, while the overall life expectancy in the US is around 73, for an individual at age 50 it's around 80[1].
Edit: Even if you pick the "right" life expectancy it's still pretty weird. You want the candidate to "only" have a hypothetical 50% chance of dying due to old age before their last day in office?
Then imagine something like COVID-19 happens again. Now a candidate on the cusp of being ineligible is suddenly ineligible because the latest life expectancy statistics shifted?
There's a reason political systems tend to prefer boring and predictable arbitrary limits.
> For example, while the overall life expectancy in the US is around 73, for an individual at age 50 it's around 80
Small but important note, you picked life expectancy for males, not all individuals. For females the life expectancy at birth is over 79 years. The average life expectancy for someone in the US without specifying their sex at birth is north of 76 years. And life expectancy is trending upwards and has for a long time as we eliminate more early mortalities.
No what? What part of the data I posted are you contradicting? Parent and I were talking growth rates, not absolute numbers. Sure, after a few years of slightly negative growth, the absolute numbers might be lower than at the very end of the negative growth. But the growth rate is now positive (for several years in a row) and expected to climb higher over the next few decades. If you think you’ve got something the CBO, SSA, CDC, and Census Bureau don’t, please share it.
Still, people age very differently. Some octogenarians are completing triathlons. Medicine also seems likely to increase longevity.
Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.
Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.
In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.
Yea people do. Some of the more recent interviews with Jimmy Carter is a good example. Recent as in pre his wife passing away. I havn't seen any interviews of him since then, so I am not sure if he is declining. It is often that in a long marriage, when one partner dies, the others start slipping. But the ones before, he was in his upper 90s and outside of the fact that me may not move particularly fast, he was (still is?) still sharp as a whip.
from my perspective, the reason to consider age limits for politicians, while using Biden as an example, is not the chance that he will die in office; it's rather the chance that he won't die in office.
he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job
As if he didn't show those signs when he took office.
Presidential age limit restricts mostly the right of the people for who to vote for. If you can't trust your people to distinguish candidates abilities to perform their duties, maybe a different political system altogether would be more appropriate.
Now, when media start covering up, maybe the problem also lies elsewhere
The electoral college picks. They don't have to vote for who most the people their state wants either (although state law may punish them if they go rogue).
President is only semi democratically decided as a courtesy.
Oddly (or not it'd definitely selection bias/survivorship) there's 4 people over 70 on my ski patrol, all of them re-certified on the toboggan this year, 3 of the 4 on black diamond. They're some of the best skiiers I've seen and their bedside manner and health skills were amazing. The main issue for most of them is just hearing which makes them seem more off than they are. All of them had transitioned to management / dispatch and back to patroller they've been doing it so long. One literally wrote the book.
You said it yourself: they can’t do the more demanding parts of the job anymore and transitioned to management.
The president is a very special role that requires a lot of stamina. It’s also a role where there’s only one in the whole country. The travel schedule alone is extremely difficult.
If there is only one role to fill it’s logical to be selective. Why hire an 80 year old when there are a dozen qualified 50 year olds who are physically better equipped to handle the rigors of the job?
The president is the commander in chief of the military. The military forces retirement at a certain age, why don’t we do that for the president?
Let’s not forget that the American president is a massive presence as a global figure that impacts the whole world. If they die in office, get ill, misspeak, etc, it negatively impacts the entire nation if not the world.
Biden accidentally calling Zelensky “Putin” in public was an example of something that could have been a disastrous foreign relations blunder if Zelensky or other allies to Ukraine were less understanding and took offense.
> I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”
You are almost certainly wrong, but it's also possible that your thereness measurement scale is still calibrated to the briefest and least knowledgeable period of your life.
"But global IQ is an amalgam of different kinds of intelligence, the most popularly studied being fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence which together—along with abilities called working memory and processing speed—are combined to yield global or Full Scale IQ. Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning (abbreviated Gf) reflects the ability to solve novel problems, the kind that aren’t taught in school, whereas Crystallized intelligence or crystallized knowledge (Gc) measures learning and problem solving that are related to schooling and acculturation. And they have very different aging curves.
Gc averages 98 at ages 20-24, rises to 101 by ages 35-44, before declining to 100 (ages 45-54), then 98 (55-64), then 96 (65-69), then 93 (70-74), and 88 (75+).
The decline with age in Gf—solving novel problems—is even more precipitous. Gf peaks at ages 20-24 (100), drops gradually to 99 (25-34) and 96 (35-44) before starting a roller coaster plunge to 91 (45-54), 86 (55-64), 83 (65-69), 79 (70-74), and 72 (75+).
These values are just averages for the entire US population of adults, with the mean IQs for each age higher for more educated individuals. But the same rate of decline across the age range seems to occur for all adults, on average, whether they are semi-skilled workers or university professors. "
When it comes to solving novel problems, the population of 81 year olds is more than two standard deviations worse than the population of 22 year olds. Alternately, the average 81 year old is poorer at solving novel problems than 95% of 22 year olds, and the average (100-IQ) 22 year old is better at solving problems than 95% of 81 year olds; I am including the 22 year olds that you rarely meet because they are silo'd off in a special needs caretaking system.
There is an EXTREMELY PRONOUNCED decline of global IQ with age LONG before dementia, that it is almost completely verboten to admit exists because it combines our fear of our own mortality with our fear of a corporeal self with our fear of being alone with our fear of being useless with the minimum baseline of respect for our elders. Nobody wants to say, or be forced to admit, "I am not as smart or capable as the man I used to be," and many of us would rather eat a bullet or put our fist through someone's face, but it is true nonetheless. By the time any of us have the authority to start forming conventional wisdom (eg, writing textbooks, or doing interview shows, or helping our children raise our grandchildren), this story is not one we want to tell others or ourselves, and so most people cannot accept it.
Sure, but how relevant or predictive of performance is IQ for the "being president" task beyond some functional baseline?
The user interface for a president to influence the operation of a country is people and relationships. The president doesn't need to solve novel problems, they need to select the right people to identify, prioritise and solve problems (occasionally novel but probably mostly boring and universal human problems), bounded by political constraints.
I guess there is also a major performance element to the role, where "thinking on feet" is very important. Probably something like "IQ" is very helpful with that.
Politician is an interesting role because it's selected primarily by emotions rather than how a large corporation would go about selecting an executive officer.
That being said, I really hope we'd all agree a high IQ president would be favorable to a low IQ president.
Basically you’re calling me young and dumb, charitably. You don’t know how old I am.
I know that I was far more capable when I was younger. I have gained wisdom but that wisdom wouldn’t help me if I was fighting jet lag on a global diplomatic mission aboard Air Force One.
I know that my retired parents who are still intelligent shouldn’t work a day job. They can barely operate Google Maps let alone be commander and chief to the most technologically advanced military in the world. And they’re about 10 years younger than Joe Biden.
Being president is supposed to be a really special job. And there’s only one role to fill, so there’s no reason not to be highly selective. It should have more stringent requirements than jobs like airline pilot.
Being incredibly sharp isn’t enough for the most demanding job in the US government. We are talking international diplomatic trips with jet lag, situation room in the middle of the night military operations, basically being on-call 24/7 for any major event.
Joe Biden would have been 86 upon his last year in office if he won the election this year. That’s barely 4 years before my grandmother decided she couldn’t clean her own house and cook for herself anymore and moved to an independent living facility. That’s someone who had no other job besides cooking and cleaning for herself. And she’s a member of the gender that lives longer. And she’s one of the older people in the independent living community! She’s lucky to not have transitioned to assisted living.
The odds of dying as an 81 year old in any given year are 1 in 15. If you’re older than 85 your odds are 1 in 7.
An 81 year old president is someone who has basically a coin flip probability of dying before the end of their term.
Joe Biden is older than radiocarbon dating (so we can't be sure exactly how old he is).
[it was an idea for a novelty website: things Biden is older than; including all the common computer stuff, but also ejector seats, SCUBA aqualungs, basic oxygen steelmaking, Velcro, the float glass process by which all common flat panes of glass are made, hairspray, spray paint, hovervrafts, LASERs, microwaves, mass production of Penicillin...]
i’ve been seeing this comment float around today, and assuming you aren’t a russian troll or bot account, here’s why it’s flawed:
there’s no _coup_ (not coop) because primary processes are not part of the constitution. candidates can step down (as biden did for the good of the country, and LBJ had done before him). there was no real choice to not pick biden, either, as the incumbent.
the party will now have an open nomination process where delegates will pledge based on how people of their state best want, and keep in mind that most americans did not want biden OR trump, so they really are doing what is best in the interest of american democracy
compare this to the RNC and GOP which has done nothing but embrace one criminal authoritarian crook for the last decade, and you’ll see why your comment doesn’t really make sense.
Hasn't the number one thing anti-biden people have been saying is that he isn't fit for office due to his mental state?
Its bizarre seeing them flip to calling this a coup as if biden stepping down is suddenly an illegal/unconstitutional thing.
I consider this "concern trolling".
They said for 4 years how he's barely mentally there / can barely speak / not fit for office, and then when the Democratic party pressures him to step down, they go all surprised_pikachu_face.png.
Are the same people saying both things? “Anti Biden” people are a wide swath of Americans and not required to agree with one another on any specific point.
Your response sounds like it was written by KJP. But seriously, here's why your reply is flawed according to Politico.
>“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.” [1]
This was not Joe Biden's decision to drop out. He was forced out by the people that pull the strings in the democrat party.
There is a lower limit but not an upper limit. Who knows how old we can be in the future, there are coherent smart people over 80 today. But hey, it’s a democracy and if you want to change it you can try…!
Agree that there are plenty of coherent smart people but you also have to think about the workload, my dad is in his 80s and is perfectly sharp on any issues you care to discuss but he also stays in bed until after 9 and enjoys a few naps during the day.
As I said in a post above, I resemble that remark--at least sleeping in, once in a while a nap. But I tend to stay awake until close to midnight. (I'm also not in my 80s, at least not yet--just hoping to get there.)
Read as "who knows how much more entrenched future politicians will be able to be? who knows how many more favors they will owe, how many more donors will have their ear?"
Civilization progresses one funeral at a time, but maybe if we knew we would live to four hundred we would take up longer term thinking and work for projects that took 100 years. Nod to Kim Stanley Robinson.
Putting politics aside? Ironic that the link you gave is a .gov site. So that would turn "life expectancy" into something political, and lobbyist would all over it.
This is wild. It seems super late in the game but okay. I'm super interested to see what will become of his chips act etc. The push he has tried to do to remove dependencies on TSMC is very forward thinking. Hopefully the next candidate takes up the momentum.
Why does the US in specific have such drawn-out campaigns? Earlier this week, I saw a pundit commenting that 4 months before the election is too short notice to pick a new candidate. But there's countries in Europe that announce elections, pick candidates, do the campaigns, go to the pools, do the counts, and have the electees take office, all in less than 4 months (see e.g. Great Britain recently).
Because elections here aren't "announced". They're on a fixed 4-year schedule. Everyone knows they're coming, and if they start just a little sooner than the other guy this time, that may give them an advantage. Over time, it creeps earlier and earlier. Like retail stores putting out Christmas stuff in mid-october.
Obviously, in great Britain's recent election, nobody knew there was going to be an election until it was announced, so there was no way to jump the gun.
Plenty of countries have elections on a fixed cycle and an election date known years in advance, and they don't have these extremely long drawn-out campaigns. Also, in most countries candidates also don't spend a fucktillion dollars on campaigning – another thing that has gotten rather out of hand in the US.
And the mid-terms make it even worse. De-facto the US runs on a two-year election cycle. I suspect this is part of the reason why things are so screwed in the first place.
Most countries put legal limits on either campaign spending or campaign duration, or both. That prevents campaign lengths from spiraling out of control and forces campaigns to be a lot more focused (hopefully focused on substance).
The US is one of the earlier modern democracies and as a consequence there are lots of little implementation flaws. And any change is seen as blasphemy against the will of the founding fathers. Many other democracies either had more hindsight available when they wrote their constitution, or were more open to change
> And any change is seen as blasphemy against the will of the founding fathers.
Anyone who uses this reasoning (I understand you’re not doing so) should immediately be shut up by quoting the inscription on the southeast interior wall of the Jefferson Memorial:
> I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
That’s as clear as can be: to honour the founding fathers’ intention, laws must not remain static.
I'd say exactly your argument is why it's hard to make changes.
The US has this pretty weird civil religion where the constitution is the holy text and the people that wrote the constitution are prophets.
Most other countries don't have that. A lot of democracies don't even have constitutions (UK, for example). The US constitution is an interesting historical document, but it's just a collection of laws. There are a lot of things democracies have figured out since it was written. Amendments are basically impossible at this point because the canon is closed and American politics have evolved to make it structurally impossible.
It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
Your comment is confusing. It seemed like you were going to offer a rebuttal but then didn’t say anything that disagrees with my point.
I’m not saying laws should evolve because a founding father said so. I’m saying that people who invoke the founding fathers’ will as a reason to not change laws should be corrected that a founding father specifically said that laws should be fluid.
Yes, invoking the founding fathers is a stupid argument. And in addition to being stupid it’s also wrong. Meaning there’s zero reason to ever use that argument and people who do can be contradicted by their own logic.
Thank you for clarifying. In that case, I’ll address what I think is the relevant section.
> It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?
Yes, you are absolutely right that it should be possible to argue in that way and discussing the merit of the idea should be more powerful than invoking a bunch of dead guys. But unfortunately it’s not. The people who shout about the founding fathers are not the ones you can convince with reason alone. You’re lucky if they pay attention to your whole argument. Invoking the founding fathers is an emotional argument disguising itself as a rational one.
Which is precisely why I’m interested in seeing what would be the reply to “but the founding fathers which you are invoking disagree with the point you’re making”. Though I have no illusions that would fix the issue, people are able contort to into extra planes of existence to not cede their point. Watch Jordan Klepper’s “Fingers the Pulse” segments for examples.
Also, notably, the US Supreme Court has ruled against virtually all attempts at campaign finance reform, with several notable recent cases, e.g., Citizens United.
> Also gives the people in power control and the ability to block out new messages. No sure it's fair or democratic.
With limited campaigns you usually run with people who are already known and have a long track record that's decently well known. The equivalent of running a Hillary Clinton or a Bernie Sanders. There shouldn't be much new stuff to drag up except their specific policies.
> Some countries give tax payer money based on how you did previously which greatly benefits the status quo
On the other hand if the state doesn't give parties money then the parties are just going to do whatever brings them the biggest donations, leading to a country run by the rich and the corporations. And you can't hand out money regardless of past performance since anyone can form a party at any time.
There is no winning solution here, but giving tax money to parties can be the smaller evil
This isn't an implementation flaw, this is (arguably) by design. You can't regulate campaign spending or duration without regulating political speech, which is a huge no-no under the 1st Amendment.
I don't actually agree with that argument, of course. SCOTUS has been perfectly willing to go along with "time and manner" regulations on political speech in the past and I don't see why "nobody can spend more than $X or campaign longer than Y days" is forbidden when "nobody can protest the G7 summit" is. The US's free speech extremism has, in practice, turned into a delegated right to censorship. And under current SCOTUS interpretations of the Constitution, the government is equally powerless to stop both speech and private censorship.
The true answer, of course, is that Trump and the donor class have coopted SCOTUS into an instrument of centralized power. SCOTUS is the scorpion[0] that stung the Progressive frog. They make this shit up as they go - free speech for me, censorship for thee. Fortunately, SCOTUS's legitimacy is in the toilet, and that power base can be broken; but it requires Congress and the President act to defang SCOTUS in a way that does not merely shift power. It needs to be distributed again.
From your lips to God's ears. As a non-American very much staring at tea leaves, I do worry stuffing the supreme court, or removing some of its power is the kind of act that could provoke a complete breakdown in the political system. Republican refusal to participate in the legislature, outright political violence that sort of thing. It's essential to save the democratic process at this point - but perhaps it's naïve to think that ship hasn't sailed. Kind of astonishing to see recent supreme court decisions like Chevron and presumptive immunity, happening with only nominal opposition - rather than say riots in the streets. Seems there's little mandate for radical change, and a democratic victory may simply delay the inevitable.
FYI most americans don't care about any of this. I suspect you're getting your info from chronically online people and the articles they read.
That aside, if you're interested in US politics you might wanna look at the details of those decisions. Eg, read this section about the case that brought down Chevron deference. You'll see that pretty much any judge or jury would have sided with the plaintiffs: https://loperbrightcase.com/#:~:text=livelihoods%20at%20risk...
I've read Trump vs US, including the dissent. It's frankly terrifying.
Americans not caring about these issues seems indicative of the media not being fit for purpose - rather than the issues not being existential. I'd argue that the less democratic things get, the more disengaged people tend to become about the details of political and legal decisions. Since they have less influence on them and are already suffering lacks lower down the pyramid of needs.
From Sotomayor's dissent
"Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as
bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the
President is now a king above the law. "
Yeah that's an unfortunate decision and that Sotomayor guy is a good writer, but the decision doesn't significantly affect people who live here and the dissent is not an accurate prediction of the impact. At the end of the day, congress has the power to impeach and elected law makers keep the president in check.
What do you think of the case that brought down Chevron deference? That should be a lot easier for you to analyze. Ie. "NOAA fucked around and found out"
And again you ignore the substance of my post. I don't know or care about the gender of the judges. I'll go ahead and leave this conversation. It's like talking to GPT-2
So, let me put it in terms people can understand: what is there to stop Biden from having the Secret Service black-bag Trump if Harris loses in November? Or stop Trump from black-bagging whoever beats the Republican that succeeds him in 2028? Or hell, what stops Biden from droning the SCOTUS justices that wrote the majority opinion right now?
According to the Supreme Court, the only appropriate venue for that question is a Congressional impeachment. The only time when it looked like a President was going to be impeached and convicted was Nixon. That's why he resigned. But I doubt that would happen today. In fact, you can blame Democrats for this: they didn't convict Clinton when he was trading sexual favors, even though that was absolutely something they should have[0]. And Republicans refused to convict Trump[1] for holding up Ukraine aid for political advantage or for inciting a riot in the Capitol building. It's like if you couldn't be convicted for beating and robbing someone because you refused to sign the guilty plea.
As for Chevron deference, let us keep in mind that the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench. SCOTUS consistently picks the interpretation of the Constitution that assigns the most power to the judicial branch, which they have absolute control over. The ostensible check on this power is Congress writing a new law, but Congress has been hung for over a decade, which means SCOTUS gets to cowboy-code whatever they want.
[0] During the Me Too era of sexual harassment revelations Democrats started realizing "oh wait, we did WHAT back then?!" and recanting
I'll answer the first part with a question: If Biden black-bags Trump, do you think he will be unpunished? If so, how much do you wanna bet? Same for those other hypotheticals.
> the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench
Only when a law is unclear. Interpreting thaw is kinda why these courts exist
> Plenty of countries[..] don't have these extremely long drawn-out campaigns. Also, in most countries candidates also don't spend a fucktillion dollars on campaigning – another thing that has gotten rather out of hand in the US.
Presumably you mean in Europe, but most countries around the world are parliamentary. They have no system of checks and balances due to legislative capture; the Executive really has no power and can be trivially forced to resign. There's no real point in running a huge campaign for a figurehead that doesn't have any real independence.
Plus, it would go without mentioning that the USA is the world's largest economy, so it's not surprising a lot of money would be diverted to elections with economic consequences.
As a counterpoint, Sweden has elections on a fixed schedule as well, and electioneering is still essentially contained to a month before the election proper.
> electioneering is still essentially contained to a month before the election proper.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the one-month limit is by law. Candidates are not allowed to campaign for longer than that. Just a little context I wanted to add for those that are unfamiliar.
You are wrong, there is no such law in Sweden. But the person you’re replying to isn’t really correct either. Electioneering ramps up slowly over the calendar year but since the election always is on the second Sunday in September there is a lull in July during vacations and then way more activity in August.
I forget which country but there is one that limits campaigning to a single month. It has been proposed as a way to remove money from influencing politics but hasn't really gotten much traction elsewhere.
Frankly the US just has a much larger area to campaign in than sweden. Candidates have to at least visit every state once and spend tons of time in 5-10
There's another significant difference in Sweden: the focus isn't on a single candidate but on the party, so different representatives can do the talking and there's no need for a single candidate to be everywhere.
Great Britain's election season is shorter compared to the US in part because they don't need to spend so much time choosing the candidates. Various prospective parliamentary candidates were already selected months before, and Keir Starmer was the Labour Party's "PM candidate" since all the way back in 2020! But since in the US the parties are so much larger and multidimensional (and internally democratic in terms of choosing the candidates), that takes up most of the time that we think of in a Presidential election.
That and the election for the President is functionally independent of the House and Senate elections because they’re serving terms and controlling Congress does not mean controlling the Presidency and vice versa. In the UK, y’all put the leader of the majority party (or the leader of the senior partner in a coalition) in Parliament as your Head of Government which is essentially a selection process which is an internal party affair; and your Head of State is of course the King. I think for most Parliamentary systems (with or without a Monarchy), the Prime Minister or equivalent thereof is chosen similarly.
The UK has a number of policies and traditions that reduce this tendency, in addition to snap elections.
Obviously in a sense politicians are always campaigning, in the sense that they're always looking to deliver on their election promises, raise their personal profile, announce popular policies, kiss babies and so on. But that's a constant background effort, rather than an election-specific effort.
Perhaps the most important factor is the campaign spending limit; a campaign might have £50,000 to spend in a constituency with 70,000 voters and when the money runs out, they can't legally spend any more. So any money you spend early is money you can't spend later.
Also a great deal of campaigning involves the candidate physically being in their constituency, not in Westminster. So to start campaigning early would involve a burdensome amount of travel, and much less free time to spend with family.
During the short campaign period, parliament is dissolved and public servants enter 'Purdah' [1] where no important policies can be announced. Candidates can spend all their time in their constituencies campaigning - but the government is basically in stasis.
I think the way we do ballot access also contributes to it. We give candidates backed by established political organizations preferential treatment (vs separating out qualifying for the ballot and support from the organization).
Tbh, I never understood why "support from the party" plays into it at all. If we truly want separation of powers shouldn't we encourage the leader of the executive to have no ties to any of the factions of the legislative. Instead it seems to be the opposite
> The fixed schedule is the case for most EU countries, in Belgium every 4 year we go out and vote.
I think you mean 5, not 4.
> The only possible way to vote earlier is when a government falls and they write out new elections but that is extremely rare.
It's not rare in many other EU countries - and even when there are no "snap" elections the there may be some flexibility about the timeline of the "standard" ones. I'm not sure that "fixed schedule is the case for most EU countries" is a good description, compared to the US where the exact date is known.
For practical purposes, in parliamentary democracies, the approximate date of the election is almost always known. Occasionally, they’ll go notably early, as with the recent UK one (they could have gone up to December) but it’s not really the norm (or certainly the out-of-the-blue nature of wasn’t), and it was still only five months.
The way primaries are explicitly drawn out across every state is a big factor. The earlier a given state runs its primary, the more influence that state has by setting the momentum.
The UK always has a Leader of the Opposition ready to make the case that they could be the next Prime Minister.
Technically we only vote for the representative in our local constituency, but who is going to end up PM is a big factor. We know what the options are before the election is announced: the current PM and the Leader of the Opposition (although in theory the leader of one of the smaller parties is also possible). Therefore no need for a primary process.
It's because America has three elections for President:
1. Republican primaries
2. Democratic primaries
3. General election
The drawn-out part is the primaries, part of which are parties trying to get their candidates in the news for a while. Once the parties officially pick a candidate — July this year for the Republicans, August for Democrats — the election proceeds on a pretty quick timetable.
The UK doesn't do primary elections to the same extent, nor do most parliamentary democracies. So they're faster, since there's just a general election.
The concern about Kamala's "short" time to make a case for electing her to the presidency is that she didn't get to make use of the ~year+ news cycles of the primaries, and will only have the general election to convince voters. (There's also a specter of it being "undemocratic" since party nominees are typically elected by the party's voters, rather than chosen by officials, but since she was Biden's VP in 2020, and he won the election, IMO this is overblown: the entire point of a VP is to take over if the president is unable to function, which is what happened in this case. Her claim to democratic election is that voters chose the Biden/Harris ticket in a general election, which is pretty reasonable.)
That's because everyone including Europeans spend plenty of their time watching the US election dramas so obviously it starts as early as possible because there's strong demand for it. It's a big business for everyone: the politicians, media, tech companies, the long line of hangers on, etc.
In Canada we know who the next 2 primary candidates were a year ago and elections not until next yr. That's almost always how it works, whether it's formalized or not.
Trump has really turned our system on its head. He's basically been campaigning since 2015 and never stopped. It's exhausting for everyone except, apparently, him.
Great Britain has a parliamentary system. In the US, the presidential election is drawn out but the campaigns for congress only heat up in the last months.
It’s weird to me that even after his debate performance people are still ascribing things to him directly. Clearly he’s just been stamping his name on the DNC agenda, though I definitely think the chips act is good in theory. We’ll see how it plays out in practice.
Most other countries have much shorter election periods. I for one would love if ours was shorter. Our politicians spend more time campaigning and raising money than they do governing
He tried a to push a lot of things in the positive direction. Democrats usually do. In addition to the chips act, there's infrastructure - saw a HN comment linking to database of where the infrastructure money went; insulin cost, public transportation, electric vehicles, climate in general, student loans. He tweeted imposing 25% tax on billionaires, which ultimately became his undoing.
> He tweeted imposing 25% tax on billionaires, which ultimately became his undoing.
Unless you’re suggesting the billionaires made him senile that wasn’t his undoing. He was a decent president, and accomplished some nice things, but his undoing is the fact that he can no longer speak in full sentences without folks holding their breath.
“ You know, it's called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes. There is a problem. They don't want you to have any water. They want no water.”
Edit:
from the same article - This what he seems to be referencing:
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed Trump's rule that previously increased the flow of water in showerheads. The Washington Post reported at the time, "Trump's shower head rule was part of a broader effort within the administration to relax energy efficiency standards and regulations for an array of household appliances, including dishwashers, washing machines and clothes dryers."
> Not going to happen, but I wonder how a mixed party ticket would do. Kamala (or whoever) + Mitt Romney as VP ?
I think it would be very hard to convince the liberal-progressive base (i.e. the core of the party) of the DNC to go for this.
> Has it ever been done?
Before the 12th Amendment was passed, the VP came from the opposing party[1]. This didn't work particularly well in practice, which is why nobody remembers the 12th Amendment :-)
> liberal-progressive base (i.e. the core of the party)
?
I thought the core of the party is establishment centrist gerontophiles. If there was a liberal-prog core then Bernie would have been a two term president already.
That was meant to be +1 SD on the "left" side of the party. If I did +1 SD on the "right" side of the party, it would be liberal-centrist.
(The point is not that the DNC's progressive base is dominant, but that it's big enough to influence the party's direction. Compare this with the +2 SD left part of the party, which is currently being almost entirely ignored by the party's +0 and +1 leadership.)
> If there was a liberal-prog core then Bernie would have been a two term president already.
He meant socially, not economically. Democrats are made up of very left social issues and centrist economic issues, Bernie who is very left economically of course has a hard time there. But still the Democrats are very left, just not in terms of taxes, but in terms of affirmative action etc.
Those are very left wing and USA is more left wing on those issues than most of the world, even Europe is much more reluctant to go that hard on those things. So yes, Democrats are very left wing, just not in the ways that makes things better for poor people, they are social signaling kind of left wing and center/right on taxes and wealth transfer.
What I meant was that the DNC is still, somehow, a "big tent" party. The plurality demographic within that party is liberal; if you add the next biggest groups on either side you get progressives (left) and centrists (right). The problem the DNC would face in a two-party ticket is that centrists would willingly go for such a split, liberals would be reluctant, and progressives and onwards would sit out of the vote in substantial numbers. Those sit-outs don't matter at the party level, but they do matter in general elections.
(This is true regardless of the social/economic axes used to distinguish the party's demographics internally.)
A variety of media pundits suggest such ludicrous schemes every election year; we have a recent, laughable proposal that Democrats should nominate Mitt Fucking Romney (age 77).
Interestingly, all these unity ticket proposals seem to demand Democrats bow to the whims of centrism with a split ticket; it is apparently perfectly reasonable for Republicans to have a ticket with two far right politicians, such as Trump / Vance.
> The plurality demographic within that party is liberal
Not the European kind of liberal. They are "liberal" in that they want to track the race of everyone in the country etc. So not very liberal at all, in Europe those things are called extreme.
Liberal means individualism, freedom of thought, meritocracy, Democrats are not very into those things, at least those things are not the strongest factions in the party today.
The topic is how Democrats compare to politics in other countries, why do you bring up something unrelated?
My point is that the Democrats are very left wing on some issues when compared to the world. Sure not all democrats are as hard into those things, but they are still very into it compared to what is normal in other countries.
So cooperating with Republicans might not be problematic in an economic kind of sense, but given that Democrats are so strongly to the left on other issues its a no-go. That was the topic.
No, the topic is US politics. I don't think it's even remotely controversial to observe that the US uses "liberal" differently than other countries with less insane politics do.
That's why Australia is being brought up: the way they use "liberal" as a conservative political demographic has as much to do with how the US uses it as European countries do. Which is to say zilch.
I am not criticizing the use of liberal here, I am saying that American liberals are very left wing since it isn't the right wing kind of liberal the rest of the world has.
I don't get this. Most of the rich world has universal health care, strong unions, shorter work weeks, longer paid vacations, uni seats for most anyone who can benefit, mass transit, even union reps on company boards, birth control, all that sort of lefty stuff.
I really don't think they'd be regarded as center right anywhere in the world.
People said that the Democratic Party was centrist during Obama's years, during which period many Democratic senators were closer to Joe Manchin than Bernie Sanders in terms of policy alignment.
Today, the Democratic Party today is economically left-wing: they're in favor of funding welfare, pro-union laws, protectionist economic policies (such as tariffs), rent control (not universally), and workplace safety regulations. They're socially left-wing: they're in favor of criminal justice reform (including abolition of the death penalty), racial equity, LGBT rights, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and access to abortion.
There's not a thing about them that's center-right.
The word you're looking for is "meme", as in a commonly repeated opinion that propagates through a population.
It's never been particularly accurate. Anything as large as the modern democrat party is going to have all sorts of opinions, which is one thing a lot of, uh, twitter style opinions, tend to miss. Ocassio-cortez and Manchin were both technically part of the democrat party at the same time, for example.
I've also read this sentiment online quite a few times, but find it rather unconvincing, especially if world politics encompasses more than Europe, the Anglos and Japan.
Left/Right is a pretty rough categorization to begin with, and things we associate with it in a liberal democracy might not hold globally. In China, the left wing of the CCP and other parties is generally regressive, wanting to go back to policies more in line with Mao, while the right-wing is economically more akin to our european liberals, but also socially progressive for things like lbtq rights. In South America, the left wing is usually economically statist and redistributive, but might be rather conservative on some social issues. There's also the whole liberation christianity movement. Japan as a country is way more conservative than the US.
Going back to a US-EU comparison: I think it is fair to describe the Democrats as centre-right on economic policy, especially when it comes to taxation. Outside of the UK, almost all countries in the EU have less qualms about high taxation levels, and it is obvious that a lot of senior democrats are in the pockets of rich donors and Wall Street.
On social issues I feel like it is different though: Open borders and immigration in general is significantly more controversial on the left side here in Europe. Things like being against against voter id is considered cooky by basically everyone. And the US is often leading the way on issues, as can be seen with gay marriage and cannabis legalization.
A simplistic left/right analysis does not do justice to the complexities of voter ideology and policy. In fact, I think the more this kind of analysis makes sense, the less mature the democracy tends to be, as it indicates that people look at it as a teamsport.
Norwegian here. We consider Democrats center-right and Republicans far-right compared to our parties. Most of the things you listed are supported by most mainstream parties here, even the ones considered right-wing. In addition, both US parties are economically far to the right compared to all major parties here. Our largest far-right party uses the US as a role model for economic policy.
Somehow I missed your comment 4 days ago. Thanks for the counter example. I really didn't think the Democrats would be center right anywhere, but I guess they are in Norway.
> They are "liberal" in that they want to track the race of everyone in the country etc
The US Census has tracked race from the beginning. America has always been very race conscious.
> Liberal means individualism, freedom of thought, meritocracy, Democrats are not very into those things
Depends on your point of view. There's plenty of examples that refute that, and plenty that show those values challenged in the opposing party. More so, the word is a label, not a credo; the party is a big tent.
There's plenty of issue of concern about the Democratic party but not what you listed. I'm not a party member but find them less objectionable than their opponents.
The number of voters aligned with old school Reagan/Bush era Republicanism has all but disappeared. The majority of GOP voters consider Romney to be part of 'the swamp'. Politics in America is increasingly driven by hatred of the out-group, so it is hard to imagine a mixed ticket doing well in 2024.
> Politics in America is increasingly driven by hatred of the out-group, so it is hard to imagine a mixed ticket doing well in 2024.
I do wonder how much of this is driven by loud minorities on both sides rather than by actual majorities anywhere.
I at least would happily vote for a mixed ticket that seemed to be committed to make bipartisanship work. I'm sick of our hate-fueled political system and am desperately hoping for a change.
Yes, the vast majority of current GOP voters consider someone like Romney or McCain (RIP) to be a "RINO". Only Trump and his sycophants are "true Republicans" to them now.
However, having a mixed-party ticket like this doesn't need to worry about swaying the Trump voters; they're not going to change their vote for anyone. The appeal here is to get some of the minority of GOP voters, the "never-Trumpers" and others who really don't like Trump much, to switch their vote (or actually vote, if they're sitting it out in disgust).
I do think this idea would succeed in getting some of these peoples' votes. However, I have no idea if that would outweigh the number of votes they'd lose from people on the left.
Technically prior to that wasn't the VP always the runner up? Practically we had two parties thanks to Hamilton and Jefferson, but the rules weren't specific to that unless I missed something important there.
You are correct. What motivated the change was Aaron Burr campaigning against Jefferson in the 1800 Presidential election and both were part of the Democratic-Republican Party. For subsequent elections the Democratic-Republican Party continued to dominate elections during the era of Good Feelings right up until the 1828 Election when Andrew Jackson under the Democratic Party defeated John Quincy Adams under the National Republican Party.
Note on those parties: the Democratic-Republican Party isn’t related to either of those parties; Andrew Jackson was the first time the Democratic Party put any candidate into the office of the President and while that’s the same Party as the one that exists today, the National Republican Party is not related to today’s Republican Party. We just really like reusing two words for most of our party names.
I think it may have a been on the Dangerous History Podcast, but I listened to an episode of the hodtory of American Policies parties. It was fascinating to hear how often they flipped and was seems to have been the reason when parties did change or disolve.
What issues that were important back then are still relevant today? That's a serious question, not a snide remark. I guess tariffs are, but (I think) for different reasons. Anything else?
An insider-outsider dynamic, with educated people in the northeastern cities usually playing the role of insiders regardless of the party system.
It's not an issue, but it is an electoral dynamic that affected a lot of issues. This might be at a level of abstraction higher than what you're looking for.
No one is debating the idea of a standing military today, but we should be now and they did back then. The same goes for a central bank, Hamilton and Jefferson debated this heavily and today we have something very much like what Hamilton wanted. We aren't debating banking but it's hugely important and flies under almost everyone's radar.
There's also the (maybe) obvious recent topic of liquor. A recent court ruling overturned bans on home distillation and way back in the Washington presidency they had to send the military to squash a revolt driven by a liquor tax.
Same things as what Washington and Adams had to deal with: state-building. There were the very contentious issues of the Bank of the United States (the Democratic-Republicans under Jefferson and Madison were originally opposed to a National Bank under prior administrations but essentially accepted it as a necessary evil) and slavery, maintaining the balance of power between States in the Senate, appointing justices, postmasters and military commanders, defending the western frontier from Indians, populating the Ohio River Valley, managing relations with the French, British and Spanish, warring with the British, buying Louisiana from France, resolving border disputes with the British and Spanish in North America, etc.
I mean beyond that, most issues were local. Voters only voted directly for their Representatives, local offices and Electors during the Presidential Elections, and who that Elector was mattered a lot more given you know, this is basically almost entirely pre-Industrial Revolution and both long distance traveling and long distance communications was still basically Medieval-tier garbage. You wanted to know that your Representative was getting you a good deal in Office and was a man of good character by whatever standard you judged that to be.
EDIT: Almost forgot: checkout American Elections: Wicked Game (a podcast) for the nitty gritty on individual elections. They covered every Presidential election leading up to the 2020 election and they’re currently in the midst of re-releasing it leading up to this year’s election with some updated content.
Your first paragraph is sort of what I expected. I'm not sure how the Bank thing fits today, but slavery is gone, the appointment of postmasters and military commanders is seldom an issue (once you get past a certain obstructionist senator who didn't want anyone appointed), we're no longer defending the western frontier against the Indians, the Ohio valley is maybe de-populating itself (rust belt), relations with the Brits are good and reasonably good with Spain and France, no war with the British, Louisiana has been American for going on two centuries, no more border disputes with the Brits or Spain (nor with Canada or Mexico). I guess appointing justices is still an issue, and certainly the balance of power between the states and the feds is an issue. But most--not all--of the national issues that the US faced back then seem to have gone away or are at least greatly diminished.
One correction I want to make on the point of slavery: slavery as practiced in the antebellum South through the end of the Civil War is gone.
Slavery is very much an alive and active albeit illegal in most parts of the world, and the global slave trade today is larger than the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was at its peak. The United States is still very active in combatting slavery and the slave trade, usually under the polite euphemism of “human trafficking”.
Appointing Justices is far more of an issue now than it ever was back then where it was a rather inglorious business-as-usual position. It had become more important even before then, but it really became an issue in the popular-consciousness after Roe v. Wade and every single confirmation process between Roe and Dobbs was mired in it. We’ve had only one confirmation since then, so I guess it is too soon to say whether how much it will continue to affect the confirmation hearings.
I also forgot to mention the Barbary Wars, and I actually just watched a video about it yesterday from The Fat Electrician: https://youtu.be/lcJhmm3D3OY
I don't think this is even remotely true. The DNC leadership is skewed towards the liberal-centrist wing of the party with significant (but not controlling) progressive representation.
Having spoken with DNC people organizing rallies, they don’t have any interest in bipartisanship. This is radical from the DNC’s point of view, not the American people’s point of view
Larry Hogan would make an interesting VP candidate on Harris's ticket. He's a Republican, but was a two term governor in the blue state of Maryland. (Maryland has a two term limit on the governor, so he's now running for Senator.) To the extent that the candidate for VP pulls in votes, I think he'd do an awesome job.
The fact that you had to explain who Larry Hogan is and why he would make a good VP candidate to pull votes, is precisely why he isn't a good VP candidate to pull votes.
Congratulations, that makes you a member of the largest DNC voting demographic! But the DNC doesn't win elections based on internal pluralities; if it did, we'd be living in a very different political landscape.
(To be clear: in a sufficiently dire situation, I would also vote for a cross-party ticket. But I know a lot of people who wouldn't, and there's a basic sense that their lack of turnout matters much more than my tepid support.)
But there’s no one else to vote for, they’d still vote for her with Romney as the VP. With that vs Trump as the other option, she’d still get the votes from the progressive base and potentially bring over a few more independent voters.
The US doesn't have mandatory voting; when people are thoroughly demotivated by their party's platform but are unwilling to vote for the other party, they stay home.
(I'm not saying whether or not I would. But I think this kind of brinkmanship is a very dangerous game to play, especially in the context of a cross-party ticket.)
Assuming the Democrats go with Harris, I can say whole heartedly that I won't be voting this year. I view voting as a responsibility to pick a candidate I want to lead rather than a vote to block someone I don't want to lead. This time around I have seen no candidate I could feel even mildly comfortable with.
I'm not happy about it, but given my view on why I should vote I don't feel comfortable voting for Trump, Harris, or Biden. Voting for one to spite another would require me first to change my mind on what a vote means or cave on my principles.
You should reevaluate what a vote means. In a country of millions of people, a vote is in absolutely no way a means for you to voice exactly what you want, or even for most people for you to voice an option you would actually like. In FPTP, a vote is for the most preferable option of the top two parties. Anything else is depriving yourself of your say. Other voting systems aren't actually that much different, they just make the information more available (you don't need to guess how others are going to vote beforehand, which can matter even though it's usually fairly predictable) and give people a bit more of a warm fuzzy feeling because they can give a vote for their most preferred option, even if still the outcome is which of top two options is more preferred.
> Anything else is depriving yourself of your say.
As much as plurality voting sucks, that's not true unless you assume there is only one election ever.
In reality the game-theory is iterative: What happens this time influences players next time. If X is concerned about losing to Y, they have an incentive to court voters that previously went for Z.
That tends not to work very well. In most countries, the third-party options are usually more extreme, and courting their voters may get them, but at the expense of even more votes in the center. In FPTP, third parties and their votes (as well as voters staying home), tend to disadvantage their own goals much more than advance them.
I may very well just be out of touch today, but I find both major parties in the US to be extreme. The policies they say they support and the rhetoric used to demonize the other party are both much to extreme for me.
At the end of the day the average person is just trying to live a decent life where they and their loved ones can be happy. We all have different ideas of what that takes, but we don't need to liken those we disagree with to Nazis out to destroy democracy.
In Canada, I've voted for the fifth place party in the past. I simply wanted them to get enough popular vote to qualify for official party status. Felt like I helped make a difference to get another voice in the fray.
This isn't strictly true. Parties definitely care about motivating their base and arguably the stay-at-home vote has pushed the US away from visible centrism in Presidential candidates.
I would suggest that this kind of thing is contributing to the problem as opposed to solving it, even as someone who is not particularly near the center.
A drop in voter participation creates an opportunity for an alternative party to fill the void. That market opportunity simply wouldn't exist if always accept that we have to eat whatever crap the two major parties decide to serve us.
If the two main parties were to drift well away from the opinion of the voters, and the voters all picked the closer option of the two, then one party would become dominant, the other irrelevant, and then there would be an option for an alternative party to fill the void closer to the voters. Note that this would be the case in any other voting system as well: whatever your preferred party is only gets to power at the expense of one of the others. The main reason this doesn't happen often is that the politics of those parties tends to shift to try to win those votes.
(IMO, the sad fact of most democracies nowadays is that the government does in fact tend to reasonably well represent the average of what the voters want, in terms of method if not results. Given the state of them, I think it reflects poorly on the voters, but there's not really any better way to align government and populace)
I really don't know, it would depend on a lot if factors. More important to me though is that I think it's st least a possibility in that scenario, as long as a vast majority of voters believe they only have two options we won't have a third party step in.
> In FPTP, a vote is for the most preferable option of the top two parties.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this take. I owe nothing to the two parties and I don't agree that they get to control everything to the point that I can only pick between two bad options they offer me.
Allowing parties to take this power leaves the door wide open for both parties to end up providing options that want to go in directions fundamentally bad for the country and I have to vote for one of them. To be clear I'm not saying that is the case today, but your view on voting makes that possible.
If one doesn't vote when they feel strongly that both party candidates are harmful, voter participation goes down and it opens the door for a new party to step up and have a legitimate chance. Said another way, refusing to vote when I absolutely disagree with both candidates creates a market for an alternative that wouldn't exist if I gave in and accepted choosing between two bad options.
Wait, how does lack of voter participation open any new party doors? There’s third party candidates on the ballot, which sometimes get a little traction, and then there’s write-ins, which don’t get traction. Not voting avoids both of those possibilities. Ranked-choice voting would enable other parties in a real way. I don’t see how not voting opens any doors. A third party has no legitimate chance in this election or for the foreseeable future unless voting breaks down completely. Neither party is going to let that happen if they can help it. The last third-party candidate to make it to 2nd place was more than 100 years ago (Teddy Roosevelt, 1912).
Third party candidates have effectively no chance as long as a majority of the country falls into the view that voting for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote. For the third parties, gaining support and more importantly funding is extremely difficult when we all fall into the D/R categories.
Decreased voter participation would signal a growing lack of faith or trust in the two major parties. That can open doors for fund raising for third parties, because they now can point to a percent of the population that historically did vote and stopped. Similarly, it would open doors for gaining support and votes because they can make the same argument to voters - 20% (or whatever the decrease is) of voters gave up on both parties. Join our party if you lost faith in the others, and in a 3 way race that puts us very much in the hunt for fundamentally shaking up the system we have today.
> Third party candidates have effectively no chance as long as a majority of the country falls into the view that voting for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote.
This isn't just an opinion certain voters have, it's the truth. A vote for anyone other than one of the two parties with the best odds of winning is a "wasted vote" in the sense that when the third party candidate voted for doesn't win (and they almost certainly wont) that vote can't go to support anyone else. Our voting system makes that true.
The only way a third party could ever win in under our current system would be if they managed to get a massive majority of the voters to vote for them, and a massive majority of the voters knew that the third part was going to be getting a massive majority of the votes before anyone voted.
It's extremely unlikely that a third party could gain that much support. Especially because elections in the US tend to be pretty close. The best any president has ever managed was something like 60% of the popular vote.
The way our system is structured what would actually happen is any sufficiently electable third party would just "take over" one of the two major parties, at the primary stage.
Trump basically did just that and Bernie Sanders came close.
FPTP systematically prevents third-party candidates from becoming viable. Literally, unless FPTP changes, voting for anyone other than D or R is factually a wasted vote.
Most countries with presidential systems and FPTP have third party runs to such an extent that it's impossible to decide who the first, second, third... party is. It's more than such and such a famous politician runs for the presidency and sets up a party if they can find one to support their bid.
The US does not have successful third party runs because of the uncertainty and difficulty of getting onto the ballot, the possibility of getting onto enough ballots that you will harm your allies but not enough ballots to win, and the fact that the electoral college means you can't rely on running up the vote in your home regions in order to get yourself into the running on a national level. It's not FPTP that prevents third party presidential runs in the US, but state electoral administration, state primaries, and the electoral college.
In any case, the effect is the same. It doesn't matter why the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. It just matters that the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. Abstention is nothing more than half a vote against the candidate closest to you. It's not a motivator for an extra candidate to run next time.
In this reading, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will probably have a bigger consequence than Ranked Choice Voting, because it will allow candidates to run up the vote in home regions, which will create new paths to the White House. Ranked Choice Voting just allows voters of the least favored candidate to make a protest and then come home. If you had had Bernie, Biden and Trump running at the last election with RCV, then Biden would have won if Bernie voters had preferenced him, and Trump would have won if they didn't. There's no actual alternative in which Bernie wins. So why would you stand if you're guaranteed to lose? It costs money and burns bridges. The extra candidates want a lower hurdle to winning (for instance, 38% in a field of four), not a higher hurdle (like 50%+1 in a field of four).
The consequences are different at the level of an individual district, because a member of Congress is a very different role than a national president.
> So why would you stand if you're guaranteed to lose?
From a country with Preferential Voting: you run to make preferencing deals that benefit the people that vote for your particular ideals.
It's on the record that X% of the popuation support the stance you take.
Further, it goes all the way to the houses and breaks the party stranglehold; Australia has 10 Independents, more than Canda, the US, and the UK combined.
Politics shoud be about more than "a little king" as POTUS, it should be about the house reflecting the proportional views of the population and weight being given to views represented and the deals that aligned views can make together.
The US FPTP system was doomed (from an iterative dynamic system perspective) to devolve into a two party non representative end game despite the express opposition of many Founders to Party Politics. It's what happens when a poort voting system is scaled up over centuries.
> I wholeheartedly disagree with this take. I owe nothing to the two parties and I don't agree that they get to control everything to the point that I can only pick between two bad options they offer me.
I don't think he's saying it's desirable, but is an outcome of the FPTP system. If you don't want to pick between only two bad options, then you'll need to eliminate the spoiler effect by switching to something like STV.
I'd be happy for us to switch to
an STV model, I'd also be happy with a majority rules vote without the electoral college.
Neither option is helpful this time around though. That said, I'd vote for congressional representatives that I believe actually will push for such a change if that option was available to me.
The status quo of where the top parties go is a consequence of the voter's attitudes, because of the vote they don't actually have the power to just force an unpopular option. The reason they are presenting policies you don't like is because they think (probably accurately) that they will win them more votes than they lose. If a top party were to not do this, they would quickly lose relevance, ceding dominance to the other party and then setting the stage for another party to gain power. A third option doesn't actually reasonably exist, in any voting system, unless the electorate and parties reach this state, it's just FPTP needs tactical voting to reach accurate representation (even in systems which result in many parties in government, you will have coalitions which form compromises and you get voters who did not get much at all of what they voted for).
I can do more than complain when rights are taken away. That was the entire point of the second amendment, the populace needed to be able to defend itself from tyrants.
I hope to never see that day come to pass and will do whatever I can to avoid it, but we aren't left with only complaining if fundamental rights truly are being taken away.
I can never understand Americans who say this sort of thing.
The US does not have a reasonable voting system. It’s not compulsory, it’s not ranked choice, and you vote for persons not parties.
You have a duopoly that’s more or less set up so that a third choice will never be available.
You aren’t here to pick an ideal candidate. You are here to pick the one that aligns most with your view that can win. Otherwise you get someone you definitely don’t want.
I agree with this to an extent and so far hav e voted in every election I have been eligible for, including when I lived overseas.
The problem I have today is that I fundamentally disagree with both options and think we will be worse off with either one.
I am totally fine accepting and supporting a candidate that I generally agree with, or even just agree with on a few key policies. I'm not okay with having to pick between one candidate who I view to be a sociopathic narcisist or another who I view has being well on his way to serious cognitive issues. Assuming Harris is the new candidate, I'm now left with the narcisist and a candidate who I view as unfit for duty, and an ineffective candidate who fell into this position thanks to a combination of DEI and a white house that refused to accept the limitations of the president.
If, on the other hand, voter participation goes down noticeably it can drive change. Both parties will know they lost support and, more importantly for them, have voters to win over. It also opens the door for creating a real chance for a third party that doesn't exist when we all continue to accept the unofficial duopoly that started way back when Hamilton and Jefferson were tearing the union in two.
>If, on the other hand, voter participation goes down noticeably it can drive change
I'm not American so system and the dynamic might be different there, but this comes off as wishful thinking driving a car down a cliff.
Voter participation among young is painfully low in Japan (a country I follow election results and politics), and almost every young ones reasons for this, as far as I know essentially boggles down to "it's useless for me to vote, older generation out vote our concerns and politics always favours the elder. Not voting at least sends my dissociation and discontentment to it all".
But decades of "not voting" have only told the politicians ONE message: the young voting bloc don't matter, because they don't vote, and our resources are better spent to favor the older bloc.
It's a circular logic, a self fulfilling prophecy, a local suboptimum with steep gradients.
Not voting because I fundamentally disagree with both options is a "break glass in case of emergency" situation in my opinion. I've never pilled that rip cord before, but for me that's where it is today with this presidential election.
Do I like it? Absolutely not. Do I expect to feel this way again in future elections? Also no, I honestly don't know how both parties allowed such bad candidates to be considered the best we have to offer as a country.
That said, I view not voting more akin to jury nullification than driving a car off a cliff. Not acting is different than doing something insane. I'm not sure how well known jury nullification is outside the US (or even in the US), but effectively it boils down to a juror voting not guilty despite the evidence, usually because they either disagree with the law or don't think the person on trial should be punished.
I'm aware of jury nullification (thank you cgp gray [1]) but afaik I don't think jury nullification can be equated to "doing nothing rather than doing the insane".
Jury nullification have a lot of uncomfortable implications to the legal system and that's one of the reasons it's not shared to potential juries, but implicit asked. The systematic implication can be pararelled to politician's in the long run deciding nonvoters concern can be ignored.
Jury nullification comparisons comes with a bit of a blind faith in the other juries (because in this situation you're not replaced, the resting juries just have more votes) are sane.
That said I know you're not advocating for nonvoting as a viable long term strategy but just for this one occasion. I'm not faulting that and can understand it. Advocating for it to others is a bit more problematic and the point I'm contending on in a public forum, in case many agrees to that stance.
My comparison was meant mainly in the light of going against the system that is in place because one has a problem with the system itself.
On a jury the expectstion is that you will vote based solely on the logic of the facts and legal interpretations presented. Jury nullification is a choice to go against this, going outside what the system wants you to believe is your duty because you disagree with that premise.
Here, not voting is going against this unwritten rule that we must pick between the two options and that is our civic duty to vote for one or the other no matter what. Sitting out for a specific election is ignoring what the system wants us to do when we disagree with the assumption that we must choose between the two options given.
> If, on the other hand, voter participation goes down noticeably it can drive change. Both parties will know they lost support and, more importantly for them, have voters to win over. It also opens the door for creating a real chance for a third party that doesn't exist when we all continue to accept the unofficial duopoly that started way back when Hamilton and Jefferson were tearing the union in two.
Is there a minimum turnout needed? I'm pretty sure there isn't.
All the diehards will always vote for the Dems or Reps.
And everyone else is not voting, not voting for an alternate candidate.
Sounds like the fewer swing voters there are, the better.
No there isn't a minimum turnout. Sitting out for an election means that whoever does still vote gets to decide the winner. St scale, though, a decrease in voter turnout would signal discontent with the system and the parties in charge. Those parties would likely respond to try to capture more voters and a third party may finally see a window that they could use to raise funds for a legitimate challenge to the two party system.
I have not seen that's happening anywhere. What actually happens is that parties will just focus on whoever votes and ignore the rest.
Sure, maybe if participation dropped suddenly to 20% there would be comments and reactions, but anything over 40% would barely get a few curious articles and no real difference.
> He may be a sociopathic narcissist but at least he's not black!
Where the he'll did that come from? I could care less what race, sex, or religion a candidate is. I want someone who is the best fit for the job.
> Maybe the problem isn't your made up voting moral code, it's that you're a little too in love with talking about your made up voting moral code.
Everyone's moral code is made up, where else would it come from? You don't know me or what I talk about about, I have no idea why you would think that I am in love with talking about my opinions on voting.
You don't see who I really am, nor is taking Biden at his word limited to the attitude of a generation you disagree with.
Biden specifically said he would be picking a VP that was a black woman. Niether is a qualification for the job nor a valid analog for success in the role. How is that not a DEI hire?
I'm not even saying DEI as a whole is a bad thing. I wouldn't begin to make such a broad reaching and absolute argument. I will absolutely argue that for roles as important as who is next inline to be President should be entirely about qualifications and fitment for the job. I don't think that a crazy stance at all but I'd love to hear any counterpoints you may have.
If there are plenty of qualified black women capable of doing the job, why not pick one as VP? Trump picked Vance and previous Pence not because they were the best choice, but he needed votes in the Midwest to win. Biden picking Kamala is an acknowledgment that he needed black support to win, VPs have never been picked outside of a political benefit, except maybe Cheney, but we all knew how that turned out.
Because, especially for such an important role, neither factor should be a hiring consideration.
When you reduce the candidate pool to one minority you have by definition, thrown out a majority of the total candidate pool. When you reduce that pool by sex you've cut it in half again, leaving yourself with a much smaller subset of the total candidate pool.
The odds are low that the best person for the job happens to be in that smaller pool. More importantly, you reduced the pool before knowing that the best candidate was somewhere in the smaller population.
Biden picking Harris to win the black vote is a political stunt and cheapens the role tremendously. Picking a VP only to win votes implies that the role isn't actually important and that anyone winning votes could do the job. I don't agree with that implication and find that it's quite a sleight to the importance of our government and our political system.
> Biden picking Harris to win the black vote is a political stunt and cheapens the role tremendously. Picking a VP only to win votes implies that the role isn't actually important and that anyone winning votes could do the job.
This is literally every election. Every single one. It's literally all any speculation about VP picks is about. Seriously, pick an election year in the last century and I bet we could dig up articles about what voting bloc the VP is expected to bring in.
What's more is that it's largely independent of the competency of the VP picks, who are sometimes quite accomplished and capable.
And of course, it's always been assumed it will be "white" and "male" for almost the entire history of this country.
And yet for this one you trot out "DEI" and all that you're trying to imply with it. I wonder why.
> This is literally every election. Every single one. It's literally all any speculation about VP picks is about
Until the 12th amendment was passed the VP was whoever got second place in the election.
In more modern history, it's commonplace for VP candidates to be picked because they fill in a gap in experience for the presidential candidate. Bush and Cheney is a good example, as is Obama and Biden. Sure you could make it political and say they were shoring up one group of voters, but the VP pick filled in a gap of experience and skills that was missing. Harris filled in a diversity gap, I'm not aware of anything else she brought to the table that Biden was missing.
In my view, a vote means more than a vote for a leader. It determines the direction of your country. Just look at how a single president has tipped the balance of the Supreme Court, where the judges will remain for decades, and that is only a part of a much larger political picture. The President will only stay for 4-8 years, but the choices they make can have impacts for generations.
You need to play the long game and vote for the best interests of your country, even if that means voting for someone you don't like.
> I view voting as a responsibility to pick a candidate I want to lead rather than a vote to block someone I don't want to lead.
You can view it however you want, it doesn’t make it true. Perhaps it would help to consider that one of the two candidates will be leading after the election, and make your decision based off of which of the two outcomes you would prefer.
Voting is using a share of power borne of your citizenship to express a political preference. I too used to think of voting as more of an obligation, but it really isn’t. It is a choice. If you’re staring down two candidates you don’t want to vote for and nobody in the 3rd parties is worth registering even a protest vote through, it is entirely reasonable to choose not to vote at all.
All the rhetoric that exists to try and drive/guilt people into the ballot box exists for the purpose of trying to get more people to turn out for their preferred candidate.
Abstaining can show the lack of faith in the limited options given. If a meaningful number of voters stay home it can signal that (a) there are voters to be won if the existing parties change and (b) voters are fed up with the status quo and may be open to a third party option.
Elections occurring and people voting in them is necessary for the continuance of a democratic society. The actions of individuals who are qualified to vote within said democratic society choosing not to vote does not nullify this.
> Abstaining provides no kind of signal or message to the body politic.
This is true and irrelevant. Not wanting to spend the (rounding up) 10 seconds to glance at and fill out the Presidential portion of a ballot nor waste the ink from your pen to do so before dropping it in the post simply because you do not like any of the viable candidates enough to do so (or for any other reason) is a personal affair.
> Not wanting to spend the (rounding up) 10 seconds to glance at and fill out the Presidential portion of a ballot nor waste the ink from your pen to do so before dropping it in the post simply because you do not like any of the viable candidates enough to do so (or for any other reason) is a personal affair.
In the same way that not helping at the scene of an automobile accident is a personal affair, I suppose, yes.
I mean if you fail a logic check and treat equally an automobile accident with a cavalcade of knuckleheads running to acquire power, you are absolutely correct.
You have yet to make an actual argument, only gesticulate in the general direction that you think it is problematic for people to choose not to vote in every election on every ticket. This is not a well developed position, only one that is reinforced by bad rhetoric and dogma.
I’m not stating this as a treatise on political science or theory or the rights and obligations of the citizenry or any other high-minded ideal: come November 6th, one of either Donald Trump or whoever the democrats pick to run will be the president elect, and for the next 4 years, they will be president. What you decide to do with that fact is up to you, and your justifications are your own, but come November 6th, Donald Trump will be the president elect or Kamala or whoever the democrats pick. Those are the two potential outcomes. Talk yourself into whatever you want, just don’t convince yourself there’s a third choice.
I'd like to see RFK get enough support to get into debates officially. Supporting him might be considered by most to be a wasted vote, but is it if it changes the discourse? I'm Canadian btw, no horse in this race.
I really want to like RFK but find myself only agreeing with him on a few topics. That said, I also really want to see more people viewing a third party as a legitimate option that isn't a wasted vote.
I'd argue that most votes are wasred given that most states are solidly aligned with one party or another. I happen to live in a strongly Republican state, making every ballot I've cast for Democrats effectively meaningless.
From the context of a voter, I would argue that your scensrio ignores the actual choice to be made. I can choose to support Trump, Harris (if that's who they pick), or neither. The third option is absolutely a choice if you view your vote as a vote of support rather than a vote for the lesser of two evils.
As a voter, you have an infinite choice of actions. There's a "write in" line - you can cast your vote for literally anyone who's ever lived, any fictional character, anyone or anything you want. You can cast no vote, you can write a treatise on the ballot about voter choice, you can tear the ballot in half dramatically in front of all nearby. You can choose to do whatever you want. Whatever action you choose to take and however you view it, there will be one of two outcomes the day after.
I think by third choice he meant an outcome other than Trump or the Democratic nominee (presumed Harris, I guess?) winning this election. One of them will definitely win and the other will definitely lose; I’m with you that they don’t have to do it with our votes specifically.
Taken to the extreme, if the two candidates were Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler would you still feel that every voter must accept that litation and vote in support of one of them?
By no means am I saying that is our situation today, but your view of how voters must decide leaves absolutely no room for voters to decide that neither option is acceptable.
I'm not arguing that voters must do anything. I'm saying that there are two possible outcomes on November 6th, and that to pretend otherwise - to pretend that your vote, or lack of vote, or protest vote, or whatever else leads to anything but one of those two possible outcomes is a fantasy. All of the work to change the options happens before the vote, not during it.
And no, your ludicrous example doesn't change that.
The example isn't ludicrous, it's playing out the worst case and asking whether you still believe that voters must choose to support what they see as the least bad option.
You literally said that voters should pick which of the two options seem best. So again, if given the choice of Hitler and Himmler should voters be held to that standard? If not, is it reasonable for voters to disagree with the vote and choose not to be party to it?
I totally agree with you here. I would support almost any Congressional candidate that I believe to honestly want to push through a change in this direction to our electoral system.
For now I just don't see Congress actually considering such a fundamental change to our electoral system, its rare enough that they pass a budget on time.
I'm not totally familiar with Himmler's exact beliefs and plans - but if say, he was almost as bad but not quite as bad as Hitler, then I would certainly be voting for him instead of Hitler. I would hope every other voter did the same. I can understand if someone wasn't able to actually tell the difference between such awful candidates - but aside from that, it seems illogical not to vote in the lesser of two evils.
I used to see it more like that. But the reality is that one of those candidates is going to get elected whether you vote or not. So not voting is basically just letting other people decide for you. Which is rational if you genuinely believe that will make no difference.
I generally agree with this. I personally feel like this is an extreme scenario that was so easy to avoid. I have voted in every election I was eligible to vote in, including when I lived overseas.
I don't expect to agree 100% with a candidate, heck I'm happy when I agree with two or three policies that I find important. But I just can't accept having to pick between two directions that I think are both fundamentally bad and dangerous.
If one side will cause significantly more damage than the other, why would you not want to limit the damage?
If you have examined the political agendas of both candidates and think they will cause equal harm, then I see your point. But I don't see how it can apply to this election.
Is it really possible to quantify the level of bad each side will lead to in the future? And can it be quantified with such accuracy that it can be compared fairly?
In this election I only see bad outcomes from either candidate (I'm mainly thinking Biden and Trump, though the same for Harris if she is picked).
I can't quantify the bad and I don't know what metrics I would even use. Lets say I thought one would likely lead to economic problems on the scale of the housing crisis and the other would commit a number of troops to die fighting in a foreign war. How would I weigh the damage of those scenarios?
You see your responsibility as wrong. We are caretakers of the country, we should vote for the best person to lead it, but barring that, we should vote against someone destructive taking power. If the country goes to heck in the next 4 years (and it hasn’t yet, the last 3.5 years have been pretty peaceful) because you decided voting against someone wasn’t moral, then you have to blame yourself.
Of course, if you don’t live in a swing state, then you can pretty much not vote and not feel any responsibility for the outcome, since we have so little influence anyways.
> we should vote against someone destructive taking power
What do we do if we believe both options to be destructive in different ways? I believed that re-electing Biden in his current state would be destructive, potentially because he isn't fit today not certainly because he won't be in 4.5 years. I believe Trump to be a sociopathic narcissist. And, if Harris is selected, I view her to be unfit for the job and an incompetent leader that would be walking into the Oval Office at one of the most important times we've seen since the 40s.
I don't live in a swing state so I do agree my vote is ignored anyway, but I have voted every presidential election until now anyway. I want my voice heard, I just don't want to align my voice with any of these options and don't see how they could possibly be the best our country has to offer.
Respectfully, I don't think you're framing the problem correctly. You're not merely voting for the President -- you're also voting for his/her administration. Biden, despite his cognitive decline, has a very long track record of appointing competent people to get things done (e.g., the American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, just to name a few). Kamala, if she receives her party's nomination, will very likely be keeping most of the same staff. Additionally, if you object to Project 2025, that's another good reason to keep Trump out of the White House.
You're not merely voting for the President. You're voting for the full package.
I also mean this respectfully, this is an interesting discussion and it's easy to lose intent in text.
I don't think your view is quite right here either. I'm not voting for an administration, I am actually only voting for the President. I would agree that I'm voting for a person who I trust to make executive decisions, including hiring and outsourcing, but voting for a person and their judgement is still different than voting for the administration comprised of unelected officials. Candidates generally don't announce their cabinet and department appointments until after the election, and it is fairly common for a second term President to shake things up after a reelection.
There's an interesting caveat to competence in getting things done. I definitely agree the Biden administration has gotten projects done, I just don't agree with quite a few of them.
I think we're worse off for the debt racked up by said programs, and the Inflation Reduction Act was a horribly named and fundamental misguided program that printed and spent new money in an attempt to reduce inflation. Whether you use the old definition of inflation, increasing the money supply, or the new definition, consumer price increases, adding new money into the system isn't a sound approach.
I also dislike much (all?) of what is in Project 2025, though I haven't personally seen Trump stand behind it or allude to any intentions of implementing it. Happy to be wrong there if I've missed something, I have a habit of tuning out when he starts talking.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia page about Project 2025:
"Although Project 2025 cannot legally promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors are associated with Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign.[43][44][45] The Heritage Foundation employs numerous people closely aligned with Trump,[46][47][48] and coordinates the initiative with various conservative groups run by Trump allies.[49] In 2023, Trump campaign officials acknowledged the project aligned well with their Agenda 47 program.[50] Trump campaign advisers have had regular contact with Project 2025,[51] though the project's controversial proposals have also caused the Trump campaign to view it as an annoyance.[52][53]"
Notably, Trump plans to overhaul federal laws, granting the executive branch unprecedented power to fire federal employees who were previously protected from political whims and executive turnover.
Whatever you think about him, Biden has been a boring adult, not a petulant 5 year old. He makes boring adult decisions, he never complained when the fed raised interest rates because inflation took off (like Trump did), I don't have to worry about him going off and nationalizing the fed, or replacing income taxes with a tariff that will make life much harder for everyone. Basically, he is a boring guy who doesn't even entertain doing crazy stuff. Trump is a pure populist, narcissist, and really, every thing he proposes is nuts.
I get you view Harris as unfit for no particular reason other than you think she is a DEI hire or something. But I bet she is just like other adult politicians, who isn't going to be very interesting, but isn't going to do anything crazy either. Anyways, the bar is low since I don't think Democrats could run anyone that would make me consider Trump's insanity. Heck, I'm probably splitting my vote this year, since I don't like Bob Ferguson for governor of WA, I'm a moderate who isn't happy with the decriminalization that has happened in my city/county/state over the last four years. BUT I value stability over anything else, I at least will vote for adults and not 5 year olds (I never thought we would get here, but Romney, McCain, and even Bush were grown ups that I could stomach).
I view her as unfit because I haven't seen her do anything meaningful. She was put in charge of fixing the immigration crisis, for example, and I have seen no action from her there. When in Congress I also didn't see anything important come out of her office, and any public hearings I did see her in were unimpressive at best and she seemed to stick to lazy arguments toeing the party line.
I consider a DEI hire because Biden made his intentions clear. He specifically said he was going to pick a woman, and I thought he specifically said a black woman but may I'm misremembering that. Saying you are reducing the pool of candidates specifically for a diversity factor makes that person a DEI hire, I'm not really sure how else to see it.
Its also worth noting that being a DEI hire doesn't say anything about the person's ability to do the role. Though I don't view her as being effective in her role, that is because of her experience and what she has accomplished and isn't because she was a DEI hire.
"Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.
In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable."
Interesting, I didn't read that as a DEI hire at all. I interpreted it as though he was just hinting at or throwing out a clue as to who he had already selected.
Yeah, if that were the case I'd agree it wasn't a DEI pick. My memory is that he phraser it very much as a "I will find someone who is..." rather than "I picked someone and she is...", but memory is far from perfect!
Your impact extends beyond your location. Donations, online engagement, and grassroots efforts in swing states can all make a difference, even if you don't live in one. For those seeking an alternative, Harris, for better or worse, has emerged as the only viable non-Trump option.
Not voting can also be a principled stance when I view both candidstes as a fundamentally bad option.
Where will we be if we all agree that the two parties have full control and we have no choice but to accept whatever they offer us? To me that sounds like a way to ensure that our democracy isn't sustainable.
If someone puts a gun in your hand and says you have no choice but to shoot your spouse or your child, would you actually accept that you must do one or the other? I'm well aware that's an extreme example and I'm not arguing that we are at that level politically today, but accepting one of the two parties no matter what the options are does allow for that scenario later.
> Not voting can also be a principled stance when I view both candidstes as a fundamentally bad option
Sure. And I agree someone thinking that way shouldn't vote. None of that changes the effects of not voting when one has the right to.
> Where will we be if we all agree that the two parties have full control and we have no choice but to accept whatever they offer us?
Most people seeking to justify civic nonparticipation ignore primaries and early campaign work. Or the fact that ballots have more than one line item.
> accepting one of the two parties no matter what the options are does allow for that scenario later
Not voting cedes control. There are zero historic examples of civic nonparticipation resulting in a more responsive government. Someone who doesn't vote functionally accepts the status quo. That they don't understand what they're doing isn't relevant.
Put another way: there were hundreds of elections in 2023 [1]. A non-voter had precisely the same impact on each of them as they do where they live.
> Most people seeking to justify civic nonparticipation ignore primaries and early campaign work. Or the fact that ballots have more than one line item
At least for the Democratic Presidential candidate, we weren't offered a primary or early campaign work for anyone that may actually be the candidate.
I will almost certainly vote for down ballot races this year though. I should have been more clear in earlier posts, my issue is with the presidential ballot specifically and not down ballot races.
The US has a first-past-the-post electoral system, and in that particular system, the way the game theory plays out is that it always stabilizes to a two-party situation, and, very literally, your responsibility as a voter is in fact to vote for the candidate with which you are most closely aligned. Anything else is self-subverting.
That model fails when I align with neither candidate. It also fails if both parties were to collude and offer us a false choice (hypothetical, I'm not proposing that's what we have today).
Maybe I'm not communicating clearly. The model is about the game theoretics of the electoral system, it has nothing to do with the preferences of any individual voter.
I’m curious: Why do you view voting this way? As opposed to simply taking responsibility for voting in a way you believe is the least bad outcome for you and your country?
I don't consider myself to owe anything to the parties. They need to earn my vote. If I accept one of the two options no matter how bad I think they both are, that allows for very bad scenarios to be possible and also allows for our political duopoly to continue to dominate.
If I don't vote, and if many others also stay home, both parties would scramble to gain support and third parties that previously had no chance at least have a potential market opportunity to break the two party system.
Am I allowing my voice to go silent and accepting everyone else to pick my president? Sure, and I don't prefer that, though in a representative democracy I also recognize that my vote doesn't matter anyway if I live in a state that swings the other way. As it so happens, I generally vote Democrat and live in a very Republican state.
> If I don't vote, and if many others also stay home, both parties would scramble to gain support and third parties that previously had no chance at least have a potential market opportunity to break the two party system.
That won't work. A non-vote says absolutely nothing about what needs to be done to get that vote. A vast quantity of non-votes are, in fact, not gettable: most non-voters are apathetic and they will never vote, full stop. Many others are, for lack of a better term, snowflakes who will refuse to vote for anyone who does not implement every bullet point of the program that they have in their head, and will therefore never vote, because their standards are impossible to meet.
Basically, most non-voters are either lost causes, really fickle, or have demands that rebuff a larger number of reliable voters and are incompatible with each other -- go and try to figure out who wants what. It's impossible. Parties can't read your mind, if you want better candidates you have to communicate your demands explicitly, and not voting communicates effectively nothing. It's like refusing to choose between spaghetti and curry and secretly hoping they offer you a hamburger instead. They won't. They'll cycle through a dozen other dishes you hate until, perhaps, they randomly stumble upon something you like, (or something you think you like, but ultimately don't.) It's not their fault: you're not telling them what to do! A better methodology is to vote in local races or primaries: that will show up in their statistics, letting them know what it is that you do like.
If you live in a red state but usually vote democrat, a futile vote for a democrat is the only signal they can use to prioritize winning your vote in future. If you can’t make your state winnable, you can’t make your withheld vote mean anything.
Which I fine, I was just genuinely curious. I don’t have a vote in the US so I’m not worried about how I spend mine.
Hmm interesting take. If I understand you correctly, your theory of change is that by not voting in this election (since you see either candidate as similarly good/bad), you might have a long term impact where, in the next election, parties will need to make more of an effort to appeal to their voter bases to increase turnout, resulting in better candidates in the future, correct? Possibly breaking into a multi party system instead of the current dual party system?
Also do you think the next 4 years will be similarly good/bad under either candidate? Or do you think one would bring the country more in line with your preference, but don't want to vote in the hopes of bringing about change to the dual party system, or to make the parties try harder to meet the needs of voters like you in future elections?
Correct, thats generally my hope of how things may change for the better if enough voters feel so poorly represented that they don't vote for President.
> Also do you think the next 4 years will be similarly good/bad under either candidate?
With Biden and Trump, yes I felt both would put us in similarly bad positions going forward. Their policies overlap in some surprising ways, from wanting to lock down our southern border to printing money like it's going out of style. They also differ in some ways, where Biden has seemed to have very little ability to keep the peace globally (I personally don't think many leaders respect or desr who he is today), Trump is a loose canon and I could see him playing a very dangerous game of chicken.
With Harris, I just don't see her as competent at all. At a good time maybe that doesn't matter too much, but there are quite a few situations in the world that require careful, decisive, reasoned responses and I simply don't see her doing that well or even taking it seriously.
this take is bad for one simple reason: if you stay home and trump wins, we don’t have a country or democracy anymore, and you contributed directly to the destruction of social norms and systems that ensure peace, stability, and the rule of law. you can feel smug as the republican party destroys democracy and slides into fascism, but it won’t really get you anywhere.
Because he undermined the election process in a serious way. If he loses, it sends a signal that siding with someone who does that is risky. If he wins, it opens the door to someone much more cunning than him, to do the same thing, but better. Its a brilliant way to short-circuit the entire political system which has let the US enjoy such a brilliant stretch of stability.
Let's put Trump aside for a moment. What do you see a Harris presidency looking like? Do you think she is our country's best option to solve the problems we face today, or is her role to fill the chair so Trump can't sit in it?
Harris will be fine but unremarkable. Middle of the road economic policy, with slightly more protectionism for high tech. Immigration policy continues as-is, with a slight increase in preventing illegal immigration. An Obama-like foreign policy, with good intentions, but bumbling in execution.
Compare that to Trump's recorded: Exploded deficits due to tax cuts. Banning abortion. More power given to corporations over people. Harming our alliances. Maybe you disagree with this characterization, but so many people that he chose for his administration came out and said how terrible of a President he was.
Sounds like we just have a different expectation a Harris presidency, nothing wrong with that.
I don't actually know what her economic policy would be, a primary sure would have been helpful there. If it's a continuation of the current policy, I'm not sure how long they can kick a can down the road though so far it hasn't exploded.
Immigration is a really bad mark for her in my book. She was put in charge of fixing our immigration issues and she has don't nothing from what I've seen. She went to the border once for a speech and photo op, but that doesn't really fix much. I only expect that to get worse when she has all issues of the Oval Office on her plate.
Foreign policy is where she very much concerns me. Obama fumbled through and made mistakes like drawing red lines with invisible ink. He had the fortune of doing that when we were still primarily dealing with terrorist actors globally, the only state actors directly in play were smaller. Today we have Russia still in Ukraine, NATO both moving away from the US and sabre rattling with Russia, and Israel continuing a bombardment if Gaza with the goal of completely annihilating a terrorist organization while simultaneously fending off threats and attacks Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Harris bumbling through similar to Obama will be extremely dangerous in my opinion.
That said, we largely agree on Trump's record. I don't understand claims made that he is an immediate threat to democracy or implement some kind of fascist takeover. He is a bad leader though, and a loose cannon which is dangerous given global problems today, albeit a different risk than incompetence.
> if you stay home and trump wins, we don’t have a country or democracy anymore
If the Democratic party really believed the apocalyptic rhetoric that they're spreading about the end of democracy, they would take this chance to nominate a candidate who can appeal to moderate voters. Compromise today to save democracy for tomorrow. It should be a total no-brainer to pick someone from the center of their party who even a disenfranchised Republican voter could support over Trump.
Today they have a chance to prove that they haven't just been cynically riling up their base with lines about democracy's imminent demise. They have a chance to nominate someone who stands a chance of beating Trump. If they don't do that and nominate Harris instead, then they've shown their cards and proven that they don't believe democracy is at risk.
This is an extreme take on what will happen should Trump win. Your claim implies that the mere act of Trump winning a democratically run election means that we no longer have a democracy. How does that work exactly?
If the Republican party poses a legitimate threat on democracy or attempts to turn us into a fascist state I'm not above fighting to the death to stop that. That isn't what we have going on today though, and to claim a Trump victory will mean democracy is over and we are now fascist is itself dangerous fear mongering with absolutely no proof to back that claim.
Two counter points…
- there are down-ballot races that might have people they want your vote. And they’re likely more influential over your day to day than POTUS.
- staying home strongly implies your ok with Trump winning and the GOP platform being implemented completely.
I was very unhappy with the options in 2016 and 2020 as well. Both times I bit my lip and voted for a candidate I didn't believe in because I at least believed they could do the job and they weren't Trump. I just can't do it again, and even if I wanted to I didn't have faith that Biden could do the job any longer and I don't think Harris is qualified at all (if that's who they pick).
Don’t you think Trump will dismantle our rights (see project 2025) and that it is our duty to vote to make sure he doesn’t get into power and turn this country into an autocracy?
I think Biden was too far down the path of cognitive decline, and I think Harris is incompetent and only fell into this opportunity as a combination of DEI and a political party completely blind to the obvious truth that Biden is dealing with health issues and allowing him to serve another four years is both dangerous for the country and borderline elder abuse in my opinion.
I won't vote for whoever the Democrats propose simply because I dislike Trump. I can't vote for anyone I think will make our country worse, and if Harris is selected I do feel that way about her as well.
A hire is a DEI hire based on the intwnt and process they were chosen. Biden made it clear he was going to select a woman, and unless I'm mistaken I thought he specified a black woman.
A person being a DEI hire doesn't say anything about their ability. You could be a DEI hire that is also good for the job, but you're a DEI hire because the pool of candidates was purposely limited based on certain diversity factors.
> A person being a DEI hire doesn't say anything about their ability.
You literally just used it as a way to disqualify her as a valid candidate. You said nothing about her skills or accomplishments, merely that she had certain demographic characteristics and therefor wasn't a good candidate.
If that's not what you actually meant, I suggest thinking about what you're trying to say in the future and phrasing it differently.
I reread my comments and don't see how it reads that way, but that wasn't my intent regardless.
I don't view Harris as competent or fit for duty. We have quite a few issues coming to a head, from economic problems we keep sweeping under the rug to geopolitical challenges not seen in decades. I have no faith that she will be able to steer us through without making things worse. None of those concerns have anything to do with her being a DEI hire, I just view it as fact that she was.
If you don't have any concerns, if it's not an issue, why bring it up in the first place?
Also, of course, if she's the democratic nominee then you're going to get either her or trump, so, dunno, make choices based on this decision? Do you really think trump and the republicans are ever going to care about people refusing to vote?
> If you don't have any concerns, if it's not an issue, why bring it up in the first place?
I don't have any concerns with being a DEI hire alone, it really doesn't say anything about the candidate. In the context of a person I already view to be a bad fit for the role, the fact that the person is in the role partly due to the DEI model of selecting candidates is important in my opinion. Its important not because she was a DEI hire, its important because a DEI approach out her in a role she isn't fit for and she's now potentially being offered a promotion.
> Do you really think trump and the republicans are ever going to care about people refusing to vote?
I don't have any expectation of either party actually caring how I vote. I'm just one voter living in a non-swing state. I have effectively no say what happens at the federal level, and my whole point at the beginning is this comment chain was simply that I won't be voting for President if the choices were Trump/Biden or Trump/Harris. I don't expect that to have any meaningful impact unless I'm part of a much larger group of voters who feel their best choice is to opt out.
How did the last years with Biden and Harris made the country worse? What about the CHIP act or the infrastructure bill and many other examples. Those things made the country worse?
How is Harris the same as Trump? Trump a convicted felon and rapist and god knows what he did on Epstein's Island. Trump said he will be a dictator for one day (hint: it won't be just a day) vs Harris a criminal prosecutor who understands the importance for upholding law & order.
How is Harris going to be bad for the country?
This is not about voting for Harris or whoever will be nominated. This is about voting against a wanna be dictator who wants to dismantle our democracy and constitution.
Both the CHIP act and the infrastructure bill spent money we don't have. I am of the opinion that the federal government should be required to run a balanced budget just like local governments are. So yes, I do view both of those as having made us worse off.
I didn't say Trump and Harris are the same. I think both will be bad for our country, but for very different reasons.
I haven't seen anything from Harris that makes me believe she is competent or fit for office. While in Congress I was never impressed by her public hearings, she either stayed silent or meandered through very lazy arguments that were often illogical and surprising coming from a lawyer. As VP she has either been completely absent or ineffective. She was tapped to be in charge of correcting our immigration issues for example, other than a single photo of at the border I haven't seen anything come of it.
I don't expect I need to lay out why Trump is dangerous for our country. We may disagree on details like whether his felony conviction was unbiased or if you can be labeled a rapist without a conviction, but functionally we're very much on the same page of who he is as a person and why he shouldn't represent the country.
> This is not about voting for Harris or whoever will be nominated. This is about voting against a wanna be dictator who wants to dismantle our democracy and constitution.
This is where we really have different opinions. My while point in starting this comment thread is that I am sick of having to pick between the least shitty option. It isn't sustainable and ultimately there are very bad scenarios that can play out if voters allow two parties to offer whatever choices they want us to pick between. If Trump wishes to dismantle democracy and our constitution I'll never see that day anyway, I'll either be dead in a battlefield or on the other end of an absolutely terrible, horrific war that never should have happened.
Governmental budget shouldn't be treated as your household budget.
It's different. It allows us to invest in the economy, create jobs, create new innovations etc. [0]
> If Trump wishes to dismantle democracy and our constitution I'll never see that day anyway'
This is what the MAGAs / Heritage Foundation have achieved so far:
- Take away woman's reproductive rights
- SCOTUS undid a 40 year old law that now makes it harder for federal governments to regulate, this includes clean air, water etc. So corporations can focus on increasing profits and screw the little guy.
- SCOTUS reduced the scope of the anti-bribery law - weakening democracy.
Just some examples.
Some things that will happen when Trump gets into power again:
- Women's reproductive will be further decimated
- Schedule F will be reintroduced - making it easier for Trump to replace administrative employees with Trump loyalists.
- Higher taxes for the working class - more tax cuts for the rich. That's why Elon and other Billionaires are donating heavily to Trump's campaign. Selling out the little people.
Look up Project 2025 for more.
Are you willing to gamble our rights and the rights of future generations?
What if everything or most of it comes to pass outlined in Project 2025?
In April 2022, at a dinner with the Heritage foundation, he said that the Heritage foundation was going to "lay the groundwork for what our movement will do."
"Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork, and Heritage does such an incredible job at that. [...] But this is a great group. They're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that's coming."
I think Trump, not really being into policy at all, just populism, really does have no idea what it’s project 2025, but he is still going to pick many of the writers and supporters of it to run his government, he doesn’t really have better choices.
Trump is the kind of guy who will say he is against abortion while asking and paying for his mistress to get one. He has a great sense on how to work populism, but doesn’t really have ideals/policies of his own.
Yeah, I agree with you. He's not super focused on policy, and he likely skimmed Project 2025, or never read it himself. But like you said, he'll still pick many people who worked on it or who will follow it while serving as part of his administration, and that's what's worrying. I have no reason to assume his administration won't try to implement it.
The guy has no intellectual curiosity, he thrives on the attention of being president but doesn’t bother with briefings, instead calling into FoxNews to complain about one vanity thing or another. That’s the problem really: the people who will work for him in a second term by now have learned how to manage him by stroking his ego, there will be much less chaos than term 1, and a lot more damage.
This work, Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, is a collective effort of hundreds of volunteers who have banded together in the
spirit of advancing positive change for America. Our work is by no means
the comprehensive compendium of conservative policies, nor is our group the
exclusive cadre of conservative thinkers. The ideas expressed in this volume are
not necessarily shared by all. What unites us is the drive to make our country better
> In any case of course Trump had nothing to do with it, it was written for him not by him (as if).
Ok great, so he's free to read it or ignore it. Let's not treat the document as if it's Trump's own stated/promised policy then.
> Which part explicity and clearly states Trump was not involved? You know, the part that you claimed existed in your comment above.
You're right I should have said that the document *shows* that he had nothing to do with it rather than *says* he had nothing to do with it. It's implicit not explicit.
The doc includes 7 pages worth of contributor names (starting page xxv) and Trump is not one of them.
So either way, it's careless to say that "Trump will dismantle our rights (see project 2025)" when he is not actually affiliated with Project 2025, as the document *shows*.
Voting gives you the right to complain because you tried to accomplish something. Giving up without trying is generally viewed as a bad thing.
But talking about "beltway uniparty" is indicative of a level of lacking intellectual curiosity that's genuinely sad. You can do better than that.
Maybe if this was twitter or a dinner party and you're just going for cheap laughs, sure, whatever, but I dunno, I guess this place isn't much different? Maybe it could be though?
People sadly value feelings of (totally unearned) intellectual superiority and sense of identity over actual ability to make changes to the world. Thus the stupid subset of mostly young people who think not voting is making some sort of statement other than that they are fools.
Well the first amendment begs to differ, but beyond that I absolutely get to complain about the situation. I wouldn't complain about whoever wins because I already don't like either of them. But I may very well complain that the two parties offered candidates that I so strongly felt were bad options that I couldn't vote for either one.
I'm not saying I need to agree with everything a candidate says, or even most of it. I need to at least believe that we won't be worse off as a country with the candidate I vote for. I can't sat that for Trump, couldn't say that for Biden, and wouldnt say that for Harris if she is selected.
That's exactly how we got 4 years of Trump, people in the critical swing states weren't motivated to go vote for Hillary. He then attempted to disenfranchise millions of Americans in the 2020 election, coming surrealistically close to achieving that goal, and incited an insurrection. So please don't make this mistake.
Do you really think it was an insurrection? Trump supporters are definitely in the gun owning demographics. Yet basically zero guns were present in the whole event, especially inside the capital.
It’s a shame this is getting downvoted to death, as it illustrates the biggest real problem with our voting system, and also illustrates the biggest reason that Dems are at a disadvantage: principles over party. Republicans are much better at voting together for their party and not fretting about whether individual candidates meet their principles, which in turn (maybe ironically) gets them much better support for their principles.
Before deciding not to vote, here’s one thing to maybe consider: which vote is more likely to get us any closer to ranked-choice voting, so that you can vote without caving on your principles in the future, and/or maybe getting rid of the electoral college? Conservatives are benefitting massively from the electoral college, gerrymandering, and strong collective party action. Both voting right, and not voting, delays the possibility of an outcome where we can vote on our principles. Dems are losing the vote often, and losing support for their shared principles as a result, despite having an actual majority, due to the party being splintered over principles and being less willing to vote collectively.
(Note I’m in favor of voting on principles and not blindly on party. I wish we had a voting system that enabled it. Just pointing out the realities of the different party strategies as I see them.)
> Republicans are much better at voting together for their party and not fretting about whether individual candidates meet their principles,
I've seen a lot of "vote blue no matter who", to the point that it seems a lot of people don't care at all who the specific person is, as long as they aren't on the wrong team.
I was kind of hoping my original comment here would lead to more meaningful conversation like this. I have to assume there are others here that feel similar to me, but it's an opinion that many may not raise for exactly like many of the ones I got here (down votes and arguments for why I'm wrong and must vote).
I'm not opposed to ranked choice voting or straight majority rules voting. I could see voting for congressional representatives that I believe to be serious about such a change, but the president really doesn't have any say in it.
I'm also totally open to other potentials the Democrats could pick. The bar is really low in my opinion, I just need to see someone that I don't expect to be actively harmful to the country, especially with so many different challenging scenarios playing out globally right now.
Thats the problem, I don't see either option as event adjacent to "good".
A bit beside the point, but I also don't appreciate the Democratic Party putting us in this position to begin with. It has been clear for over a year, even with limited public events, that Biden's health and cognitive ability was declining. We now are left with an unprecedented scenario of the party having to figure out how to pick a candidate in record time with zero voter input.
Not voting is a vote for “whatever”. If you really don’t see a difference between Trump and Harris (or Biden or any other), I’m really not sure what to say…
RFK Jr and Nicole Shanahan are running, and already on the ballot in 29 states. Though you won't see them interviewed on CNN or Fox News, many polls show them winning against Trump.
One of the reasons that RFK Jr started his campaign last year was a poll by Zogby which "surveyed over 26,000 likely voters across all 50 states, indicated that Kennedy could potentially outperform both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in head-to-head matchups." I believe the poll showed the majority of independent votes going to RFK Jr, and a significant portion of D and R votes going to him as well.
Given recent events, perhaps Trump is now much more popular, but previously polls showed RFK Jr beating Trump.
It’s more conceivable than people are willing to believe that RFK could get more votes than trump in this election. For example, trump might die before election day, in which RFK might have a chance.
> perhaps Trump is now much more popular, but previously polls showed RFK Jr beating Trump
Trump isn’t more popular. RFK was never beating anybody. If he played his card better he might have put himself into the running for Trump’s VP.
The bigger problem is there is a strong political incentive to look at who doesn’t vote and transfer their chips to those who do. (Appealing to non-voters doesn’t work. Most non-voters aren’t principled, they’re just lazy or indecisive, irrespective of what they say.)
This is an interesting thought experiment. What would the US be like with a completely impossible ticket? Would we flourish under a Lenny Bruce-Knuckles the Echidna ticket? What if Misty and Brock were the respective RNC and DNC chairs? These are the sorts of questions the status quo politicians don’t want us to be asking
I read something a few years ago that said moderates/non-affiliated make up the majority of voters with only a smaller percentage on left and right tied to the parties (somewhere maybe in 15% to 20% range on each side, can't remember exactly).
So it seems like a good mix of moderate could possibly win, especially when the other candidate is so polarizing.
Most of the folks who say they’re unaffiliated or moderates or open to voting for either party in fact vote exactly like a self-reported partisan. They just don’t like the label.
Lots of crappy reporting doesn’t differentiate between self-reported swing/moderates and true swing.
GOTV matters more. Do your people show up at the polls?
That's the thing. When individual issues are polled without party labels, the Democratic Party's positions are largely popular. Just like these issues, if you were to put a Republican on the Democratic ticket, that candidate will lose support.
We've seen repeatedly that Democrats going to the middle are met with supposedly moderate Republicans saying, "But not like that."
The problem is that Democratic policies do not result in promised outcomes. For example, higher minimum wage sounds good on paper, but then you have a hard time finding a job or affording basic essentials. So people become allergic to people who seem to bring decay. I am not saying Republican policies are a picture of practicality.
For the problem of lifting as many as possible out of poverty there aren't really any good answers so I think it comes down what each person's preferred trade-offs are. No minimum wage is good because it lowers the barrier to potentially gainful employment as well as making it easier to meet the work requirement for certain government benefits. High minimum wage is good because if you can get a job you'll make enough to not need benefits and it puts a floor on how much value a job needs to actually produce to be worthwhile and orients the economy around more skilled work.
But both options kinda suck. No minimum wage when wages can be depressed below CoL creates a decay in its own way.
My preferred ideal is setting minimum wage not by rule but via a standing government work program available to anyone that pays above CoL for the area. Then private employers can compete on price or by offering easier less-stressful work.
Democrats are the party of “wouldn’t it be nice if?”
Republicans are the party of “yeah, but…”
We need both types of thinking, and it’s a shame there isn’t a party that actually merges the two instead of this crappy tug of war we have going on. Practical progressivism, or something.
Not really. If this were true, one might expect to see, say, deficit spending temper when Republicans control both houses and the presidency.
Republicans just like to put debt into different things, like tax cuts for the rich.
Plus a good deal of the “wouldn’t it be nice…” is real-world tested and proven and the “yeah, but…” is nonsense.
[edit] this notion is a hold-over from when it was sorta, kinda true, when both parties were still basically trying to make government work well and largely working toward similar goals and differed largely on approach—but that was more than 50 years ago. Reagan’s campaign is the demarcation line.
Individual Democratic policies might poll well but as a bundle there's deal killers in there for most Republicans. For instance: Universal health care sounds great... oh but thats bundled with changes to ATF policy to make me a felon for what's already in my closet? Pass.
It’s definitely not just that. You can ask people if they’d support a hypothetical social program and then describe a real one, warts and all (they’re usually not a tenth as bad as popularly supposed—you don’t need to shy away from the down sides to make them look good) and get very high rates of support. Name the actual program, and you get a “no” and a bunch of BS about it back. It’s a propaganda thing, it’s not the price tags. I mean, sometimes, sure, but you can go out all day long and get 20-30% swings in support for this stuff with straight descriptions (including costs) vs. the name under which a program has been vilified.
[edit] one of the funniest ones is foreign aid. It’s commonly supposed to be way higher than it actually is (you’ll get answers like 5%, 10% of the budget, wildly wrong stuff) so you can consistently get people to agree that a “cut” to double what it actually is would be a great thing for a fiscally responsible candidate to propose.
[edit edit] so point is the vast majority of voters have no clue what it is they’re opposing when they say they’re against lots of things they’re against. Describe it, and they’re on board. They don’t actually know what it is.
Maybe but we have also seen a swing in how politics works (gotten more extreme). During the last two decades I've gone from Republican to Democrat to independent (never-Trumper, Democrat by GOP moral forfeit). I wonder how my beliefs would have evolved if US politics didn't grow so extreme over time.
I'm in the same boat. I think everyone dramatically underestimates how many of us Trump refugees there are. Some of us are never trumpers and actually voted for Biden, some of us held our nose and voted for Trump. But the extreme right that fuels MAGA doesn't have as much support as people think, and the main reason why Trump stands a chance this year is because the left has made no overtures whatsoever to the center and center-right.
Going along with the… let’s say poorly supported by the facts notions that illegal immigrants are meaningful in terms of rising violent crime rates (which—to avoid accidentally contributing to the problem, no, they’re not rising) or fentanyl smuggling, and backing that not just with rhetoric but with policy in some cases is, I think, one thing the democratic campaigns believe they’re doing to reach out toward the center and center right. It’s definitely not aimed at democrats even a hair left of… idk, Reagan I guess, given the whole amnesty thing. So they are trying some stuff.
My father was a straight-ticket Republican voter his entire life and now he says he will never vote for any MAGA Republican. He hates the MAGA takeover of the party. Though it's anecdotal, I agree that there are far more Trump refugees than people think. I also don't know any Democrats who have done the inverse and moved to the MAGA camp.
Hopefully Trump's loss will be the final nail in the coffin for MAGA.
> and the main reason why Trump stands a chance this year is because the left has made no overtures whatsoever to the center and center-right.
People keep repeating this like it's some kind of obvious basic fact and I get more and more confused each time.
How much more "center" can you get than Joe Biden? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Kamala Harris? As far as I know, they're all in favor of arresting illegal immigrants, using military power to further foreign policies, moderate taxation, little to no drug legalization, mass incarceration for felons, barely any gun control, etc, etc.
What exactly is the "center-right" looking for that they're not getting?
Every time the media (and social media) brings up self-described right wing desires, they're pretty much entirely culture war issues, is that what you mean?
Yeah partisans arent good at winning friends and influencing people in their pathetic partisan power struggles
They’ve spent nearly a decade isolating themselves in an algorithm fueled mirror room, while disassociating from everyone that doesn't already agree with them 100%
instead of any color coded “wave” occurring despite their recurring delusions, there’s gridlock in the senate, no filibuster proof majority, they’ve lost affiliation and independents are the largest political affiliation in the country now with almost zero representation
The only example I could think of that sort of fits that bill:
"National Union Party was a wartime coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and border state Unconditional Unionists that supported the Lincoln Administration during the American Civil War. It held the 1864 National Union Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president and Andrew Johnson for vice president in the 1864 United States presidential election." (wikipedia)
Great success as an electoral pairing, not so much afterwards with Johnson's reconstruction policies resulting in all former Republicans leaving the National Union Party and an impeachment.
It used to be (like, early 1800s) that the VP wasn't elected directly; whoever lost the election became VP. Jefferson and Adams were political adversaries, but when Adams won the election in 1796, Jefferson became VP
I had a similar thought. It would be bold to pluck a republican of the old order as a gesture to the many republicans who now feel like men without a party.
Romney would be an interesting choice. I remember this[0] article in the globe where a columnist who dragged him during his presidential run apologized after seeing how bad things could be.
Like you say though, hard to imagine any party conjuring the courage to do something like that even if they thought it was wise.
> hard to imagine any party conjuring the courage to do something like that even if they thought it was wise.
They would if they sincerely believed that losing this election would doom democracy. If they nominate a straight polarized political ticket instead of one that can actually unify everyone who doesn't want to see a second Trump term then we know that they don't actually believe their own apocalyptic rhetoric.
I think both choices are defensible here depending on what factors you think are more important. If you think you can actually sway moderate Republicans away by giving them a home in the VP (I think Romney would only do numbers as the actual nominee) then a split ticket makes sense. If you think mobilizing your base like Obama in 2008 and get more of the non-voting population to show up at the polls then a "polarized" ticket makes sense.
Yeah, I don't think split ticket with Harris is honestly the way to go. To pull it off you'd need a Democrat from closer to the center who can credibly pitch a narrative of healing a bitterly divided nation and fixing the poisonous rhetoric that is driving us apart. Nominate someone like that with a Romney (but not necessarily actually Romney) as VP and you'd have a ticket that's actually designed to address the democracy-ending problems that the Democrats purport to see.
Nominating Harris with another left-leaning running mate may make the most sense from a purely strategic perspective, but I don't think that's because anyone seriously expects her to win at this point or because it's actually their best shot at protecting democracy from the impending apocalypse. They're just hoping that having her in the president slot leads to fewer losses in the rest of the races.
They're almost certainly going to pick someone centrist for the VP. Politico has a list of likely running mates [1]. They're pretty much all centrists.
Of course, whoever they nominate will just be called a leftist anyways. Even Harris is on the right wing of the Democratic party, and here you are calling her "left-leaning."
People keep repeating this, what the heck does it actually mean? If we define Kamala Harris as "left of center" what does it actually look like if she "moves to the right"?
Just listening to the news/social media for the past decade, every single "right wing" issue that gets brought up is purely performative culture warring, so what do these "centrists" want?
>If we define Kamala Harris as "left of center" what does it actually look like if she "moves to the right"?
Seriously, if you look at her record, she's very center or even right of center. We're so polarized now though that the far right is straight up fascism.
Or actually radical: switch from our terrible first-past-the-post voting system to - say - ranked choice (or one of many alternatives; they're almost all better than fptp) and then primaries won't be so important and parties won't have so much power over our kinda-democratic-but-actually-oligarchic political system.
because we cant do that in the next 4 months as it would require a overwhelming enough demand from the electorate that a super majority of representatives in the house and senate along with the president would have to pass a constitutional amendment that is otherwise considered against their own interests, then it would need to be ratified by the states and pass through the inevitable challenges in the supreme court that seem dead set against anything resembleling democracy this year.
California state primaries are top-2, not FPTP turning the general election into essentially a run-off. Parties still dominate. Same with my city elections which use RCV.
I’m not sure why they would reduce party influence either. Features like being robust against spoilers would seem to most benefit major party candidates.
It's a two-round voting system. It is, by definition, not FPTP.
There only functional difference between it and say, the original French two-round system that Maurice Duverger (of Duverger's law) contrasted with FPTP is that someone who wins an outright majority in the first election (an open "primary" in California) is not immediately elected.
The fact the second round is FPTP doesn't change the overall voting system. With only two candidates for a single seat, most voting systems degenerate to FPTP, but none of the issues related to FPTP are present either (there are no clones, no strategic voting, etc.)
There's no reason this couldn't happen. States have great latitude to determine their own election laws, including how they allocate electoral votes or elect federal offices. Nebraska and Maine can split their electoral votes. Georgia requries 50% + 1 for US Senate and Governor instead of a plurality, and will have a runoff election if no candidate gets a majority in the general election. Ranked choice would just be another method. The problem is that the two ruling parties have very little incentive to introduce this.
This sometimes turns out very badly - in the UK it led to "faster than a lettuce goes bad" Liz Truss for example. Conservative party members are an odd bunch.
Labour also picked Jeremy Corbyn an election back. Ultimately the rest of the country didn't want to vote for him.
Notably Corbyn actually got more votes than Starmer in both elections he ran - the change is more to do with the right vote being split between the conservatives and reform, the conservatives losing the centrist vote after the clown show of the last 5 years, and a unofficial pact between Labour/LibDems prevented splitting the centrist/left vote the same way the right vote was split.
the fact that they were able to make that pact is probably because they're not miles apart and Corbyn couldn't get that to happen. e.g. I don't think I could ever have voted for him given his attitude on Ukraine but I could have voted for Starmer if that was what made sense in my area.
Sure, but people like you weren't sufficient to change the fact that Corbyn still got more votes.
The libdems of 2024 have a very different situation in that despite the Tory implosion they are weaker than ever. I'd put my money on them either still making the deal or getting buried if Labour had even more votes.
That's just not true, though. Starmer has only increased Labour's vote share by 1.7%. He didn't significantly outweigh the loss in votes by demotivating opponent vote. Tory voters were more likely to vote for Reform or the Lib Dems than stay home.
Labour's opposition not being united is probably more attribuable to the Conservative party itself not being united. The amount of voters leaving the Tories to go to the Lib Dems and Reform has steadily been increasing.
Besides, a significant part of motivating people to vote against Corbyn came from Starmer's wing of the party itself.
No. The staunch Republicans will still vote for Trump and the only way to beat that is for there to be an incredibly cohesive force among a population that isn't very cohesive in the first place. The Republicans actually have it easy, they align and bond on lots of things. The center and left align on very few things and fight amongst themselves.
> The Republicans actually have it easy, they align and bond on lots of things.
I have seen some videos of Trump voters who are claiming that JD Vance is a traitor to the white race for marrying a non-white. And their kids have non-white names.
They are quite upset about this. Some of them are so disgusted by this that they might not vote at all. One can only hope.
Trump's political machine pouring money into primaries to oppose dissenting Republicans is a great corroboration of how little cohesion is in the Republican party. It's not happenstance that the first ever removal of a speaker of the House was a Republican and was last year. Unfortunately, fighting a battle to unify tends to result in more battles...
I’m curious: what do the Republicans align on, besides “Win at all cost” and “Liberals are bad”?
Trump doesn’t care about the budget, doesn’t care about protecting our allies, doesn’t care about abortion. I’d wager he doesn’t care about immigration, either, except as a way to get votes.
A lot of it is just identity. They vote for Republicans because they are Republicans. It's that simple. You could introduce a moderate Democrat that ticks a lot of Republican policy boxes, and most Republicans still wouldn't vote for them.
I would argue that 'win at all cost' is played by both parties. It's a form of 'the ends justify the means' and I really wish that people of both parties understood the long-term implications of that approach.
Democrats encourage their fellow elected officials to step down when convicted of crimes. They notoriously don’t encourage a mob to attack the Capitol to interfere with counting of the electoral ballots. And they haven’t spent the last 4 years undermining confidence in the election system.
There are plenty of faults in the Democratic party, but “both sides” is a tired and inaccurate trope.
The Democrats have yet to remove or seriously call for Senator Menendez to resign for serious corruption and obvious crimes while the Republicans removed Santos for campaign lies knowing a Democrat would replace him.
I think some of that is just the different norms in the senate vs the house. The senate is very much about decorum and tradition, whereas the house is more of a free for all.
I think it is funny to watch how people on a programming forum think "democracy" is a decent enough designed system.
It is very interesting how the manner in which people think changes when the topic changes, and also how we focus only on the flaws in intelligence of the supposedly dumbest among us.
> There are plenty of faults in the Democratic party, but “both sides” is a tired and inaccurate trope.
Only if the claim is both sides are identically bad, which is rarely the case.
It is amazing how simple memes (and boy, does our culture run on them) can inject bugs into cognition.
Since you brought it up. Let's take your same question and apply it to Democrats. What do the Democrats align on, besides "Win at all cost" and "Trump is bad"?
Democrats hail from several religions (and a lot of atheists) and have a lot of independent thinkers. They are not mass-"programmable" like religious Christians and Republicans are. Republicans can be mass-software-updated by their leaders very quickly. Democrats' lack of programmability makes it harder for them to align and win.
Democrats tend to contain a lot of types of socially oppressed groups of people, each of which is fighting their own battle, but they cannot be bothered to fight another oppressed groups' battle.
Democrats hail from multiple social classes that each want the other taxed more out of spite, not understanding that higher taxes of anyone in the economic food chain is going to make it harder for everyone.
Christianity, God Bless America, conservative immigration law, well-being of rural people and small towns, second amendment, Made in USA, white-normalized culture ...
Democrats very rarely align. They fight between factions about whether BLM, LGBT, or Stop Asian Hate is more important, ffs. They can't even come together and fight for all of the above.
Evangelicals love Trump (in one of the biggest “this massive group of people clearly was lying about its stated moral principles” reveals in recent memory).
> Other than promoting coal, what has Trump done for rural America’s economy?
Protectionist tariffs, particularly those imposed on Chinese imports were so popular that the Democratic party has silently endorsed and continued them through the Biden presidency.
What are you talking about? Christians (American ones at least) absolutely love Trump. I'll probably get a bunch of replies here from non-Christian liberals making a bunch of theological claims about a religion they don't even believe in, but the people who decide what is or isn't "real Christianity" are the people who actually go to church and call themselves Christians, not a bunch of people who don't believe strongly in any religion. Talk all you want about how Trump doesn't exemplify so-called "Christian values", but that's totally irrelevant. The Americans who actually go to church every Sunday are showing up at Trump rallies like he's the Messiah's chosen one and they're voting for him, and of course defending him at every turn no matter how much you might think his words or actions don't align with your perception of the religion.
>Other than promoting coal, what has Trump done for rural America’s economy?
He's given it a lot of lip-service, and that's all that matters for these voters. And also very importantly, he delivered for rural America by installing a bunch of SCOTUS justices who managed to overturn Roe v Wade. How's that good for rural America's economy? It isn't, but that doesn't matter, because this issue was #1 or #2 for these voters, especially the ones that most strongly identified as "Christian".
It's amazing how easy it is to see why Democrats keep losing elections to the MAGA crowd, and how they completely fail to understand their mentality and what's really important to them.
> What are you talking about? Christians (American ones at least) absolutely love Trump. I'll probably get a bunch of replies here from non-Christian liberals making a bunch of theological claims about a religion they don't even believe in, but the people who decide what is or isn't "real Christianity" are the people who actually go to church and call themselves Christians, not a bunch of people who don't believe strongly in any religion.
How about a reply from an evangelical Christian who goes to Church? How about if I use words from Christ himself?
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ [1]
From what I can tell, there are different camps of Evangelicals and "Evangelicals" voting for Trump.
Let me say at the start that "Christian Nationalism" is an inherent contradiction in terms. Jesus over and over again had the opportunity to become a political power, and explicitly rejected it [2][3][4]. Anything trying to explicitly enforce "Christianity" with political power is out of line with Christ's teaching. This has always been true, but it is particularly true now. A lot of the people I see on TV pounding on about God and Christianity don't show any evidence that they know anything at all about Jesus; I don't have any reason to believe them to be Christians.
Others are real Christians -- people trying to follow Jesus and take his teachings seriously -- who are simply deluded. They actually believe that the election was stolen; they actually believe that the trials against him are witch-hunts. They're not voting for Trump the person, but for an imaginary person they've been fed.
Others are real Christians, and know that Trump is a vile man and a criminal, but somehow have convinced themselves that the Biden "crime family" and/or the Democrats are just as bad, and are cynically choosing someone they think will benefit their own group. Either they don't think a second Trump term will be worse than the first term, or they don't care.
Consider the "gay wedding cake" case [5]. Evangelicals in loads of creative professions (including baking, photography, and so on) came perilously close to having to chose between violating their consciences or losing their livelihoods. Getting a solid majority of the court who would vote "their way" about these sorts of issues was considered by many to be worth the cost of a Trump presidency. (NB I'm not trying to make an argument either way about that case; rather, I'm trying to show the mindset of someone in 2015 deciding whether to vote for Trump or Hillary.)
Also note that I don't consider any of these things excuses. Belief is not a morally neutral activity; there may be people who genuinely had no opportunity to understand Trump's true nature, but I don't think that applies to the vast majority of Christians who have an inaccurate picture of him; particularly after the warnings we have throughout the New Testament to be on our guard against people trying to control us.
Furthermore, while we have the example of using the legal system to defend ourselves (in the case of Paul's various trials in Acts), we're also told to expect to persecuted for our beliefs. Hiring a lawyer is one thing; voting for a man like Trump is something completely different.
And there are plenty of Evangelicals who are outspoken against Trump; but far too few.
All that to say -- unfortunately, yes, Trump is popular with Christians and people who consider themselves Christians.
There's no solid evidence these quotes are accurate (plus, they're translated if he ever existed and made any such speeches). The entire belief is based on faith.
>Anything trying to explicitly enforce "Christianity" with political power is out of line with Christ's teaching. This has always been true
That's your opinion, based on your interpretation. Other Christians in the US have a different opinion.
>A lot of the people I see on TV pounding on about God and Christianity don't show any evidence that they know anything at all about Jesus; I don't have any reason to believe them to be Christians.
That again is your opinion, based on your interpretation of a quote written down by some religious person centuries after the deity that supposedly uttered it was on Earth. Other Christians have a different opinion.
As a non-Christian, it's not up to me to decide whose beliefs are "correct". And the people you disagree with aren't some vanishingly small, fringe minority; they're a significant part of the US voting public. I appreciate that your beliefs are different, and personally I like your beliefs more than theirs, but you're not going to convince me that yours are more correct; as far as I'm concerned, neither one has any basis in reality. Yours certainly sound nicer, but Christianity has well over a millennium of history of being tied to state power, so the other side has a lot of precedent.
>Others are real Christians -- people trying to follow Jesus and take his teachings seriously -- who are simply deluded.
Again, "real Christians" in your opinion. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who self-identifies honestly as a "Christian" is one, regardless of how incongruent their actions and opinions seem to be with some of the teachings of some of the denominations of that religion.
Anyway, I do appreciate you doing this analysis of the different factions, and I do agree with your breakdown of them.
>Consider the "gay wedding cake" case
As much as I hate many of the SCOTUS decisions in the last 8 years or so, I actually agree with this one, or at least its outcome, though I think the justices all missed the real issue. If the gay couple had wanted to buy an off-the-shelf (non-custom) cake, the baker should have been required to sell it to them. However, (as I understand the case) they wanted a custom cake, so basically they wanted to commission artwork. I think that should be subject to 1A protection; no one should be legally required to create artwork for something they disagree with.
> As far as I'm concerned, anyone who self-identifies honestly as a "Christian" is one, regardless of how incongruent their actions and opinions seem to be with some of the teachings of some of the denominations of that religion.
I understand where you're coming from, but this is just an unworkable definition. It reminds me of a snapshot of a social media post I saw which read, "I'm a vegan who eats meat. Yes, we exist." "People trying to follow Jesus and take his teachings seriously" certainly isn't a perfect definition, but it's a lot more useful than "anyone who self-identifies as a Christian".
There's a huge difference here: you would have a very, very difficult time finding anyone who identifies as a vegan and also eats meat knowingly and willingly. However, Christians who don't fit your definition of "true Christian" are a large part of the US voting population, so much that the "No True Scotsman" fallacy seems to apply here. Even worse, if we look at Christians over the last two millennia, especially during the middle ages, the vast majority of them don't appear to be "true Christians" according to your definition.
Christian conservatives are decidedly a minority in the Republican party, and increasingly marginalized. Much to the distress of that faction, the offical Republican platform no longer talks about gay marriage nor banning abortion except for late-term.
The Republicans have moderated a lot over the last decade. Their current platform reads like the Democrat platform from the 2000s.
In principle, if you got everyone to agree to it (and this would be a big if), this would probably be an interesting enough ticket that it might just win. Maybe.
In practice, Romney is 77 years old and is ready to retire - and think how often age has come up as a factor in the presidential race recently. Romney isn't running for reelection, but if he had wanted his senate seat for another 6 years, I am quite certain it would have been his. So ultimately, I don't think Romney would go for it, simply because he wants to spend more time with his (large) family.
Moderate Republicans who won't just vote for Trump are a dying breed. I don't think they are worth courting over just convincing young people and women to turn out to vote, purely on demographics. I could be ideologically blinded by this though.
You'd have to get Romney on board with it. You'd be electing a Democrat administration with a Republican VP. It's not split, it's just a blue ticket with a red VP.
If you want to bolster the ticket, get someone that people already like. Hell, get Obama or Sanders to come back as the VP.
Obama can't be VP either as the rules are that anyone ineligible to be president can't be elected as VP (there's apparently some debate over whether they could become VP via being promoted from lower down in the succession in the event of a presidential vacancy).
Sanders could, but I think he has the double issue of his two prior failed campaigns - a lot of his more motivated voters from previous times might have a "boy who cried wolf" reaction a third campaign. He also doesn't really disarm the "too old" criticism, even if all evidence points to him aging a lot better than either Biden or Trump so far - Biden 2020 vs Biden 2024 would give a lot of people pause even if Sanders gave the world's best debate performance at this point.
There's also the fact that Sanders has been actually pretty influential in Biden's presidency, which I think is why he came out so strongly in favour of Biden a few days ago.
It's not obvious how much of this is Sanders' impact on Biden vs. Sanders' impact on the party as a whole, but Biden's pro-union and pro-worker stances are pretty pronounced compared to Obama and Clinton (and remarkably so compared to Trump, and Bush). So he's easily the most pro-worker/union president in my lifetime, which is a fairly Bernie-ist position.
Same with (partial) student debt relief, and you see shadows of the Green New Deal in the Inflation Reduction Act.
It would be more politically palatable to pick a Senator Joe Manchin or Governor Andy Beshear. In other words, a Democrat so moderate that they can win in the reddest of states
I should have been more clear here. I will likely still cast a ballot but leave President empty. Above I meant that I wouldn't be voting for President if the options are Trump and Harris, but I should have clarified that.
It happens in EU countries, where it's not unusual for a right-leaning President to elect a left-leaning Prime Minister. Worth noting that a Prime Minister in the EU often has more power than the VP in the US.
Was thinking that too and it might be a brilliant way to get the folks on the right that don't want to vote Trump but also not necessarily a dem. Also it could be a great marketing tactic to be like 'we're bringing unity back' or something to that.
And theoretically no reason it couldn't happen other than both parties definitely not being on board with it.
I think the problem is that both parties have moved, the democrats shifting left and the republicans shifting right (and to put the cards on the table, I think the republicans have shifted a lot more rightward than democrats have leftwards). This leaves people pretty unwilling to go for a split the difference approach. Like if you ask people in favour of a centrist position, they're probably picturing someone in the middle of Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and thinking " I could manage with that". But for a lot of the core democratic vote, they see a Romney as the result of drawing a line down the middle and they already decided he was too right wing for them. Or similar, the republicans are worried that splitting that line down the middle ends up at Hilary, who they already didn't like. So while a lot of people express support for compromise and consquently centrism, you'll get into a lot of infighting when you try to decide what the centrist position actually is..
Democrat leadership and large donors may have moved left, but the voters haven't. Which is why Biden was having trouble with some groups previously thought locked-in Democrat.
Romney appeals to the sort of people who own multiple houses. Most Trump supporters are working class concerned about the price of groceries, who would probably be better served by a left-wing pro-labor politician but won't vote for one because they abhor the progressive social policies that get bundled with that in America. So they vote for the guy who plays lip service to their problems while talking smack about progressive social stuff.
Romney is politically obsolete. He serves no further purpose in American politics.
A few others who'd voted for impeachment (House) or conviction (Senate).
Those are:
House (10): John Katko (R-NY), Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-WA), Adam Kinziger (R-IL), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), David Valadao (R-CA), Peter Meijer (R-MI), Tome Rice (R-SC), Fred Upton (R-MI), Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), Liz Cheney (R-WY).
Senate (7): Richard Burr (R-NC), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Pat Toomey (R-PA).
In terms of public awareness, I'd roughly rank Romney and Cheney the overall leaders (previous GOP Presidential candidate, and daughter of a previous GOP VP), then perhaps Collins, Murkowski, Burr, Sasse, and trailing those Kinziger, though that's my own seat-of-the pants / /dev/ass estimate.
As mixed-party tickets, any of those named, possibly excepting Sasse, might be draws, though Cheney or Romney would lead my own picks. Both reluctant but pragmatic.
One of TFG's prime superpowers is claiming the media limelight, and all that's been going on with the Democratic ticket since 27 June has robbed him of that. Hell, a week ago he came within an inch of being permanently removed from any future, let alone a political one ... and that's scarcely being discussed. I'm not convinced that "no news is bad news", and that all attention is good, but ... at least in terms of attention, the Dems have been winning this battle for the past several weeks.
The other thought is that the general election all but certainly swings not on converting voters but motivating them. Or demotivating.
I've been thinking of a Harris-Whitmer ticket, which would play to Dem strengths among Blacks, women, blue-collar/industrial voters, and one of the key swing states (Michigan (15 EV)).
Other states in play are Nevada (6), Wisconsin (10), Pennsylvania (19), and Georgia (16).
MI, WI, and PA currently lean Dem, which would give an electoral majority, taking NV and Georgia (very slightly GOP) would ice that cake.
An argument against a split ticket is that there might be a greater chance of strongly motivating marginal Democratic voters. The argument for a split ticket might be to take dissatisfied Republicans (or former Republicans), though how much any of the candidates listed above might draw is questionable. Romney is strongly associated with Utah, which will all but certainly go GOP (99% by 538's forecast), Cheney with Wyoming, similarly inclined, and with a small population (and electoral vote) to boot. Whether either can draw GOP votes from elsewhere, and most especially in critical states such as those listed, or perhaps AZ (surprisingly close), NC, FL, or TX (rather more distant likelihoods, but potentially huge if doable) is the question.
It'll be interesting watching this play out, no doubt.
The more I think about it, the less I think a split ticket works, though I think it's worth considering in future.
Also needed to have Trump announce a VP pick first. Because otherwise Trump would have picked a black man without question (Tim Scott probably although maybe Ben Carson)
Israel is the culprit .
In that case, let's look at the millions more of people who died under Trump.
Trump was unable to stop the war in Afghanistan, and triggered the invasion of Ukraine (by weakening NATO)
Invasion of Ukraine started under Obama in 2014. Not that I care from the outside who the head of the US military industrial complex is while things happen, but let's be a bit more precise.
Funny how people can't even accept a simple truth and rather flag it and instead bicker over inconsequential bullshit, like whether Biden stubled twice or thrice during a stupid debate, or whether he was tired or is simply getting ever more demented, like many people over certain age.
But at least it explains how US can fund so much brutality against children overseas. Americans just close their eyes, and go lalalalala, while raking in profits.
He was dropping out no matter what, and Kamala losing is objectively worse for his legacy than Kamala winning. Anything he could do to help her is good for his legacy, and he took a ton of bullets for her the past few months in order to give her the best shot at beating Trump.
One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman. But he did campaign on a single term.
Let’s hope the Dem’s circular firing squad puts down its guns so they can quickly concentrate on winning the election with someone … probably Harris is the simplest answer.
I laughed out loud when I read this, but maybe if you reword it "effective presidencies" you could be right.
I imagine those around him were doing all the presidenting, and perhaps they're more effective without a functioning president to get in their way.
Some might then point out things like the border were signs of ineffectiveness, but actually, if you reasonably assume it was intentional, then they were exceptionally effective.
A single term was a prominent part of the discussion around his electability[1]. I'm not sure whether he campaigned on it per se, but it was certainly something that I (and other people I know) factored into my vote in 2020.
His campaign HEAVILY implied this, but no, he never said it.
It’s definitely one of those thing that make people like me, who want good faith honesty in politics angry, because “he didn’t actually say it” politics is why gotcha politics exists.
I remember that too, it was never said explicitly but heavily implied like "he'll return things to normal and then pass the torch to the younger generation" and such comments. I remember being slightly surprised by it because the traditional way was to renominate the sitting president, but a lot of things weren't as they used to in 2020.
"Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."
Biden was a stop-gap measure as Democrats didn't risk to put any new emerging leader against Trump. I think it was a big mistake - basically "coronation" of Biden back then replaced the normal, though painful, democratic process of producing a new Democrats leader. And as a result, it seems to me that Biden like a huge tree in the forest only exacerbated the issue by not letting new leadership to grow in the last 4 years. Of course he didn't do it intentionally, he (and his entourage) just naturally sucked up all the air and nothing grew in his shadow. Now, with the "anointment" of Harris, Democrats are repeating that mistake for the 3rd time - ie. Hillary, Biden, Harris - while on the other side we have a "Viking" leader who bloody slaughtered and ate all the competitors who were in that Republican jar (compare that to "Biden campaign chair to staff: Time to elevate Kamala Harris" - leaders aren't elevated by some bureaucrats, leaders arise and elevate themselves)
(To clarify my political position, i'm pro-Democrat and think Biden wasn't a bad president, though i think he completely dropped the ball on the foreign policy - while Ukraine and Israel are more prominent, they cause multipage flamewars, so instead i'd point to Houthis where i think majority can agree with me that what Houtis do in Red Sea is just plain war crimes (intentional attacks on civilian shipping) and that should have been immediately nipped in the bud by the overwhelming US and allies' force in the region - if anything, protection of civilian shipping is one of the most legitimate major uses of the Navy, and i'd say it is a direct duty of the president to put it to such a use when the need arises)
He was the Founder who ended up being President when the US had both the motivation (which had been there for some time) and the naval resources (which had only just been coming online) to do something about it--but I don't think he was the only Founder who had that general view about the Navy.
> basically "coronation" of Biden back then replaced the normal, though painful, democratic process of producing a new Democrats leader
There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though. Bernie, Warren, Andrew Yang all had their shot, some did pretty well, but ultimately the democratic base voted for Biden
> There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though.
Does no one remember what actually happened?
All the other candidates except Warren made back room deals and dropped out around Iowa, suddenly and for no reason. Leaving Biden as the obvious selection, and Warren there to siphon off Bernie support to make sure he wouldn’t be a problem.
The base voted for Biden after they had no choice.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but it seems like democrats have a problem with democracy, at least within their party. In 2016 shenanigans were pulled to bypass Bernie and the DNC won a lawsuit on the claim that they have no obligation to nominate the candidate selected by the people.[0] The 2020 primaries played out in a similar fashion with Biden having a difficult time and every other candidate stepping aside to allow him to have the nomination. Now I’m 2024 an entire nation has been disenfranchised of their primary selection and the foremost candidate being proposed never received any votes by anyone for a nomination to the highest office (she ended her candidacy before any primary in 2020).
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
This is undoubtedly one of the few times the Democrats collectively did the right thing and defended against an outsider from taking over their Party the way Trump took over and undermined the Republican Party.
People like to imagine that the Parties are these kind of quasi-public entities that exist to serve the American people. They’re not. They’re private entities that are vehicles for the acquisition of power across local, State and Federal offices that are in a perpetual term-based competition with each other. We tolerate their campaigns because their battlefield is the ballot box instead of actual fields, but nominee selection still happens at conventions run by the parties themselves.
The Primary system you are familiar with is one that the Republicans and Democrats chose for themselves to inform their overall decisions on who to put forward as the candidate flying under their banner and has only been around since 1972.
If the DNC no longer has use for a public nomination process, they should get rid of it. It wastes a significant amount of taxpayer resources with estimates in the hundreds of millions of public dollars required to run a primary. It looks like the party has regressed to 1968.
I don’t disagree, although I’ll go a little further and say 1) parties should run their own damn primaries if they run them at all and 2) do so without spending a single cent of public money to do so.
People are downvoting you, but February 7th Chris Matthews is on MSNBC after Biden and Sanders debate he says that Sanders will lead to executions in Central Park.
If there are people who don't remember these facts clearly, you are among them. Nobody dropped out "around Iowa" except Kremlin stooge Yang and literal Republican Bloomberg. No legitimate candidate dropped out until South Carolina, where Biden trounced the whole field.
They quit because they got their faces ripped off in a fair fight, not because of some backroom party shenanigans.
Super Tuesday was on March 3 2020. Amy Klobuchar dropped out on March 2 2020 and endorsed Biden. Pete Buttigieg dropped out March 1 2020 and endorsed Biden.
Biden was polling over 50% since the start of the race. The idea that Warren supporters owed Bernie their support is ridiculous (bernie and warren supporters hated each other), and the idea that everyone dropped out to save biden is a braindead conspiracy theory
This takes a particular view of leadership as chaotic, violent, and aggressive, and not as collaborative, and quiet, but still assertive.
Harris being immediately endorsed by basically all of the alternative candidates (Newsom, Whitmer, etc.) shows that her campaign has its shit together, and moving through the nomination process without conflict leaves fewer weaknesses for the opposition to take advantage of.
I never could find a direct quote of Biden himself saying he would be a single term president, but his campaign team said it regularly in public interviews.
In 2020, when they asked him if he'd run for reelection, he said "I view myself as a transitional president," which is a pretty fucking weird answer if he were planning to run again.
Everyone expected him to drop out earlier, but I think the reason he stayed in as long as he did was to take all the bullets for Kamala until he felt confident all the other potential challengers would get behind her.
What he didn't want to do was drop out early, let Kamala get battered and bloodied by her own party nomination process, win the nomination, then lose to Trump just because she'd been dragged through the mud in the media for months.
I'm not quite sold on it having been a plan to protect Harris and give her the spot without a primary. That strategy would take a ton of coordinstion, but more importantly it throws a ridiculous amount of uncertainty intoix that I think any political party would be too afraid of.
The more simple explanation, in my opinion, is that Biden is exactly what some had thought for over a year now - a person getting older and starting to run into cognitive and physical decline. I've watched multiple family members go through this, and the picture of a person in the middle of decline lying to themselves about their new reality and stubbornly refusing to accept it fits perfectly well.
It's a very tough thing to objectively measure, but one metric we can point to is his ability to push a surprising amount of bipartisan legislation through an incredibly divided congress in just 4 years.
I obviously haven't read all the bills that were passed (ha!), but my impression is that many of the bills are just spending money - which is always popular with both parties. I don't get the sense that there was a lot of policy reform going on.
And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective (unlikely?).
Spending money is a key "lever" in legislative action. You can't legislate something without allocating money for its implementation and enforcement.
In terms of core policy reform beneath all of the money spending: the current administration seems to place much greater emphasis on capital projects (repairing and building new infrastructure, including energy infrastructure) than the previous one did.
Of course every bill is going to allocate money. But there's a difference between allocating money accompanied by a policy reform and passing a bill with the sole purpose of flooding an industry/market with government money.
The IRA is trying to address climate change, yes. But there's the problem of relying on government to have any idea of where to inject money to make the most difference, trusting the government to not just inject money wherever it benefits the most politically connected, and avoiding massive fraud (see the SBA loans during COVID). Not to mention the insane irony of something called the "Inflation Reduction Act" being a massive spending bill.
Point being: Number of bills passed and billions of dollars spent will be terrible metrics for how effective a politician is because of all those nuances.
Are we calling bills endorsed by a single Republican "bipartisan" now?
Also this so-called immigration bill contained billions for Ukraine, Israel, etc. That along with the fact that most of the bill sought only to facilitate getting more migrants through the system more quickly, and of course the bill was DOA. Saying it was Trump who killed it is just conjecture, and reactions from Senate and House Republicans indicates there was zero support for the bill as written.
Interestingly the House passed an immigration bill in 2023 that the Senate never voted on. Along with the removal of all of Trump's border-related executive orders, it indicates that Democrats are not seriously interested in border security.
Trump has not been in office since January 2021; how could he have tanked that bill?
Using Trump as an excuse for not passing any bills on immigration, LGBT rights, abortion, etc when he didn't hold any political position for 4 years is the very definition of ineffective leadership.
"Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.
In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable."
>you're basically just making the argument that Trump is an incredibly effective leader capable of controlling his party's agenda even when he's not in charge of it
to my understanding, he wasn't afraid of splitting the vote and was vocal about it as far back as 2022. And apparently the R's that publicly slammed him did not want to call that bluff.
And continuing the trade war. Then people act surprised when inflation is high. Recently, I think Jay Powell has even called out congress and the president for continuing to spend.
Is that Biden or effective cooperation in the Senate & House of Reps, including across-the-aisle deals? I always wondered about the degree to which WH coordination played into this.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two presidents in modern history who were most effective at passing major legislation (Biden and LBJ) had spent decades in the Senate.
You can cut it any number of ways: the CHIPS act has existed in some form or another since 2019, but it only gained legislative momentum when Biden threw the weight of the executive branch behind it. The IRA was probably going to happen in some form, but the concrete scope and priorities listed in it come directly from Biden's legislative agenda[1].
TL;DR: 100% credit? Of course not. But has Biden's administration been more effective at advancing its policies through the legislative than the previous administration? IMO yes.
IRA (re-industrialized a significant portion of Red states in Power Systems, Battery, and Solar PV manufacturing), CHIPS (bringing back mass semiconductor fabrication with 5 mega fabs and re-introducing packaging and OSAT in the US), Infra Bill/IIJA, and Child Tax Credit during COVID.
There's a reason the GOP aren't touching most of the provisions in the first 3 Acts (especially with Vance as Veep). [0][1]
Vance is backed by Horowitz and Andreessen, and both heavily benefited from the IRA and CHIPS various provisions (but got hit by the capital gains tax changes that Biden proposed a couple months ago [2]).
The biggest issue was the Biden admin's inability to promote the impact of all of these. Biden hasn't been campaigning across America as much as his predecessors.
Ford is building a battery plant in Stanton TN based on grants from the IRA and Biden administration, creating thousands of jobs in a county that has been in economic decline for 30 years. But none of the folks working those jobs have any idea where those jobs came from. They just credit Ford:
> MADLAND: Yeah, I talked to a lot of workers on the site, and this is this very large facility in rural Tennessee, a couple hours outside of Memphis. It's going to be a big electric vehicle battery and manufacturing construction in an area that had for 20, 30 years, really tried to spur investment, and nothing had happened. [...] So these big steps forward in their lives that you can see from these projects, which are good union jobs, constructing the big facility. Then when I also spoke to them and said, well, how or why do you think this project came to be? This project received many billions of dollars in loans from the federal government as part of these investments we're talking about. It also received significant state funding. And the workers to unanimously said, Well, I credit Ford, which is the big Ford Motor Company as a joint investment there. And then I would probe and push and they'd say, Well, I also credit my union for helping make this happen. I had to keep asking and asking before ever mention any elected officials that had anything to do with it. But their sentiment was, well, if any, elected official had anything to do with it. So I would like that and support them, but I have no idea about this.
I can safely speak for myself - the fund I was employed at had began rebalancing away from Cybersecurity and Biotech and funding Hardware, Energy Tech, and Defense Tech around 22-23 due to provisions in IRA and CHIPS.
Plenty of peer funds did the same thing.
Even if Trump wins in November, most of the provisions in the acts I mentioned will be retained, especially given that a Thiel and A16Z acolyte is Veep and an early MS alum is cabinet track.
Before 2022 we weren't even entertaining the option of funding an early stage startup in the Hardware, Energy, or Defense space.
This is a MASSIVE change in the VC/PE industry which has concentrated on various flavors of SaaS for the past decade+.
An entire ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow has now restarted in the sectors above that hasn't been seen in the past decade.
I absolutely sure if there is few T of free money there will be "MASSIVE ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow".
But I believe in market economy, and to me it looks like VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition.
> VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition
Not exactly.
It was because of the upfront cost and lack of deal flow.
Before the various IRA and CHIPS provisions passed, you might get $200k at most from grants to commercialize research in the Energy or Hardware space. The rest would be fronted from the private sector so you're looking at an additional $800k-1M of private money at the pre-seed/seed stage. On top of that, deal flow was weak, so it's harder to fund later series or get good exits during an M&A event.
This is a very high upfront cost so obviously SaaS made sense due to much higher margins.
After IRA and CHIPS, you could expect to see an additional $300-500k in grants, which means my upfront cost in funding is lower.
Furthermore, the government is providing tax credits and grants to private sector players to minimize the amount of upfront money they need to spend (say) building a Battery Recycling plant or a Chip Packaging factory.
This means there is now much more money sloshing in these segments as a significant portion of my upfront risk has been subsidized by the US government. That money can now be deployed in either funding research projects commercializing into startups, re-investing in existing players to help their own M&A strategy, and funding additional research in the spaces above.
Compare Democrat presidents and Republican presidents in general. We routinely see less deficit spending and more economic growth under Democrats than under Republicans.
Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause. (Is it your opinion is that Trump is a RINO who runs the country like a Democrat, and covid disguised that?)
Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
> Compare Democrat presidents and Republican presidents in general.
as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.
> Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause
first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
> Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.
this is a loaded question. Recovery was in expense of inflation, rise of debt. One would need to do some quantitative calculation to see if current situation is result of actual policies (and which policies: Trump's or Biden's), or just economy is flexible itself and if result could be better and if spendings were justified(or went to real estate market and stocks).
>as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.
I wasn't excusing current policy. I was making the case that Trump's economic failures were due in large part to Republican Party policies, not just to covid.
>first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low
Well, that's a novel use of the term "loaded question". It wasn't even a question at all; it was a simple statement of my opinion.
>One would need to do some quantitative calculation...
Fortunately, the field of economics is dedicated to doing quantitative calculations and making assessments like these.
Economists strongly favor policies that Democrats tend to adopt (especially demand-side economics: think lower taxes for the poor and higher taxes for the rich and for businesses, relief of personal debt, a stronger safety net for the unemployed, cheaper and more accessible healthcare, more spending on public services that aid economic development such infrastructure and education, etc.) and oppose economic policies that Republicans tend to adopt (especially supply-side economics: lower taxes for the rich and for businesses, union busting, a weaker safety net for the unemployed, healthcare that preferences insurance companies, reduced spending or even outright privatization of public services that aid economic development such as the postal service, etc.).
The majority. This is a good place to start to get the general idea of where economists stand on a variety of US policy proposals: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/
There are other places as well, but this is the most accessible one I know of for people without access to economics publications.
Polling data of economists is not enough for you? The polls even have commentary where many of the economists precisely explain why they answered the surveys as they did.
I formed my understanding of economists' opinions on policy by reading data like this. It's highly educational, very easy to read, and not biased and cherry-picked like articles and opinion pieces are.
If pure data in a highly accessible format not good enough for you, it sounds like nothing would be.
The only thing that's going to solve climate change is technology. It's the same technology we've had since the 50's. Not turning off our lights, setting the AC to 80, drinking through paper straws, or clearing thousands of acres for solar panels.
Solar is faster in the short term (because people think it's somehow "clean") but not sustainable in long term. It requires too much land and upkeep for not great output. It would be better to go all in on nuclear and surrounding technologies and solve energy once and for all.
I disagree. I'm willing to reconsider though. Here's what I think.
Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.
I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.
Current YoY CPI inflation is at 3%, barely over the long term average, down from a peak of 8-9% before the IRA passed.
It's very possible to construct an argument (certainly I'd believe it) that it didn't actually affect inflation per se and that the inflation burst was transient and would have subsided anyway. It's absolutely not correct to say inflation wasn't "addressed".
Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol. And perceived inflation over the last two years is like 50%, and that's being conservative.
> Inflation can be addressed when my salary goes up the same ratio as perceived inflation lol.
Has it not? Mine has. Wages as a whole have. In fact wage growth has been historically robust for the last decade or so. Here's a FRED graph for "median usual weekly real[1] earnings", which correlates well to the kind of working class argument people usually make in this space: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Note how it has been going inexorably upwards since 2014 or so, and in fact the inflation burst turns out to be the correction to a very rapid spike in wages (due to pandemic assistance) that only corrects downward to the upward curve.
I really wish people who wanted to argue about inflation would do it with more numbers and less "lol".
[1] "Real" means "inflation adjusted" in this context
Lol. You have, what, a 12% increase in salary according to that chart (followed by around 5% dropoff lol) compared to more than 50% perceived inflation. I don't think I need to make any more arguments after that.
I called it out specifically to avoid the mistake, but I think you skipped the footnote. You're misreading the chart. The numbers there are already corrected for CPI. An upwards slope represents higher wealth, independent of inflation. Lol, indeed. This is sort of what I was complaining about. Please, please try to get stuff right before arguing about it on the internet. Economic statistics are extremely well-tabluated and easy to find.
Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment. That’s been trending down since the mid 80s. As in housing is getting more expensive relatively
> Now compare inflation adjusted income with the cost to rent a one bedroom apartment
And now we're doing goalpost motion. This is how this always goes. Indeed, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And that can change across regions and subeconomies, and even demographically to the extent that different groups spend in different ways. And this is interesting and important.
But it's absolutely not about "inflation" or "wages" and if you come back from an incorrectly-stated argument about inflation/affordability/whatever by saying "OK fine but this is actually about housing policy", you just look silly.
The fact that housing is expensive in some markets isn't a refutation that people are making more money, it just isn't.
EDIT:
But in fact FRED is great, so I generated your chart for you showing the ratio of the CPI urban rent metric to nominal (not "real" this time) hourly earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qtNi
And.. you're kinda wrong here too. It's true that the chart is going upwards, but only by about 8-9% since 2006 (the earliest date where we have both data points). And very notably:
1. Most of the growth was from 2011-2018 or so, not a recent phenomenon at all
2. There was a huge dip during the pandemic (because of assistance programs, it's the same effect I mentioned upthread) that we've only just recovered from in the last few months. The recent rapid rise of "rent costs as a fraction of income" is just taking back all the boon people got earlier.
3. It's actually levelled off since 2023.
Again, there's data to this stuff, and it doesn't support your position.
Official numbers for inflation vs actual inflation vs perceived inflation are very different numbers lol. Actual inflation and perceived inflation are much closer together and the official numbers are basically cooked up so people don't freak out. A 10% addition to my previous comment doesn't make a big difference to how people feel about the economy and inflation.
What on earth is "perceived inflation"? That's not a thing. You're literally making up a fake statistic because the real one doesn't support your incorrect-but-strongly-held intuition!
It's inflation as perceived by the average person, basically increases in daily expenditure on required goods and services like food, gas, utilities, rent or mortgage. Have you even been reading what I wrote or are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?
> are you just spouting shit you copy pasted from somewhere else?
I'm literally linking to FRED charts trying to have a numerate discussion about this stuff...
Can you cite some research or measurements or anything about this "perceived inflation" metric you're talking about? Like, where are the numbers? I'm pretty sure you just made it up, no?
I'm not linking to numbers lol. I already know how much more I'm paying for groceries. I talked about perceived inflation from the beginning and you are just now talking about it? You haven't responded to anything I wrote. I am pretty sure you just read the word inflation and started some pre-written rant. Either that or you are severely lacking in reading comprehension.
Just linking a bunch of numbers does not make an argument. You have to actually talk and respond to the actual topic being discussed.
So... when you say "perceived inflation", you're really just saying that you, personally, perceive inflation. And therefore I can't disprove that with numbers, because numbers don't change your perception. Well, touche. I can't beat that logic.
But in the real world, you do admit that current inflation as traditionally understood by centuries of economics is a little under 3% right now, right?
Perceived by me and by pretty much everyone except delusional people like you who believe the official numbers. Keep your head in the sand, why would I care.
And absolutely not lol, the numbers are cooked up, as I said before. You are really really bad at reading comprehension.
Since you cite "pretty much everyone" with the same rigor you do your inflation numbers, I think I'm comfortable with my characterization of "perceived inflation" as your own personal perception.
To wit: you're just simply wrong here, and instead of arguing from a rational basis you're hiding behind your philosophical right to be wrong about whatever you want. And that's very distressing to see on a site like HN.
You can be comfortable in your delusion, that’s fine with me. I’m not writing a thesis when it’s so obvious that inflation is much higher than what is officially reported.
Removed troops from Afghanistan (though Trump gets half credit for that one too, it was his timetable and his plan that Biden executed -- poorly -- though that's likely due to soft revolt on the part of the military leaders)
Surviving four years without starting a new boots on ground war (also Trump gets credit for that)
Calling out china on its bs (also Trump gets credit for that)
In practical terms the big differentiating factor between Biden and Trump terms is that trump is soft-pro-putin and Biden is anti-putin. And trump freed some black prisoners who probably shouldn't be in jail anymore
Moving forward, Biden is likely to be pro-taiwan and trump has been making anti-taiwan rhetoric
And yet the Congressional leaders who were in the room with Biden say that he was unable to communicate effectively and obviously senile. It's hard to believe that he had anything personally to do with getting legislation through.
> helped those people along by flying them to non-border states
Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?
> 'he' did not allow silly things like the supreme court stop him from attempting to buy voters by cancelling their student loan debt
This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy? You could call literally anything "buying votes"
Your post is beyond biased, it's contradicting itself.
> Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?
Sure, they flew migrants to 'sanctuary cities' - remember the panic on Martha's Vineyard when a few of them showed up and remember how quickly they were shuffled away by the virtuous inhabitants of that island - to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. They were very vocal about it and did it out in the open, inviting press and publishing widely about their intents. That is not what I referred to. I was referring to the secretive night flights ordered by Biden's government, something along these lines:
a subpoena of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [...] identified over 50 airport locations, including our nation’s capital, used by DHS to help process into the country more than 400,000 inadmissible aliens through the administration’s unlawful Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) mass-parole program. The program was officially launched in January 2023, and the documents obtained by the Committee cover the period from January-August 2023—accounting for roughly 200,000 of these individuals.
> This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy?
Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program' [1] - there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections.
And yes, of course my post is biased, I am after all playing devil's advocate to defend the 'effective' Biden presidency in ways most likely not intended by the parent poster.
> there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections
And? You are aware that promising to do things for voters that aren't being done yet is not exactly a Machiavellian scheme. It's how a policy gets started. Do we just not do anything because that would be new and scary? It's a response to the growing balloon of college costs and lack of opportunities for degree holders. Being $100,000+ in debt for no payoff is a scam, not debt relief.
I know you're pretending to play devils advocate but you are transparently being critical of politicians doing the bare minimum of their job because they have a D next to their name. Devils advocate means you are taking a position you don't agree with for the exercise of it. You are making bad faith statements about a party you visibly hate.
> Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program'
So you think they're both buying peoples votes unethically, but it's worse for the DNC because they're black. Got it. As if white people aren't the most catered to in politics.
Simplest may not be best here. Is Harris the person who is most likely to get people to the polls and vote Dem? Is she someone who can convert independent/undecided voters? etc. IMO those are not easy "yes, absolutely" answers. Does the Democratic party have anyone in the wings who is more likely to win than Harris?
Maybe? Gretchen Whitmer might be a strong candidate, off the top of my head. But I'm struggling to think of a nationally known candidate with super-strong positives that would be a viable alternative. (That's also true for the GOP IMO if somehow Trump was out.)
It's a disgrace that the party that was able to turn Obama from an unknown junior Senior speaking at the 2004 DNC to winning the Presidency 4 years later, now has done zero to promote more candidates over the last 4 years when Biden ran on being a single term President.
Basically, the DNC's options are the people who failed to get through the primaries in 2020 against Biden and maybe Whitmer or Newsom.
I just do not see Harris getting the middle/undecided, and it's 2016 all over again, if not worse, because SCOTUS has the deck stacked if it's even close.
The fundamental problem is that nobody but Biden won the primary. The time to debate over and vote on an alternate has come and gone, and this (along with his decision to run at the last minute in 2020) are things I don’t know I can ever forgive him for.
At this point the VP has the most legitimacy as a successor and given the situation we’re forced into she’s unambiguously the option. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better than all the other terrible options that involve a free-for-all between candidates with no opportunity for voters to weigh in.
The best possible outcome at this point is for the establishment to quickly and unanimously get behind Harris. Again, it’s not necessarily a good outcome. But it’s the best available to us thanks to Biden waiting for the last possible moment (again) to come to this realization.
Harris at least has legitimacy as having received votes as the vp, and extra scrutiny given Biden's age. The optics of pushing her out would be tragic.
Whose optics? Its only relevant to the people that would only vote for her. I'm no political strategist, but they'll have to undo the (untrue) opinion that she was in charge of the border, which is one of the Dem's primary losing issues right now. If the Republican's can pin that vision into swing voters minds, true or not, she stands no chance to win. I am unsure if that is a fair prediction but that is why I generally hope they can find someone else.
She was on the ticket, so the optics would be of pushing out a qualified, experienced, already-in-place vice president and woman of color because...reasons that are definitely not racist wink wink would be the Republican ad.
I honestly didn't have much faith in that polling. The media was scrambling after the debate to propose a different narrative and many in the party that were turning on Biden were promoting Harris.
The polling seemed too convenient. I don't have a link handy, but the best poll process I saw after the debate did show Harris doing better than Biden, but she was still worse off than a few of the other Democratic potentials.
Not according to Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz [1], Chamath Palihapitiya & David Sacks [2], possibly Zuckerberg [3], and others. And of course Elon, Thiel. Many such cases.
These videos would fit very nicely into an undergraduate course segment on motivated reasoning. As viewers, it's incumbent upon us to determine whether the Musks and the Thiels of the world have our best interests in mind and, if not, whether their support for any particular candidate might reflect that.
As Trump said in his recent speech in Michigan "We have to make life good for our smart people." These are executives and investors who have created trillions in value with their technology based products and services. Their interests align with mine.
You're entitled to believe that. But you might want to consider whether this is (1) uniformly true for HN's readership demographic, and (2) uniformly true for the American electorate.
Hmm why should they consider those things? They stated their opinion and priorities, which will likely influence their voting decision. The views of HN or the American electorate play no role in the statement of that individual's priorities, no?
I think the simplest answer here is “almost everyone’s revealed preference is for living in a deliberative democracy, not a demagogic one.”
In other words: GP probably wants, in an ordinary setting, to have their views understood (why bother responding at all if not?). In which case they should similarly set aside some space for understanding why others don’t share them.
I'm not sure I follow that logic. Nothing about justinhj's statement implied "we should do this regardless of what anyone else thinks". They just stated something which is a priority to them. They're taking part in a deliberative democracy by engaging in a public discussion of their priorities. Am I misunderstanding something? Are you maybe responding to something another comment insinuated?
Downvoting isn't really a mechanism to censor, flagging is. The intent of downvoting is usually just disagreement. My guess would be you're being downvoted for a few reasons:
- A few of the people you mentioned are somewhat polarising, so folks who dislike them, might downvote
- in a measure of a president's efficacy, mentioning people who think a president is ineffective isn't as convincing as say mentioning actions of the president that were ineffective. You will, for any president, be able to find a large number of people who will passionately argue for/against that president's effectiveness.
- Your sources are very long videos, which discourage verifying if folks want to see what they said about him. Eg "Here's why he's in effective: [3 hours of podcasts]"
- One of your sources is a podcast which features Trump himself, which greatly brings into doubt the objectivism of the video
- the Zuckerberg short is very speculative, further weakening this collection of sources
- The FT article includes the following names: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Shervin Pishevar, Keith Rabois, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Joe Lonsdale, Jacob Helberg
Please keep in mind that not too long ago vocal support for Trump could get you fired (and still might). Fighting against censorship is important.
We would disagree on who is promising the deliberative democracy and who is the demagog I expect. However, expressing my opinion does not reduce the space for others to express theirs. In fact downvoting opinions is a form of exclusion.
Ah, yes, just the people I ask for a sensible objective view on the world.
Like “well, this collection of the weirdest Silicon Valley people available took some time out of their busy schedule of hawking bitcoin or metaverses or magic robots or whatever to give a Very Important Opinion” is _not_ the world’s strongest argument.
> Let’s hope the Dem’s circular firing squad puts down its guns so they can quickly concentrate on winning the election with someone … probably Harris is the simplest answer.
On the contrary, the processes that anointed Hillary in 2016 and Biden round 2 in 2024 were exactly the kind of "well, it's this person's turn now" decisions that were bad, anti-democratic (lower-case d) choices previously. I'm not looking for a "circular firing squad" but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.
> ...but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.
Regardless of what people want (and FWIW I agree that Hilary getting rammed down our throats was highly anti-democratic) at this stage of the game, Harris is the only person who can benefit from Biden's warchest. Barring somebody like Dwayne Johnson deciding to enter politics and stealing the show, Harris is the solitary candidate who is poised to hit the ground running with an adequate campaign today. And with so little time before the election, I think the only choice Democrats have today is to hold their noses and vote.
Hillary Clinton basically took control over the DNC through financial dealings that Brazile (who took over as head of the DNC after these dealings) characterized as "if not illegal, then at least unethical".
Nah. She stole it, it was wrong, and if democrats had policed their own after that happened, they might be having an easier time batting down complaints of political persecution today.
Part of it is a numbers game. She would get an incumbent bump over other potential candidates. There is hope, and I believe some data showing, she could energize the POC base. This is especially important now because polling was suggesting Trump was growing that area. Fundamentally though, name recognition ends up being meaningful in elections. I’m not advocating one way or another, just sharing why it seems to be an obvious choice for the party. If it helps, who I prefer isn’t being considered, probably because it’s not “their turn”.
They'd rather lose the election than let someone with less seniority; and god forbid let any outsider into the circle. This happened with Hillary and will happen with Harris. It's the worst candidate to pick and a guaranteed loss against Trump.
The Democrats have got it all going for them; both in absolute numbers of votes and also of financial support. Life is interesting...
> the processes that anointed [...] Biden round 2 in 2024
You think it's notably corrupt that... an incumbent president gets to run for re-election? You might argue this was a bad idea. You could argue it's counter to the way the campaign was presented in 2020. But it's hardly surprising; it's literally the way we've done things for hundreds of years!
That's quite the stretch. There are reasons we have primaries in the first place and don't just automatically anoint the VP as the the next presidential candidate. And let's stop with the pretense that their were any real choices in the Democratic primaries this year to begin with.
It's true, the party machine continues to churn out party candidates, and the voters are not given much choice. I left that first item blank in the primary.
But we all have this idea that our candidate will win in a perfect situation that the party will never give us, and while it's good to argue for choices, I'm skipping past the inevitable frustration. Harris was nowhere near my first choice, now or in 2020, but she is qualified. Realistically it's going to be her, whether we agree now or in a few weeks.
I agree that it's best if she earns it, but "earn" looks like something different to everyone and to some, nothing will be enough because their preferred candidate didn't win.
I liked James Carville's idea of picking maybe eight contenders and having town hall type events to choose the most popular. Game show element to take publicity from Trump and also kind of democratic rather than anointing a connected insider, which of course Trump would then go on about endlessly.
Chicago Mayor Daley and his police force made the mistakes with the protestors, much of the media coverage of the police riots falsely made it look like it was happening right outside the convention site.
Well, anointing the VP Humphrey as the new candidate, in a process that alienated a lot of the dem's base was a big mistake in retrospect.
I won't pretend to know the history well enough to know if there was any workable approach then, but the convention process in 1968 definitely didn't work to produce a candidate Dems were excited about at the end of it, the turnout was low and Humphrey lost in a landslide.
Also, I think some of it was happening right outside the convention site - Dan Rather was famously manhandled on national television by security guards while trying to interview someone leaving the convention.
The tension in the US system is between founders who believed in the virtue of the commoner and founders who feared mobocracy. At various levels of the system, the system is designed to be elitist. And the parties are fundamentally private institutions and can be as populist or elitist as they want (worth noting: in practice, the GOP constitution is more populist than the Democrat constitution, which is one of the reasons they nominated Trump; there weren't backstops in the GOP like superdelegates to push him off the ticket).
The Electoral College is often cited as serving a similar purpose... I think recent events show despite paying the consistent premium it extracts in elitist gatekeeping, when it finally mattered it failed to provide the promised protection against unethical demagogues.
Anything a washed up hack like Carville suggests should be viewed with suspicion. At this point, it has to be Harris. She is also the only person who can use the money from Joe Biden's campaign fund.
> One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman.
In what way? I don't live in the US, so what did I miss? I don't remember Biden doing anything of note (good or bad).
> But he did campaign on a single term.
Biden said that he was running for only a single term, and during this entire second election campaign nobody called him out on that, not even outspoken Trump?
Looks like he just signed a bunch of money to people, then said he fought inflation which was both directly and indirectly caused by him signing over money... Can't see anything tangible there that forcibly improved the lives of Americans.
And probably the wrong answer. I don’t see her winning over swing voters. Gretchen Whitmer seems like the best option to me. I’d enjoy watching her debate Trump.
Whitmer far and away best. But she’s had every opportunity to throw her hat in the ring and unfortunately the window for doing so is all but closed by now. She seems genuinely not to want it / lacks the courage to proactively make it happen.
The 2 parties' bases will vote for whoever their candidate is, and their work is just to convince the undecideds. An HN commenter a while ago wrote, they don't get who in the hell can be so stupid/ignorant to still be undecided in this election. I feel like to win them over, the candidates have to rely on the halo effect, ie. sadly even just on looks. The young and fit-looking Whitmer, or Newsom, seem to be the best candidates. It's shallow, but consider the voters.
Obama's charisma and youth surely helped a lot. Trump is tall and he was a good-looking young man, and his swagger has let him get away with being a total POS for 77-78 years.
> who in the hell can be so stupid/ignorant to still be undecided in this election
We only know the name of the Republican candidate at this time. You can make your decision how you want, I’ll make mine when I see who I have to decide between.
Believe it or not, there are people in this world that is not immediately swayed by either waving your totem pole or burning the strawman with the opponents face. You witness a raging mob or a 100% sure fool once in your life and the magic of tribalists shouting loud being convincing, might shatter.
Those will still be swayed by emotional or other marketing tactics that appeal to their convictions, but if they managed to stay undecided in such a polar political climate like USA, my guess is that what they see are two fanatic ends of the horseshoe, and they either decides to disengage from it all or take their time to assessment which one is the lesser dummheit[1]
Or, hell, Elizabeth Warren. She could beat the shit out of Trump in a debate, and has a list as long as you like of actually fighting for the middle class.
you mean the same woman who has campaigned against, fear-mongered the risks of encryption vs. authority, and rallied for full control over software implementation(s) used by the public (and available to law enforcement/government et. al)?
while she has admirable sympathies and even consistent policy, she has clearly demonstrated she's not opposed to pushing an agenda she does not understand.
I don't know how much name recognition matters when people are SO polarized about the extremely well-known name on the other side.
It seems like this is really going to be a "for Trump" and "against Trump" election at this point. Nobody's going to leap out and knock anybody's socks off this close to the wire. All the dems need to do is present any body people are reasonably sure will still be warm in four years. The results won't differ much.
> A fair number of Dems have seemingly engaged with the prospect of Biden stepping aside as a gateway to their wildest fantasies
Uh, who? Certainly there are people who have their own opinions out there somewhere, but virtually every name brand democrat over the past few hours has either explicitly endorsed Harris or notably avoided boosting a different candidate. And absolutely no one is going even the tiniest bit negative on Harris, at all.
No, it seems like a fait accompli at this point. Add to that her control over the almost $100M campaign warchest, and... yeah. The fight now is over who gets to be VP.
I'm not talking about prominent Democratic politicians/strategists/pundits for that part; it's just a sentiment I've seen a whole lot of as someone whose social media diet is dominated by left-leaning spaces. There's a huge appetite for the perfect candidate who can (in fantasy-land) ensure that Trump is defeated for all time.
It's not obvious how he could have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine, or stopped Hamas from invading Israel. Not everything comes back to the U.S.
The biggest EV manufacturers in the U.S. are Tesla and Ford, as far as I can tell. No Chinese manufacturer I'm aware of has made significant inroads.
And Trump has said that he intends to cancel that tariff [1]. Honestly, the narrative that Biden enabled Chinese EV encroachment is very bizarre. It reflects almost the exact opposite of the actions the candidates have actually taken.
I'm not sure you are referencing the correct article. It just mentions Trump threatening to raise the tariffs to 200% and eliminating the EV mandate. I saw nothing about Trump canceling tariffs.
If you believe the Kremlin narrative around their motivations for the war, and I think there are a LOT of reasons to be skeptical of that narrative, but even if you believe it, the 2022 invasion plans were likely already well underway in 2020. These things are planned years in advance (Bush was already working on an Iraq invasion plan pre 9/11, for example) and once things are in motion the stakeholders are not easily turned around.
It’s not just Kremlin narrative, a large wing of the foreign policy establishment also recognized the risk in published articles as far back as the mid 90s.
Very much a false equivalence to the point that it sounds like a bad faith argument. There's a massive difference between contingency planning for a hypothetical versus actively planning for something that's is intended to be agenda item #1.
The first clue to differentiating a contingency from an active plan is resource allocation. Russia moved about 80,000 troops to the Ukrainian border a full 13 months before the invasion. That's over 50% of the force that would eventually enter Ukraine in February 2022 and also about 25% to 35% of Russia's entire non-conscript military force.
Not his fault per se, but he certainly didn't help the Russia/Ukraine situation by pushing for Ukraine to join NATO. That was one of Russia's hot button issues and he wasn't exactly diplomatic about it.
One take is, Putin is too self-unaware to realize that the reason Eastern European countries want to join NATO is because they're afraid he will invade them sooner or later, just like what he did to Georgia in 2008.
But then again, maybe there's some merit to Putin's paranoia that NATO is "gobbling" up these countries to create a military circle around Russia in preparation for a future invasion. At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion.
But he must knows he's running the country like a thug, with oligarchs being forced to tithe to him, and he hates the idea of citizens revolting to topple down other thugs (like they did in Ukraine), because if that idea catches on, that might happen to him too. I wonder if he draws a faulty conclusion that these revolutions are EU/NATO/Western-engineered because they're evil, instead of coming from the citizens themselves who are fed up with being robbed by the elite.
Hah, ironcally enough, Russia runs a propaganda network (or so we've been told) that tricks the population in EU/USA to moan about their rulers and be rightwing populists...
For the non-stupid answer to your opposite-of-that question: these are takes, and for one thing I claimed, I said "he must", i.e. it's a guess, because if he doesn't realize he's a thug, he'd be dumb.
OK I did not signify that the sentence "At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion." is a guess of mine. My bad?
> He also was president to Russia invading Ukraine leading to a Europe wide conflict. Hamas invading Israel.
I put some of the blame on Biden because the botched Afghanistan withdrawal sent the message that the US doesn't want to get involved with regional conflicts, emboldening Russia, Hamas, and Iran.
The agreement was to leave in May. The US left in basically August which is 4 months after the agreed upon time.
That said, if though basically 20 years of "occupation" the US couldn't nation build Afghanistan into being able to defend itself vs the Taliban I don't think you can point at a single president.
CHIPS act, IR act (infrastructure, jobs...), student loans effort, better social nets for seniors, millions of jobs, much better handling of inflation than the rest of the world, pushing for democracy and freedom.
We can't go back to misogyny, racism, removing freedoms from women, teachers, different people, giving money only to the rich and connected, non-sense diplomacy...
The second sentence makes me not trust the first sentence btw.
The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.
By not stepping down as president, he is totally RBG-ing Harris.
Maybe a resignation will be announced later for maximum impact and tie into some thing ready for Harris to announce presidentially, like some camp david peacing or another 3 states ratifying the ERA.
Dannnnnng. I think it's definitely for the best (probably never should've come to this, reminds me of RBG). And that said I really, really liked his presidency, but, he is undeniably really old.
The problem isn't just his age, it's his decrepitude, both physical and mental. I know people in their 90s who are able to speak clearly at any hour of the day...
Speaking clearly has nothing to do with mental fortitude. Tons of things can affect the fluency of speech. We really need to move past the days where we judge people's intelligence and competence based on how well the connections of their brain are able to influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw.
It is a requirement for the job of being a national politician.
You have to be able to win elections at that level, and there's no participation trophies for feel-good runs by someone with a handicap, you just lose.
That is what parent is challenging. You can of course disagree. I think it's an interesting point. How much damage do we do to ourselves by societally selecting charismatic people who speak eloquently as leaders (importantly: over other qualities)?
We evolved a natural tendency to like charismatic and funny people, because (I'm speculating) you need a high minimum level of broad cognitive competence to pull that off.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.
On an evolutionary scale, it's probably a little simpler than correlation with cognitive competence.
A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).
I feel like the only characteristic needed to be a popular speaker is self-confidence. Have you seen most of the word salad coming out of Trump's mouth?
It’s word salad, but for his demographic, it’s a salad of carefully selected words they love, delivered with great warmth, charm, or aggression, as appropriate.
All of his 'success' is purely derived from charisma as far as I can tell. He isn't particularly adept at his prior career of real estate business given that he has under-performed in the markets he has participated in, and he had to commit felony fraud to do it. His biggest success is making people believe that he is more successful than he is.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
Looking at the wildly hostile media coverage of him post-2015, you’d come away thinking he’s a major charlatan.
Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.
The truth is probably in between.
Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.
You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.
I disagree. I know quite a few people who are incredibly charismatic, but exceptionally narrow in their cognitive competence. In fact, one of the problems that I would highlight about charisma is that it allows you to be get away with a lot more stupid shit than you would if you had to get by on other talents.
I agree with your point, but I think your examples are charming one-on-onenor in small groups only.
To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.
One has to be practical. Some handicaps are seen by the majority as a negative for the job. You can’t tell them they are wrong for making it a requirement (after all, they hire the candidate).
To me, the role seems to be like 95% charisma as it's largely a figurehead position. Foreign relations, domestic relations, commander in chief of the armed forces are all mostly charismatic functions.
The smart but uncharismatic folks seem better suited to institutional roles where they can guide policy in the right direction without being the public face of the policy. It's not all that different from the distinction between sales and the folks that design/make the product; the groups are complementary but divergent.
Winning elections is only a part of why the US President must be an effective communicator. Even with the greatest staff supporting them, poor communication will hamper their ability to do the job, especially in a crisis situation.
The truth we cannot change is that people simply want to follow charismatic leaders. We can sit and lament on how stupid that is, but we aren't magically fixing that anytime soon.
I was using "speak clearly" as a shibboleth for general mental and physical ability.
There is clearly something wrong with him that was not in evidence in 2020. Whether it's Parkinson's, senility, 12-day-old jet lag, I don't know. But it's clear that it's hard for him to carry on a conversation, and that is basically the job of a politician.
His recent debate performance was poor. But he's had trouble speaking for a long time. Go back and watch older debates or speeches and see. It's all classic speech impedement stuff; he's clearly had lots of training and experience, but sometimes he can't use the words he wants and switches to different words.
I'm honestly not sure what we're looking for in a debate, but most presidential debates since I've been a voter are contests to see who can look like they're listening the best while getting back to a rehearsed talking point the fastest. [1] When you combine that with trouble with words, and maybe some over training, it doesn't look good.
Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting? I don't know, it's a totally different setting with different expectations. We don't really get a window into that.
[1] Well except that MTV town hall. Pretty sure Bill had no talking points appropriate there.
There are also different kinds of difficulty speaking. When he was younger, Biden would trip over words or say something not quite right, or make gaffes (supporting same sex marriage before it was the admin policy).
But now his difficulty seems to come from difficulty understanding what is happening around him. He seemed confused by his surroundings multiple times during that awful debate.
I've seen a lot of Biden supporters pointing to his stutter and speaking difficulties, but his troubles have qualitatively and quantitatively changed, and definitely for the worse.
The reason there was no coming back from his debate performance is because it wasn't just some verbal slip up or "classic speech impediment" stuff. Anyone who's taken care of an elderly parent or grandparent recognized the clear signs of age-related mental decline. And it obviously wasn't that single debate, e.g. the news about Clooney's fundraiser where pretty much everyone in attendance thought he had markedly declined, or this recent BET interview where Biden got seriously confused and lost his train of thought: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/video/biden-youtube-.... To your question "Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting?”, that BET interview was just a taped, 2-person, no-audience interview with a friendly interviewer. I just don't understand how anyone who's been paying attention can state that Biden's mental capacity hasn't declined significantly, and more importantly, how anyone could suggest with a straight face that Biden would have the requisite mental capacity in 4 years hence.
But in the last couple of months, it's like his tongue is not moving right. I literally can't understand some of his sentences now, the syllables are so slurred and garbled.
Biden apparently had a speech impediment (basically stutter), for much of his early life, and had to train extremely hard to overcome it. So in general I've always brushed aside criticism of his speaking as it's evident to me that he's generally very articulate and well spoken if you overlook the occassional word salad.
Over the last few months I've generally defending his gaffs to friends even though I don't like Biden as a politician, because I think that kind of discourse is counterproductive politically and stigmatising socially, which I still feel.
However, I have to say, the recent downward spike in his ability to string a sentence together becomes concerning to me, not so much because I think it primary reflects any cognitive decline per se, but it seems to me like a sign that the pressure of the presidency and the campaign are affecting him in _some_ way that is causing his speech impediment to surface at its worst and most frequent yet. So I would still push back on a lot of what you are saying, but yes, at this point, something is clearly off there to a concerning degree.
I agree that mental fortitude is not necessarily correlated with fine grained muscle control, but speaking clearly is a pretty freaking basic requirement for A PRESIDENT
Yes, we shouldn’t confuse verbal fluency with intelligence, or the lack of one with the lack of the other. Perhaps you should go back in time to 2000 and step up to defend George W. Bush.
However, when someone was previously verbally fluent and then the whole world can see that that person’s fluency has deteriorated, it’s completely reasonable to believe that deterioration of other mental functions is happening as well, as seems to be the case with Biden.
Verbal fluency is a job requirement for a president. It doesn't matter if the president is the most intelligent person, it matters that they can communicate effectively, particularly with world leaders in life-or-death situations when a miscommunication can result in a great catastrophe. Personally I would rank intelligence as less important than several other attributes.
I occasionally call my kids by each others' names. My parents would call me by my brothers' names. This is a running joke in large families. I occasionally in large meetings swap the names of two products we're talking about and have to be corrected. It's just a very low-grade "verbal dyslexia" that means nothing except that the brain isn't a perfectly-wired machine.
I don’t beleive he’s actually confusing them, but it’s not a good look for a guy who’s supposed to be a leader in uncertain times. One should never be question if the president meant what they just said.
And it's such a double standard. Trump never pretended to speak clearly and now people can in good faith point out that trump has not shown signs of regression because there was nothing he was curating about his persona in the first place and thus nothing to regress.
Whatever Trump says can be construed as some sort of 4d chess hidden message because of a cult of personality that has developed around him. He can hint that asylum seekers escaped from mental asylums but his base will not suspect that he may be the one confusing the two words and instead they will just cheer at the grotesque image because that's the kind of politically incorrect thing they want somebody to say (regardless of whether Trump did that on purpose or not).
I have the feeling that whatever Trump will say and will do will never ever be scrutinized by his side in a way that even remotely resembles the scrutiny to switch Biden has to be subjected to.
And that double standard speaks a lot on the troubled times we're living through.
This comment triggers Poe's Law for me. Given this comment by itself, I would have guessed this was satire. Unfortunately, from a fuller picture, I guess this is actually fundamentalism.
I agree for the average person, but at the same time the front man for one of the strongest economies in the world should be able to speak at least on an average level. Unfortunately I would define his speech at this point as poor - please correct me if I'm wrong. This factor seems like a running joke not only in the US, but the entire world.
Competency is not a requirement for being a politician. Winning the most votes is. And being elocuent and aggressive helps much more than being coherent
Biden wasn't running for chief scientist somewhere, he was running for President of the United States, and a huge part (probably the primary part) of that job is being able to communicate effectively. If "your brain isn't able to adequately influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw" then you shouldn't be applying for a job where verbal communication is paramount.
it honestly astounds me that people did not recognize Biden’s cognitive decline in the 2020 debates. it was obvious then, and it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.
> it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.
Dude, you just completely made that up. Certainly every news outlet I recall, from NY Times, WaPo and CNN to Fox News and the WSJ were all running a ton of articles questioning Biden's fitness for another term. None of them were "boldly proclaiming" anything.
No, it is a sign that both terms occupy close relationships in the brain. I consistently fumble the name of my elder sister with the name of my eldest daughter and I know many people who have similar mixups.
Biden is showing signs of decline, but the name-swapping thing was never (and still isn't) that. It's mental klutzery, nothing more. As the other person pointed out, it is /very/ common when two names are mentally-adjacent, to reach for the wrong one. My parents would call me by my brothers' names all the time, and I just did that with my own kids this morning.
Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.
I've been mixing up names for as long as I can remember. I'm not even 40. Of all the things to judge him on this rates pretty low on my list, especially since Biden has a bit of a history of "gaffes" like this.
That said, it's pretty obvious a lot of energy and fire that Biden previously had is no longer present. Or at least very inconsistently present.
the thing is. i dont remember a single fumbling of words by biden until he appeared back into the public recently. like he was great at speaking and decently quick witted.
the extreme change is worrisome. i mean is this him now? will it keep deteriorating? why would anyone think it wont. how much of a medical concern will be 1 year later. 2 3? this is what people are concerned with
Those were just the top two results in Google for "biden vice president gaffe", limiting the date to before 2016.
I mean, it's probably gotten worse, although I can't really judge that. But it's certainly not a new thing. I'm not saying he's not too old and tired, I'm just saying that merely the mixing up of a name alone really isn't a sign of incompetence.
You've got to be kidding, I must as a non-partisan say. The observations entertain the republican world, but they're there nonetheless for everyone, or this wouldn't have been forced by the democrats.
That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said. The double standard is astonishing.
But yeah obviously there certainly are better candidates than Biden to run for president. Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me.
> Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me
Well we had the 2020 primaries. Bernie and Warren were too left to win a general election. Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, got 2nd in New Hampshire, but only cancelled the campaign after South Carolina, once it dawned that the South has too much of a quiet problem of Buttigieg being gay and preferring Biden simply because he was Obama VP. Without those sad facts, we could've had Buttigieg winning 2020 and 2024.
> That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said.
Yeah, just three days ago, praising Hannibal Lecter, or remember "covfefe" from a few years back? Or the QAnon bunch where some people managed to assemble millions of people [1] by essentially doing "tea leaves predictions" on Trump speeches?
There is no equivalent to that level of derangedness on the Democrat side, not even close.
Is this satire? A typo on twitter and something that wasn't Trump?
Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
> A typo on twitter and something that wasn't Trump?
That one was a response to "and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said", because that is precisely what QAnon was/is: a bunch of people poring over Trump speeches and every tiny utterance of anyone in his circle to find "hidden meanings" like alleged raids on "pedos".
> Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
He misspeaks and needs to correct himself. Yes. That's completely undeniable.
But hell, listen to a Trump speech and to a Biden speech. Trump is just a plain stream-of-consciousness braindump all the time, Biden at least generally manages to stick to the prompt.
Unfortunately, Trump has what I call the "entertainer instinct": he knows exactly and most especially instinctively how to entertain masses, how to make pictures and quotes. The best example is him getting shot - 99.999% of people would have fled, he raises his fist and yells "fight".
And in a political climate where it's not facts but pure and utter showmanship that wins an election, that's a problem.
It's not that he's incompetent (I certainly consider him dramatically more competent to do literally anything
(or when the situation calls for it, nothing) than his opponent), it's that he's perceived by some voters to be incompetent, and that may cost the election, and I'd really rather not be dragged along into that universe because his vanity doesn't let him move over.
Yes, but enough prominent Democrats and donors didn't want to support someone with Biden's faltering condition. Thus the pressure for him to step down. It doesn't matter what the Republicans are willing to support. Democrats are trying to win an election and put someone competent in power.
I don't know the quote you're referring to, but sexual assault by siblings is at least 19x more common (2.3%+ of children) than by adult family members (0.12%+ of children), according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Tangential fact to Biden being able to coherently communicate such a fact or not though.
Being ugly is a disqualifying trait for getting a job as a supermodel.
Being unfit is a disqualifying trait for being an Olympic athlete.
Being unable to stay awake and say coherent sentences is a disqualifying trait for being the president of the most powerful nation on earth.
Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie — which is why Netlix will surely try, because they’re unable to comprehend what the problem even is, and why their “equality” is groan-inducing.
PS: If I was a US citizen, I would vote for AOC not because of her sex or race but because neither of those influence my decision. Do they influence yours?
Being born in Roman Hispania isn't the same as being "of Spanish origin" or "latinx". Being born in Africa doesn't make you black. Elon Musk is the richest African in the world.
If Shaq had been born in China, would he be a good candidate to portray first sovereign Emperor of China?
A black bear born in the arctic isn't a polar bear.
If historical authenticity is semi-expected then having Samuel L Jackson as Nero isn’t going to fly. If race swap is part of the gimmick like in Hamilton then I don’t think it would matter.
If going for visual realism, then obviously a black man would not look the part, since all roman emperors were caucasian (except possibly Septimius Severus).
> The problem isn't just his age, it's his decrepitude, both physical and mental.
"When Biden stumbles over words, we question his state of mind; when Trump acts like a deranged street preacher, it’s … well, Tuesday. If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club,[1] he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs. "
> “Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?” Trump asked during his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Washington. “… I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much.”
Fucking Hell. I need to stop thinking these things are exaggerations or hyperbole. In the past few days, I thought "MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW" and (now) "immigrant fight club" were the stuff of political cartoonists juicing the zeitgeist.
This is the other problem with this election cycle: Trump is saying truly deranged things, but they’re so far outside of what people think would be reasonable for a person to say that he’s not getting the kind of blowback for them he should be because nobody believes he’s actually saying them.
(A contributing factor is that he actually Has been misrepresented a few times by the media - the “bloodbath” comment was very clearly about the auto industry in context, so the right feels rightly aggrieved and the left & media lose credibility.)
Nothing new, sadly. Comedians during Trump's presidency were saying how they can't top the absurdness that was Trump's reality. Welcome to a slice of the madness they needed to parody somehow.
On the one hand, abandoning an incumbent President with the all of the strengths that entails just months from the election because you let the other side control the narrative with their "crippling dementia" meme seems like political suicide, and you can usually trust the American left to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
On the other hand, American politics is so fickle and vain that even a minor gaffe on camera can doom a political career (see the "Dean Scream.") Although this standard only seems to apply to Democrats, it's still a factor. What really killed Hillary Clinton's chances wasn't systemic misogyny, or the email leaks, but her expression. She had a memeable crazy face, and that became her entire identity for many Americans. Now "Sleepy Joe" is the identity of Joe Biden.
The only question now is, what will be the meme that they deploy against Kamala Harris? I don't think the tried and true "probably a pedophile" or "crippling dementia" options are going to work, and "blood drinking satanic priestess" has probably worn out its welcome. They'll probably go "crypto-muslim" like they did with Obama.
edit: looks like they're going with "all of this is an attempted coup." A bold strategy by the insurrectionist party, going back to the "stolen election" well, but it seems to be a perennial favorite. Let's see if it works for them.
Biden was never the quickest guy (or tongue) in the room. During Obama's term, he was legendary for putting rooms to sleep with plodding, off-topic monologues where he set up irrelevant straw-men and then knocked them down. Obama was, by far, the quicker of the two. Time has probably not improved matters, but it's going a bit far to say Biden's declining sharply. Even in his prime, Biden might have stuttered and stumbled through a debate with somebody as consistently unpredictable and utterly unhinged as Trump.
Is a younger leader better? Possibly. Speaking as a non-American, I have to note that, when Americans vote for a President, they're not just voting for one guy. They're voting for a guy who will select the entire white house staff. Biden surrounded himself with highly competent people with good ideas and they're why he's been an effective President. Obama could have easily done worse if he'd been less lucky with his staff selection. An old president who selects good staff can be effective.
Trump did worse during his previous term and would be objectively worse in his next precisely because he'll surround himself with family and yes-men. When staffing, a good leader tries to make himself the dumbest person in the room. Biden did that. Trump never will.
Case in point: The VP. In a Biden vs Trump contest, it was a very real possibility that either of their VP's would have to take over during their terms. Biden had Harris as his VP, and she's clearly ready to do the job. Trump chose a rookie senator yes-man with a profound lack of principles for his VP. The thought of Vance becoming President in 2026 or 2027 should terrify people.
VP's are frequently ghosts - we only really remember Mike Pence as the guy who called his wife Mother and who Trump and his supporters wanted to hang when they were cosplaying insurrection.
Harris has at least been a formidable prosecuter and brings bone fide proven legal talent to the role, not to mention the $8,000 US plus Trump and his family have donated towards her election since 2011.
if decrepitude had anything to do with voter confidence, we would have booted both candidates out after that charade that we called the "presidential debate"
I say this as someone that agrees that Biden should have stepped down earlier (for the 2nd election I mean).
But please, people, do not compare the average person in their 80's to what this man has to do daily.
Just alone entering a war room and giving an order to bomb a place, or watching the raw videos of war (which we luckily don't get access to) is something you don't come back from. This is not an average person, and he was doing OK after all.
However, he objectively got older. That's it. No coming back from that either...
many people that age have been in actual wars. not saying which is more intense or which causes more stress on your body it definitely matters context of what you went through. although id say most vets that went through vietnam or korea probably been through a lot.
at least i know my korean gpa has. man is crippled and vocal cords basically non existent due to his job there. but man is so sharp and smart mentally its actually shocking.
but bidens has had serious brain surgeries. that alone should have disqualified him from even running imo regardless of how his term went
The point is not that Biden has been through an extraordinarily stressful experience at one point in his life but that Biden has been going through an extraordinarily stressful experience for the past four years while already being very old. With the greatest respect to your grandfather, I think it would take a similar toll on him.
And 8 years with Obama as VP in 2009-2017 (in his late 60's and early 70's). Obama got visibly older in 8 years, and he was way younger than Biden was at the time. And yet, Biden challenged Trump that had previously won against Clinton, not the new guy in the neighborhood. And he won.
Seriously, the stress he went through in the last 15-20 years, that's some s*. He even lost his son in 2015.
This guy has crazy good genes. And it sucks that people make fun of him. He should not go as a "joke". People should have some respect and understanding for him.
It’s weird that an incoherent Trump never gets called out for his ramblings that run on and on in circles. Yet Biden’s gaffes are blown out of proportion. I wish someone just called out Trump directly and told him to stop the ramblings. But nobody in his circle could do it when he was president, nobody could get him off twitter and so on.
Trumps been called out for his ramblings for 8 years now. Its not news anymore. Hes mastered the post truth tactic of overwhelming people with bullshit so much that they dont care about it anymore.
Am I wrong to think that whoever is appointed to Presidency is just a figurehead of the actual administration, and that it really doesn't matter how functional he actually is? I'm not defending or endorsing Biden, but from my eyes we vote for the administration, not for the person.
Compare him from his time as the vice president vs now. It is not even close. He has deteriorated so much in his speech. People can't even understand him which was never a problem back then.
What a person thinks and what a person externally expresses can be two entirely separate things. I'm pretty sure Biden can think entirely well enough to be president.
You seriously think Trump is more physically fit? I'd give you mentally, but avoiding having your head blown off because you gesture so wildly it's hard to get a clear shot does NOT make the man physically fit. He looks like a trash bag full of gelatin when he wears his golf clothes, and golf was Trump's only/best example of a (barely) "physical" challenge he thought he'd beat Biden at....
Sad.
> You seriously think Trump is more physically fit?
Absolutely he’s more physically fit. I don’t think Biden would have survived being tackled by the Secret Service agents. That alone would have broken all kinds of bones.
And as far as stamina goes, Trump regularly gives hour plus standing speeches. Do you really think Biden could stand in the hot sun for an hour?
I think he's experiencing a rapid decline in his health, possibly due to COVID. He had been recorded riding his bike this June [0].
This is anecdotal, but it reminds me of my grandfather before he died. He had always been able to run on a treadmill and lift weights; then, he got cancer, and his health deteriorated to the point that he began to need a walker to get around, until he became bedridden and died.
"Unfit for office" (Esper) "The greatest threat to democracy that we've ever seen." (Cobb) "he failed at being the president when we needed him to be the president" (mulvaney) "doesn't like to read, doesnt read briefing reports." (Tillerson) "absense of leadership, really anti-leadership" (McMaster) "wannabe dictator" (Kelly) "he shouldn't be near the oval office" (Barr) "a person who admires autocrats & murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, the Constitution, and rule of law" (Kelly) "God help us [if we's reelected]." (Kelly)
And simply, "he's an effing moron" (Tillerson).
Biden has always been a little weird with his vocal stutter, but he makes good points. He knows what's going on. He can talk to issues and hold a point. Trump's logic as he gets up on the podium & drunk uncle rambles is terrifying, both mean and vindictive when coherent but often just totally space case weirdo verbal diaherria. He's never been sharp. He's never been interested in the world, has always lived in his own head & it's only gotten worse & less & less intelligible. He's an effing moron and a mean nasty one at that. Biden is aging yes but he's a put together intelligent engaged listening person who reads his damned briefings & is engaged & interested & has ongoingly shown ability to go on talk shows & rallys & be strong, to talk intelligently to issues, to handle deep conversations well, & make sharp cases.
You don't see anything like this insult against character & intelligence against Biden. I think Biden is sharp, but even if you disagree, at least he started with a full deck of cards and some decency & respect for democracy. The other guy?
I think Bob Woodward really sums it up: "the president has the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."
Someone in Trump's own party attempted to assassinate him last week, and failed. For most people, having someone in your own party try to kill you would be a huge negative, but the person I was responding to attempted to spin it as a positive.
The “who” that pulled the trigger is much less relevant than the reaction of Trump right after it happened. Rising up, the flag waving behind him, with a fist in the air yelling “Fight!”. Followed by a crowd cheering, “USA! USA!”.
That was incredibly iconic and that picture will be in the historic books, and IMHO, alongside a biography of him as our 47th POTUS.
I did hear about Teddy being nearly assassinated and then continuing his speech right then and there. Helped with his image as being this stubborn bull who never backs down and comes in swinging.
looking it up, we haven't had a near assassination since Reagan (how... well, poetic isn't the word I want to use). Probably a bit too recent for history books to record at my time. The other presidents who had near assassinations did eventually become assassinated.
There was never any risk of me voting for Trump, but when I watched the debate it became abundantly clear that Biden could not win an election. He came off as an extremely frail old man and I had my doubts that he would survive the entire debate, let alone another four years in office.
I'm a pretty left-leaning person and I find Trump to be an overwhelmingly unappealing idiot in general, but even I had to admit that Trump "won" the debate. He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.
Love Joe, but 2 minutes into the debate it was clear he couldn't win an election. He was behind, and he needed to come out strong, and somehow he made it worse. Whether or not Kamala can remains to be seen, but at least there's still _potential_ there.
>He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.
Off topic but I find this insult(?) a bit funny. Is it supposed to be an insult as in his action / speech are as predictable/determined by current state only, as is Markov chain?
Maybe, but he always sort of talked like that, even well before he got into politics. Just a rambling incorrect ding-dong that speaks with a far-too-high confidence-to-understanding ratio.
not a fan of his totality, but he is an epic troll and memester in a way that has broad resonance.
It doesn't seem sophisticated, but it is perfectly engages one audience, and perfectly enrages a second target audience.
Examples that come to mind is mocking Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" or rebuking the question of him as a dictator with "No, no, no, (other than day one)."
It's an interesting case study in that people's perception of "who won" determines "who won".
However, if you change the criteria to "who had the most favorable impact on undecided voters" then apparently he lost? The news was Trump lost undecided voters from that debate..
So Trump won because everyone thinks he won(including me haha). But what did he win?
I don't have polling data so this is just "personal vibes", but I get the impression that left-leaning people like me thought that the last debate was going to be more or less like the 2020 debates, where Trump ends up looking like a blabbering idiot and Biden comes off as reasonably snappy and charming, and that the election might be another shoe-in for Biden.
I think the statement of "Trump won the debate" largely boils down to the fact that nearly every left leaning person who watched it turned it off feeling like "holy fuck looks like we're getting another four years of Trump".
Having watched it, it's not like Trump got "better" in any regard, he's still a blabbering idiot (maybe even more than in 2020), but he didn't "disappoint" me like Biden did this last time.
It’s hard for me to say it because it’s not like Trump was actually “coherent”, he just didn’t seem like he was on death’s door.
Also, wouldn’t me saying I hate him a lot but still acknowledge he won lend more legitimacy to it? Like it’s actively working against my biases and I still acknowledge he won.
> your biases shouldn't have any impact on whether you thought someone performed better or worse than their opponent
That's arguably the definition of bias isnt it? Especially because political debates don't have objective winners or losers, declaring your bias before picking a winner in something that's only subjectively winnable does seem relevant.
This isn't a case of watching a soccer match and concluding "Gosh, I'm German, but I gotta admit Brazil won the 2014 world cup"
I do try and avoid my biases influencing my opinions on things, but almost by definition “bias” implies that I might not be fully aware of the thoughts that might be influencing.
Again, and I do not mean to repeat myself, the fact that I did concede he won the debate despite my distaste for him indicates that I am able to put them aside, at least a bit.
I find this recent kind of artificial “nuance” by simply pretending that having an opinion is somehow “tribalism” to be supremely annoying. It’s not clever, it just comes off people pleasing with the opposite effect.
Yes. Because Trump "winning" what was potentially the worst debate in US history isn't even worth a consolation prize.
This isn't even a RvD thing. I'd take back Romney, McCain or go as far back as Bob Dole. Hell, Sarah Palin was at least a pleasant form of stupid instead of malevolent. I remember when the R's at least has some minimal sense of class, but even that's out the window. This is just an embarrassment to my country at this point.
I don’t think all (or even most) republicans are stupid, but I think that Trumpism (and demagoguery in general) is a natural consequence of the Republican party’s unwillingness to outright condemn the conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones.
They’ve flirted with that kind of thinking my entire life (with the Satanic Panic and acting like Harry Potter was out to brainwash children), but it feels like the conspiratorial stuff really picked up in around 2013; that’s at least when my grandmother stopped sending me unsolicited Fox News articles and started sending me unsolicited InfoWars articles, and when she started really going off the deep end.
I agree. Their reasons pre-2016 may have been selfish at best or fundamentally misguided at worst. But I felt the worst the potential Romney era would do is slow (but not halt) gay marriage. If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president (outside of completely throwing education under the bus... But 8 years of Obama didn't fix too much and Biden tried but got huge resistance to some starts).
There's definitely a much more explicitly hateful undercurrent in the trumpism era. I never would have expected a Charlottesville to happen so brazenly in the 21st century. Let alone the insurrection.
And on the other hand, Kamala' complexion is part of why Im worried about the D vote. Because despite much progress there are undeniably some older D's who hold prejudiced thoughts (external or internal).It undoubtedly was a partial factor leading to Hilary's loss. I really hope I'm just overreacting though.
I agree with most of what you said except for this:
> If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president
I think he was still pretty awful; his administration basically banned stem cell research from happening in the US, he withdrew funding for anything involving climate change research, and he shares blame with Clinton for the 2008 housing crash. [1]
He wasn't quite as stupid as Trump, he didn't try and bribe a foreign official to investigate his opponents, and he didn't try and overthrow democracy with a violent mob, so I guess if that's our bar then he's pretty ok, but I think my standards are still higher than that.
[1] I'm aware that it was Clinton who signed the subprime mortgage stuff that caused it, so he definitely deserves a large share of the blame. However, the Bush administration sat on it and were happy to take credit for the short-term benefits until 2008, meaning that they weren't thinking about the long term consequences either, so I think they deserve a share of that blame too.
That’s just how you do it. It would have been far, far more damaging for him to spend a few weeks going “ah, well, maybe I won’t run”. It always looks a bit silly in retrospect, but total confidence right up until you change direction is just how you have to do politics, in general.
It seems to me the pressure built up and he could no longer fight it, which means he had no choice. The party did not allow it, just like they didn't allow Bernie in 2016.
Except in this case "the party" is actually "people that vote for Democrats". It's insane and infuriating to try to blame this on "the elites" when a significant majority of Democratic voters wanted Biden to step aside. If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.
> If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.
Yes, and it worked, and it's working again. I'm just saying it's not what people would have voted for if there was truly a choice. The presidential election is just a show for the managerial class to select their new spoke person.
I mean, you could read it that way, and without inside knowledge it would be impossible to prove or disprove, but realistically, even if this was fully amicable, even if this had been _instigated by Biden_, it would still have played out in public exactly the same way. There’s no world in which an incumbent national leader will say “hey, thinking of resigning, more info in a few weeks”; it’s just not how it works.
There is no message his campaign could give other than "Biden is running" and have Biden still run - any other message would damage him.
Saying you are considering dropping out would be immediately pounced on, and effectively mean you'd have to drop out. So I don't think there is any signal in the messaging there except that he was probably still seriously considering running.
That is a counterfactual that is pretty hard to prove. The US is a very large machine and I find it hard to believe that two wars were enabled by the presidents weak will alone.
In his final 6 months, set up a plan for a Constitutional amendment that puts an upper age limit of 75 at the start of a term of office for Members of Congress, Senators, POTUS, VPOTUS, Executive appointments requiring Senate consent, Judges, with compulsory retirement at 75 for lifetime appointments.
Presidents should be held to similar health and psychological requirements as astronauts. The role/responsibilities require the same level of performance.
The President has no role to play in the Constitutional amendment process.
Biden could use his time to promote one, but there is absolutely no way it can be done in six months. A Constitutional amendment is an enormous hurdle to overcome -- three-quarters of the state legislatures.
I think there are exceptions allowed for major events (if only the keep all of the discussion in one place, preventing it from bleeding into the rest of the site).
I think it was pretty widely understood that he was going to have to be adamantly in the race until the exact moment he wasn’t in the race. The second he showed any public wavering it would have been over.
I can understand that perspective too, but a problem with that approach is that he might seem arrogant and out-of-touch - and I would have difficulties trusting a party who is so clear in their communication for so long, and then abruptly change direction completely
This is how it works everywhere. Do you go to your boss and say "well, I'm thinking of quitting and taking a different job, but I'm not sure yet and I'm still deciding. I'll let you know when I've decided!"
resignation and successful impeachment rates are pretty low, so basically it's 4 years, and then later basically one can do whatever they want, they instantly have an amazing audience/market.
Then we could have had a better primary process, instead of putting huge amounts of effort into pushing a critically weak candidate.
People have been saying this for many months, and were basically told to stop helping Trump win. Turns out those people were right - so why defend the lies?
They hadn't told the people running his Twitter account yet?
There was already an incident [1] where his press secretary tweeted about running for president on her own account, so she or her people are presumably in charge of it.
Even if Biden had personally authored and posted every one his tweets, that would have nothing to do with whether aides were kept in the loop about major campaign announcements.
This thread is discussing an alleged inconsistency (or quick reversal) in his Twitter messaging.
I agree with what you wrote. The people running Biden's campaign were not told the news 10 hours in advance - nor 10 minutes in advance. I doubt those messages were sent by the same people.
I was waiting for the House to censure him for not stepping aside. It was pretty clear that the flood of leadership democrats and donors insisting he step aside was building.
Until the electoral college is eliminated, or we at least get some kind of system like rank choice voting, there is no point in pretending that the votes of any more than a handful of swing states actually matter.
Does he write his own tweets? He's no Elon Musk or Donald Trump, I would assume some staffer is tasked with writing those tweets. And they obviously wouldn't tell the staffer to do anything different until the decision to drop out was final.
Oof. This guy has been the biggest positive surprise of the US presidents in my lifetime. Expectations were low, but he actually turned out to be a good president (from a European perspective). No new wars, no more talk about shifting defense focus to Asia, generally nothing unreasonable. Good support for Ukraine, no doubts about NATO - rather the opposite. Basically, the rich uncle on the other side of the pond has been a good one.
I presume that his attitudes and staff selection carried the day, and maybe could have done so for another term. But his mental capacity was clearly declining, and he is in fact expected to handle some things personally.
The US was in Afghanistan for twenty years. Everything the US did there collapsed in a few months after twenty years. It seems like after the second Osama was killed everything done there was a waste of time and money for the US. It's a terrible situation, but it's a terrible situation whenever there is a country using religion to justify oppression and war. The people have to be willing to get rid of the oppressors.
US had to learn the age old lesson too it seems - you just can't conquer Afghanistan (well maybe apart form wiping almost its entire population but even russians didn't do that). And its not a place for democracy, its tribal to its core and nobody likes giving up power held over many generations. It doesn't matter much how superior you think your cause is or advanced equipment deployed.
There were just 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before they pulled out, and below 10,000 for years before that. There are more U.S. troops in countries like Germany, Italy, or Spain.
In the end it was a very small commitment for the US, with huge gains not just for Afghan people but also for the US.
I'd argue that zero troops and zero dollars in Afghanistan should be the goal. Afghanistan knows that if they try to raise up another Osama what will happen, so I would argue that what happens there, even if it's terrible, doesn't actually affect things in the US anymore.
We can invade a bunch of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe and possibly "improve" lives there, impose our will, while sucking money out of America ostensibly forever.
Or we can sanction human rights abusers, offer proper asylum, and if there are any real on the ground changes from within the country then possibly support in a similar way to support in Ukraine.
Once you invade a country you're committing to a certain responsibility to do right by it and the people living there. Either follow the Prime Directive or don't, but you can't just choose whimsically based on whatever is convenient in the moment. Blame the Bush admin if you really want to blame someone.
How does the prime directive apply when you are attacked directly.
I do agree that Bush deserves the blame for turning what should should have been a hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda mission into a sprawling invasion of various countries in the middle east
Afghanistan or the Taliban didn't attack the US – bin Laden did, who had no position in the Afghan government. Taliban refused to extradite Bin Laden to the US, and the US refused any compromise such as extradition to another country. All of that is a rather different thing than "they attacked us".
Regardless, Obama, Trump, and Biden had to deal with the situation as they found it, whether they agreed with the lead-up or not.
Counterpoint: after World War II we still have troops in both Germany and Japan who are now our allies. Any kind of occupation, and our occupational forces were small, was always going to be a long term commitment. Instead we just straight up abandoned our allies.
This was not a win, and the Biden Administration lying about it at every single stage of the process until the final troop was out was downright cowardly when all we had to do was continue to commit to sit on our asses while Afghani society rebuilt itself.
They reverted months after we left, which means the only way to hold it off would have been to stay forever and make them the 51st state.
Anyone who didn’t want to live under authoritarian Islamist rule should have left during that 20 year period. I find it hard to believe the whole place reverting was a surprise.
The US invasion and attempted puppet government in Afghanistan made life much worse for women in Afghanistan because it drove regular people to support the extremist Taliban, who themselves became more extreme as the war went on.
Just because the US could take control and pretend to make progress doesn't mean it actually changed people's minds. In fact it actively poisoned the concept of women's rights in that region for decades
Enough ordnance lying around for them and their army and menfolk to have fought if they wanted to. At some point we have to say enough is enough. Thousands of American lives, trillions of American dollars, and 20 years ought to have been enough. If not, then it's just not a job that is reasonably accomplishable by a foreign state. I wish them all the best in building a free society for themselves over the next decades, but they'll have to do it without American boots on the ground.
Maybe its China's turn to try to conquer the graveyard of empires.
Owing to the change of administration, the Biden administration was obviously responsible for implementing the terms of the agreement as negotiated by the Trump administration.
I think both parties get an approximately equal share of the credit or blame.
That's not the fault of the US though. We were there for years and years trying to foster democracy, but you can't help a country/culture that doesn't want to help itself.
> He got us out of Afghanistan too... this was a huge win and was very risky. Doesn't get enough credit for this one.
Thats because Trump agreed to get us out of afghaniston. Biden oversaw the absolutely disastrous execution, abandoning untold millions of military equipment in the hands of the taliban.
Trump's plan involved getting out even quicker. How was it going to be less disastrous?
It is always the same story, Dems bad, I would have done it right. He had a 'credible deterrent', and would have completely ended the Ukraine war (that had been going on since 2014). Just like he claims now he will end the war, and bring back all the Americans imprisoned abroad if re-elected. It's one thing to say that sort of stuff and present a plan for doing so. Trump says it, and then pivots to even more bullshit.
Do you really think a different president, with effectively the same military leadership, was going to execute the pull-out in a broadly different way on a shorter deadline, and call it a success?
Unfortunately his domestic achievements have been somewhat mediocre.
His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people.
I really do think his major failure was not pushing for a lasting achievement like implementing federal parental leave. He had the chance, but opted for a 1 year extension of child tax credits.
And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
"His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people."
Look at the $300bn climate funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and the impact on bringing chip manufacturing onshore with the Chips Act. All this with a nearly divided congress.
Easily the most effective US president of my lifetime.
The CHIPS act has stagnated since its announcement, it comes with onerous DEI requirements on new chipmaker facilities which just compounds the shortage of skilled labor. There has been no progress on construction of announced facilities since the bill's passage.
The IRA has nothing to do with Joe Biden. It passed because Joe Manchin decided at the last minute that he hated what China is doing with trying to monopolize stuff like solar panels and batteries.
There's a reason people jokingly refer to him as President Manchin.
The US economy is extremely robust right now and the European countries that took a balanced budget austerity approach are in shambles. Look at England. Just carnage over there.
Deficit spending makes sense when the spending invests in the future. Every mortgage holder understands this implicitly. If these deficit levels concern you the obvious first place to start would be on the revenue side, by letting the Trump 2017 tax cuts expire.
Can't wait til Jan 2025. I'll be taking full advantage of the home energy rebates to rewire the electric, install modern insulation, and install energy efficient heating/cooling in my 1930's Craftsman. The rebates should cover up-to $14,000 of that cost which will be a great help.
1/10th the number of illegal immigrants? The US gets less illegal immigrants than Europe per capita. If you look at the charts from the last 10 years of the immigrants as percentage of population you recognize that the US is seeing slower growth while European countries see faster immigration. This is happening while the US has a high immigration rate of desirable skilled workers.
> And of course the US has an illegal immigration problem. European right on the rise from 1/10th the number of illegal immigrants the US gets.
Those are also the backbone of a lot of agriculture in the US, either a president tackles it and food inflation rises or you keep the status quo and prices steady.
There's no winning strategy, whomever tackles it will have it backfire someway, the US depends on exploiting cheap labour for its low margin industries.
Trump's strategy of making lots of noise about building walls to stop illegal immigrants while not actually building or stopping them seems to be working reasonably well.
Genuine question: is the European right actually on the rise? It seems somewhat localized to France, where Macron just unexpectedly outmaneuvered both Le Pen's party and the left coalition that formed to counter Le Pen, securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him. In the EU as a whole, Ursula von der Leyen just won another 5 years as the President of the European Commission, which seems like a continuation of the status quo in the EU rather than a turn toward the right.
This is all from my naive perspective as an American.
Edit: I'd appreciate a reply instead of a downvote. As I said, I'm asking a genuine question.
Biggest party in the Netherlands is radical right (PVV). In France they barely got a parliamentary majority against Le Pen, in a country that's not particularly good at coalitions, so doesn't look like it will last. Hungary has been on the authoritorian track for quite some time. Poland just managed to get off it, but we'll have to see if it will stick. Italy got a neo-fascist.
Generally you see radical right gaining more votes in Europe, even if they don't outright win everywhere. You also see that other parties adopt ideas from the far right. This means that policy is changing in that direction and that the discourse is more around those topics. Meanwhile research shows that this doesn't actually make voters vote less for the radical right parties, so those other parties are not gaining anything from it.
I see, thanks for the info! Interesting that Poland managed to get off the authoritarian track as you said, when they're so geographically close to being embroiled in war again. I'd think that would lead people to lean toward that kind of "follow the strong leader to get us through war" thinking, but obviously I'm glad it doesn't.
Makes one wonder whether they just like his fascist leadership style or there are some rather direct incentives involved. Russian secret services like to stir the pot in other countries in order to weaken them.
A few German right-wing dudes seems to have more or less provably received money and favors from Russia.
The right-wing party in Poland (PiS) still won the latest election (as in - got the most votes), but didn't anyone willing to form the coalition with them that would secure enough votes to form government - other major parties campaigned on being explicitly anti-PiS. So, even though PiS won, they are the opposition now, and the wide anti-PiS coalition is in power.
Also to add, PIS was mired in the passports for sale scandal, which was a significant reason for them losing the election. People didn't vote against anti-immigration and far-right behavior, they voted against PIS hypocrisy.
Here in France, the media isn't so prompt as to call last election's results a "victory" for Macron's party.
Quite the contrary, his party now finds itself with (considerably) less parliament seats that it had, and when it could get a majority by appealing to the "moderate" right, he now has to compromise with the opposition. His party doesn't even hold a relative majority anymore.
Sadly my country hasn't been the only European one where fascism is creeping up again. The far rights came out on top in the last European Parliament election in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary and France. In the other countries, its scores are steadily, dreadfully, increasing with each passing election.
Personally, I blame the increasing economic inequality and austerity politics lead in Europe since the 80s.
My personal opinion as a non-European who has voted in the UK elections as a Commonwealth citizen: the far-right tends to win broad support in European Parliament elections mostly as a reactionary bulwark against the EU's Open Borders policy (and rightly so). People tend to vote somewhat rationally for national elections.
Honestly, from my perspective, the rise of rampant immigration (and that too contributed by people of my community) is going to damage the entirety of Europe in the long run. Already I've seen firsthand the skewing of the demographic pyramid in the younger generation (0-18 yrs), a lack of worthwhile job prospects for second generation immigrants, and the rising tide of anti-national behaviors from members of migrant communities. As Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed rightly said, the next generation of terrorists will not come from Saudi Arabia or the Middle East, but from Europe. The kind of venom that mosques here in Europe spew is much worse than the extremely highly-monitored mosque sermons in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman.
From my Muslim perspective, Europe will be a lost cause in a single generation, unless there is a MASSIVE cultural upheaval that stomps and quashes the current migratory trend. Austerity and inequality are just the sparks, but the bigger powder keg is the growing base of increasingly alienated migrants who have to face the austerity and inequality (see Leeds riots very recently). European society was never structured to take in so many incompatible migrants like American society is.
There ought to be a clear distinction between indigenous Muslims who migrated post WW2 all the way to the 80s and 90s, and the recent migration waves which outnumber the former. The former have been able to acclimatize to European culture while still maintaining their roots (not to mention that it was harder to migrate back then - you needed a job already for starters). The latter bring the same tribalistic beliefs of their homelands over here. And trust me, the former DESPISE the latter, and it's an understatement. Not because they want to pull the ladder up after them, but because the latter import the same foul culture that the former wanted to escape from.
As a Muslim, I don't want to see people praying on the roads and streets of Paris. I didn't want to see people chanting "From the river to the sea" for Gazans (who have a very strong reason for being despised by the rest of the Middle East). I don't want to see Muharram processions in Barcelona either.
Fun fact, the Middle East has one of the most relaxed migration policies across the world, yet a lot of European migrants are actually unable to migrate because they are criminals back home (the first condition to obtaining a residence visa is a police clearance).
Muharram processions are specific to the Shia community. Allowing one and not letting Sunnis or Sufis do some arcane street ritual/procession is recipe for disaster. Best to not allow anything. Let these rituals be relegated to the mosques and Imambaras, not on the streets where they hamper with the daily lives of non-Muslims.
Indigenous Muslims that you had mentioned are my absolute favorite kind of people, that I've eschewed the rest. The rest could actually learn a thing or two from them (but of course they won't).
I believe the immigration problem is mostly fear mongering by the far right. In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
I am not saying we shouldn't have a sound immigration policy, but closing/controlling the EU's borders is highly unrealistic. Just look at Italy's far right government: they promised to stop all immigration to the country but since Giorgia Meloni's investiture, the numbers have never been higher.
The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis. The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
Austerity and inequality are the direct results of deregulation, financialization and privatization of previously fine public services. Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
> The solution should reside in providing better integration and opportunities to migrants, who could very well be part of the solution to Europe's demographic crisis.
The issue is that Europe has already taken in far too many migrants than it can possibly integrate. Right now, taking more migrants isn't a feasible situation if they're impossible to integrate.
The solution to Europe's (or any country's) demographic crisis isn't more migrants. It's making a conducive and affordable environment for families and childbearing. Cheaper healthcare, affordable childcare, cheaper education, etc. and that's just scratching the surface.
> Despite the right's endless whining, immigration has very little real impact on the economy, and crime, overall, has gone down in the last decades.
So is that why Sweden, whose population is 10% non-Swedish now, has had to declare publicly that their crime rates have skyrocketed over the past decade? Why Poland, which took very few migrants pre-Ukraine, has had a very low crime rate? Call me right-wing, but while some of their claims might be horseshit, others are more than obvious truisms.
> The most diverse European cities are also the most productive.
The most diverse cities were already major production centers before migrants entered the picture. For a more accurate reference, compare the levels of non-residential investment into these cities pre and post the migrant crisis.
>In France less than a thousandth of the population could be classified as "immigrants".
France is obviously one of the few countries in Europe that could uniquely integrate its migrant population, but your numbers are wildly inaccurate too. Out of a population of 67 million, 8.7 million were foreign born. Sure foreign born could mean a lot of things, but that still isn't "less than a thousandth" of the population. And a significant number concentrate in the major cities, further ghettoizing them.
I don't believe you can convince your population to raise more children, sure you can make it easier for those that want to, but demographic decline is a worldwide phenomena. It's the endgame of the demographic transition.
What happens in Sweden is mostly due to a resurgence of organized crime. I don't think closing down the country's borders (which, again, isn't feasible by any realistic mean) woulf fix the problem. To find a culprit, you should look at poverty rates which is always much more strongly correlated to crime than ethnicity or whatever else. Here's an article from the Guardian that explores this, for what it's worth: https://theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-...
When speaking of immigrants I always think of illegal immigrants from Africa, which is what the right talks about anyway. In that regard, I believe my figure of one one thousandth is more accurate.
And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in. The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
As it stands now, it is tougher for me as an affluent non-European to migrate to Sweden, or any other European country (except Switzerland apparently, where I'm at now) for the long term, than it is for me to settle in the UAE or Singapore. It is tougher for my highly skilled friends in tech who want to move to Europe, so they've chosen to move to Singapore instead. On the other hand, both the UAE and Singapore are making it much harder for low-skilled migrants to get in, while they find it much easier to go and settle in Europe. And they are, in hordes.
> And how again did organized crime become resurgent in Sweden? Was it not driven by scores of unemployed immigrant youth finding an outlet for their skills, coupled with a relaxed policing culture that was developed in good times?
In short: no. Read the article whose link I posted above.
> We're not talking about closing down borders here. We're talking about strongly monitoring the kind of migrants you bring in.
And how could we do that ? We can't put policemen along every 4m of the European border. We are already doing random border controls, I don't think we can do much better without bankrupting ourselves.
> The UAE and Singapore are both heavily migrant driven populations, yet don't see this resurgence of crime that we see only in Europe, because they actually preselect their visitors and residents.
I don't think comparing the EU with the UAE makes much sense here. The situations are very different. Also, the UAE depends on massive numbers of foreign low-skilled workers to run the country. There are usually only allowed to stay for the duration of their work, and are hidden away from the rest of the country. There are many reported cases of worker abuse and inhumane working conditions. Overall, I'd wager there to be much more violence in the UAE than in Europe. In any case, you were speaking of values earlier, I don't think Europe has much to learn from the UAE in that department.
As for Singapore, I don't know what to say. It's a city-state, obviously it functions very differently than a continent-sized loose economic union of several country. Not that their ways have nothing of interest to us...
I'll conclude on our exchange, feel free to disagree:
You seem to believe about everyone can get into Europe, which is far from being the case. Famously in France, Macron's government last immigration law was the last one in a series of about a hundred similar ones since WW2.
I am yet to hear of an immigration policy that isn't just "give them less rights, give more money to the police, etc.", which as we have seen is only effective if our goal is to worsen the situation.
The influx of young abled men and women should be a net positive for Europe, and France, where businesses are always complaining of not being able to find enough low-skilled workers. Instead, we are too busy pushing back and making their lives harder to the point of making integration almost impossible and ostracizing them from society, thereby creating the conditions for crime to flourish.
Ah, my mistake. The political commentary and analysis I'd been reading had been saying that, while Macron's party lost seats, his goal may have been to defang the far-right before they got any "real" power in 2027. I guess the commentary was implying that his goal may have been to let the French people see what the far-right would do with their political power, while not risking the presidency.
It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
> It sounds a little bit like 4-D chess now that I type it out, I'm not sure I believe it myself.
The thing is with Macron, he managed to make the journalist class believe he's a genius (he's not dumb, but still miles away from being as brilliant as presented). So whenever he trips on a stone, you get an army of journalist explaining to you how he planned for it all along.
> securing himself a surprise victory in the snap election everyone thought would be a disaster for him.
This is totally incorrect. Macron's party arrived 3rd in number of seats when previously it had a relative majority. He lost over a hundred seats in parliament and many key roles. Additionally his coalition is weakened because his allies really didn't appreciate his move and are already openly questioning his leadership.
He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
As for the rise of the far right, it's happening in more countries than just France: Germany, Netherland, Italy, etc.
> He is in a way worse position now than he was before the snap election, and while you can say nobody won, no one can seriously question the fact that Macron lost hard.
Good point. I replied to another comment below, I'd been reading political commentary/analysis saying that maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027. But as far as I'm aware he never actually said that was his goal, it's just a guess, and from a hard numbers perspective he called a snap election and lost seats.
> maybe his goal was to defang Le Pen's party by letting the French people see what they'd do with power before the election in 2027
That's what he said in private at some point, but that wasn't his initial plan. We have another reported conversation that explain his plan was to benefit from the divided left to reconquer an absolute majority for himself.
It's only after the left managed to make a coalition that he started floating this idea of letting the far right ridicule itself.
But even if that's a stupid plan, he haven't achieved that either, the far right gained over 50 seats, and their electorate are now even more angry because they consider they got robbed of the election.
So no idea what commentary you were reading, but I'd recommend not to trust that source ever again on that topic at least.
He miscalculated super hard regarding LFI. I genuinely think he did not expect Glucksmann and Faure to basically sweep the antisemitism/antisionism under the rug that hard for the elections to get access to Melenchon's militants.
RN, through no skill of their own, is in ideal position right now. The coffers are going to be full, they have 3 years to clean up their candidates and get the messaging correct, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the coming EU budget restrictions. And R! is finally dead after having served their purpose of shifting the discourse.
The far-right parties are on the rise in most EU countries. But in most EU countries they have not managed to make it into government in enough numbers to be relevant, yet.
But the rhetoric of the centrists/moderates has been shifting towards the right as well, on the topic of immigration, and especially with regards to certain ethnic groups.
The UK may have just managed to get a majority, but that's a peculiarity of their electoral system. As a fraction of the votes, their far right gained a larger share than in previous years.
Similar effects can be observed in plenty of countries, among those Sweden, Germany to some extent, Italy, Hungary has been way left for a long time, etc.
To be honest, the UK elections might be parliamentary, but they have a very Presidential character to them, just as is the case in India and Canada. People still vote for the PM face. This time, they didn't want to vote in Rishi. Put Boris Johnson on the ticket, and I'm certain the results would have been extremely different.
Comparing the most recent election in the UK and the one before it the vote for the right (Reform) increased by 2% points (14% overall) versus the vote share for UKIP in 2019
The other right wing parties (Conservatives, DUP) got 25% between them
Where as the more progressive parties got over 50% of the vote - Greens got 6%, LibDems 12%, Labour 34% plus SNP and Plaid Cymru
To say the right did well in the UK election just isn’t true
There's no "EU as a whole". Europe is made of vastly different countries with their own politics and the people care much more about the national politics compared to EU level politics (at least based on what I have seen).
It doesn't help that the EU parliament (elected directly) does not have much power compared to the commission.
> I presume that his attitudes and staff selection carried the day, and maybe could have done so for another term. But his mental capacity was clearly declining, and he is in fact expected to handle some things personally.
Biden's presidency makes me wonder if we really need a head of state these days. Is it really necessary to have such a single powerful figure in the executive branch?
The biggest exception (IMO) would be in times of crisis, where a strong executive is necessary.
I feel two ways in this, you probably need one voice for certain key tactical decisions, but the fact that everyone feels the presidency is this important in America supports the idea that the presidency has gotten way to powerful. Loosely speaking, the person who is president shouldn’t matter as much as who is in congress.
This is how it works in most European democracies.
The balance between the President, the Prime Minister and the Congress or Parliament is different in different countries. In most of Europe, the President is mostly a "figurehead". The President does the diplomatic stuff, wines and dines with foreign leaders, maybe has the ability to veto laws or pardon people, but it's the prime minister who actually runs the government and appoints the cabinet.
I think this varies varies between countries. Sweden indeed has an almost (formally) powerless monarch. I think the UK has a monarch with some real power but that does not put it to use? And how Denmark, Netherlands, Norway etc fare on this scale would be interesting to learn.
> you probably need one voice for certain key tactical decisions
I agree. Having a unified vision is the other key thing a president brings. Unfortunately though we barely see the fruits of a unified vision with how divided the two parties are today.
> Is it really necessary to have such a single powerful figure in the executive branch?
As an ignorant outsider, my impression is that the president is only supposed to 'preside' over things. Delegate and appoint people. Sign bills as a ceremony.
The real decision-making should be happening by the people's representatives in congress, while the Supreme court can guard against decisions which would violate the constitution.
But then parties form, partisanship happens, and congress stops making meaningful changes. Blocking anything that the dems put forward apparently gets votes for senators. You don't even need filibusters to prevent votes; just the suggestion of one.
So without a working congress, the President and the courts end up picking up the slack, and wield more power than they should.
I naively wish that there was some way for congress to actually be a congress, and for each member to vote his/her conscience on every single matter.
The problem isn't the head of state but the head of government. The solution to that is reduce the powers of the President.
I have been having thought that the office of President should be split. With separate head of state and head of government that runs the executive branch. Another option would be to have triumvirate with command in chief that commands the military. Maybe the President has power to dismiss the others, or there is system than one person can't take over, like the CnC can never be executive.
You could do that with current structure by giving all the executive power to the Vice President, and then President would be left with head of state role. They would run as slate, with the visible, charismatic President, and the unknown, competent VP. If the President dies, the VP loses all his power.
The two historical examples that immediately come to mind (and explain the Latin term) both didn't end well.
I agree with the rest of the points you make. I think in Europe, the CnC is always a military post and needs to have done officer training and risen through the ranks, whereas the head of government (whether nominal or actual) is strictly a civilian role.
Whether European models would scale up to something the size of the USA is another question.
I've said that the US needs an elected king. The guy you want to have a beer with, to throw out ceremonial first pitches, even to welcome other heads of state is the king. The person who runs the government and balances congress is the president and should be super boring. I'm imagining George W Bush as idea King material while Gore would have been ideal President material.
In parliamentary republics, the President is the powerless head of state, and the Prime Minister is head of government. There are lots of terms for head of government like Chancellor, Chief Executive, and First Minister. "King" has too much baggage of being inherited.
Most limited Presidents have fixed terms, but I don't think there needs to be term limits for the figurehead. I was thinking that the head of state would attract those who want the spotlight.
This is a weird way to formulate the question of how you could better constitute the US federal government.
(because if you were gonna make a change as fundamental as not having a primary leader of the executive branch, you probably wouldn't try to limit your changes to that)
This is a very partial view. A good number of people, including American democrats were disgusted by his unwavering support to the current genocide in Gaza. Many believe he could have stopped it with a phone call and explicitly refused. I know many who swore they would not vote for him, regardless of the circumstances.
The US public is not as supportive of Israel as it used to be but support is still broad. The opinions you're reflecting are a small minority. I would expect that democrats lost votes on their "both sides" approach here since more centrists would have move to the right then people on the left who at best can not vote in protest. Stronger support for Israel would have not only reduced Palestinian suffering in the war but would have also likely gained support for the democrats.
For example, Israel was pressured to delay its offensive in the beginning of the war after the Oct 7th attack, which likely caused more casualties and prolonged the war and it was pressured in other ways that prolong the war. There was certainly nothing like "unwavering support", e.g. there was intense pressure to avoid an operation in Rafah, e.g. with the US administration saying the population could not be evacuated, but then Israel ignored that, and the population did evacuate.
On the other hand, there is virtually no chance that the US could have forced Israel to stop the war because Israelis view this as an existential threat. No threats or measures the US would take would override that view. This is likely why Biden is not able to stop the war by making a phone call.
I think it's important for people that want the war in Gaza to end and to see less casualties and suffering to understand this calculus. Israel's and Hamas'. What those people seem to be working towards in practice is a prolongation of the war, more suffering by everyone, and possibly the election of Trump in the US.
> On the other hand, there is virtually no chance that the US could have forced Israel to stop the war because Israelis view this as an existential threat. No threats or measures the US would take would override that view. This is likely why Biden is not able to stop the war by making a phone call.
No chance? That's a very unimaginative view. Here's one way to do it that would have caused Israel to immediately stop: "If you keep going against what we are publicly saying, we will no longer veto security council resolutions against you, and UNGA will move forward with sanctions once they realize we're not going to protect you anymore."
Biden tried to threaten and stop Israel and this is one reason for it taking so long. It took like five months to start invading Rafah, which is crazy. And the main reason is Biden administration stalling it. Thank G-d now Dems will be busy with their political infighting and survival and the hot stage of this war will be over soon and Gazans can breathe a bit and start thinking about their future.
Israel is acting towards its declared objectives which it views as existential: The removal of Hamas from power in Gaza and the return of its hostages. Hamas is acting towards its declared long term objectives of destroying Israel at any cost.
It's ok for you to disagree with those objectives, or Israel's assessment of threat, but you can still see how a truce that leaves Hamas in power does not align with Israels' declared objectives. If you can offer a truce to Israel that removes Hamas from Gaza and Israel rejected that then I'd support your argument but that option is not on the table at the moment (partly because it does not align with Hamas' objectives). From Israel's perspective the proposed truce neither guarantees the return of all Israeli hostages nor the removal of Hamas from Gaza.
Israel's current government is also unlikely to work towards the proposed truce because it involves releasing Palestinian prisoners which will be seen as a win for Hamas and also a potential for future violence. This is where Israel is divided internally with many (most?) supporting a truce and parts of the government working against it. But most Israelis would still see the truce as temporary and agree that Hamas' survival in Gaza is not acceptable after Oct 7th. If Hamas was to e.g. leave Gaza (like the PLO left Beirut) then many options open up for ending the war and moving forward (including removal of the current Israeli government).
Again regardless of your opinion/politics you need to see this from Israel's side if you want to be able to achieve a solution. The Ukraine/Russia conflict is similar in that you need to understand what both sides are looking for and what they're willing to concede before you can end that war. Just saying that you think the war should continue until Russia is repelled from the entirety of Ukraine, while potentially a reasonable moral position, may not be a practical one or one that minimizes the number of people getting killed. I say that as someone who is 100% supportive of Ukraine. There's the idealistic outcome and then there's reality.
It's certainly true that if Israel has no other alternatives, and under the assumption it views Hamas' survival in Gaza as an existential threat, then it will continue to use force to achieve that objective, which will certainly lead to more people getting killed. Israelis and Palestinians.
If this is the scenario we're looking at, and we want to minimize Palestinian suffering and casualties, then we should be looking at how this force can be used in the most optimal way to achieve these objectives. For example, a truce that gives Hamas a chance to rebuild its defenses and re-establish control over broader areas of the Gaza strip is almost certainly going to lead to more suffering and casualties.
Israel just passed a law calling a UN agency a terrorist organization, thus making them legitimate (in their own twisted minds) targets in an ongoing genocide. Earlier that same legislator denied any prospects for a 2-state solution making it absolutely clear that they aim to at best keep Palestine in a state of domination, what the ICJ has ruled as apartheid.
I think it is a mistake to claim Israel is acting with anything but genocidal intent. Even their own legislator shows this genocidal intent when it validates obviously invalid targets. Their aim is not the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza, but the elimination of civilian order of Palestinians in Gaza. And it is clearly and obviously moving towards that goal.
Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. They don’t have the military nor political capabilities for that. At best they are a threat to Israels ongoing policies of apartheid. But in that regard, so is the ICJ.
> PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump declared Tuesday that Israel must “finish the problem” in its war against Hamas, his most definitive position on the conflict since the terror group killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages on Oct. 7.
> Many believe he could have stopped it with a phone call and explicitly refused.
This seems to take all of the culpability, motive and free will away from Netanyahu. I'm not saying Biden couldn't make that call, but why do we assume Bibi would have actually stopped if so?
To a lot of outsiders it honestly looks like to some extent Israel controls US foreign policy. It's not a good look. Why does the US have to tiptoe so much around this issue? Why does Israel have such leverage? What is this leverage?
I always say, imagine if it was France instead of Israel. Then you see how crazy the situation is.
A strong West-allied military in the Middle East is extremely valuable.
If France started a war of aggression, the US would also 100% stand with France, especially if it started with France being hit with a terrorist attack. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
From my layman's perspective, it's because a lot of people in the US just plain support Israel. I think that's because of religious connotations but again I don't really know. I've even seen an Israel flag being flown in the same yard as a Trump 2024 yard sign, here in my tiny northwest Iowa town.
Because critics always say what they don't want but rarely think through what they do.
The very likely case of Palestine replacing Israel would be a rapidly anti-US, anti-Western, anti-Democratic government and a loss of a very valuable port in the middle east due to the, y'know, rapidly anti-US issue.
Also depopulating Israel of Jews would almost certainly result in another Holocaust. Because Hamas - the most likely-to-govern organization for Palestine - has long enshrined Jew murder in its charter.
Depends what was in the phone call! If he said "I'm going to drone you and everyone in your cabinet and all of your family" that would probably have done it, coming from the one person on earth who can credibly make that threat.
Biden's aides could probably come up with a more nuanced and more statesmanlike but equally effective threat than that, of course. Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
> Any US president would have great leverage to threaten an Israeli PM personally or politically, or threaten changes to US foreign policy that would work badly for Israel.
US Presidents aren't dictators and there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
In any case, I don't believe Netanyahu would have caved. No matter the threat - the crimes of Oct 7 were way too serious for any Israeli PM to leave unanswered. It was the equivalent of 9/11 - and just like the US back then, who completely flattened Afghanistan in retaliation, there is no way any other Israeli PM would have had any other realpolitik option than to fight until Hamas is gone off the face of the planet.
It’s more like 10x worse than 9/11. Israel is a fairly small country of 9m people. So much of the population was connected to those killed. If you scale it to the US it would be as if 41,000 Americans were killed. Our response would be off the charts in such an event.
> there is no way _any_ policy change too bad for Israel wouldn't have led to serious financial issues for any party. AIPAC is damn well connected.
Well, yeah, it might not have been good for Biden financially or for the US strategic military position in the region. That's exactly why he didn't make the call - it's not that he doesn't care about the slaughter of innocents, but he cares about other things more.
Biden's wise choice exemplifies true leadership, and ultimately, it's a testament to the enduring influence of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's revered elder statesman, who remains a powerful force to this day.
"in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which started in 2014."
Russo-Ukrainian War: "The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea"
Trump would (has promised to do so on live television) just give Ukraine to Russia. Biden/USA/allies have stood down Russia, which has been seriously damaged both by battlefield losses, by not achieving their strategic goals and instead entering a second Afghanistan, and by the rapid conversion of the EU economy to no longer need Russian energy.
I think you are spot on (and a bit puzzled why you got downvoted). The energy transition in Germany away from Russian gas was a economic achievement I didn't think possible. It costs Europe dearly but has accelerated renewable transition remarkedly.
Failing US infrastructure has been singled out as a major pressing issue by US Engineers (professional societies, etc) for at least 15 years that I'm aware of.
It's been cited before 2016 as a trillion dollar problem.
The point is that this something that one POTUS chose to talk about and frequently hyped "Infrastructure Week" and also something that another POTUS chose to do something about.
^F informs us there are 33 instances of "war" on that page, most in "award", "forward", etc. Two as the actual word "war".
Of course it's a good thing, why on earth would you imagine it not to be?
> You were the one who could not find it not me and then you got confused with award and forward
Please don't be silly. I found all instances of the character sequence "war". Most instances were within full words, two instances were the actual word war.
Then you asked me to help you to search within the text. Most people on HN are capable of finding such things themselves. Why you struggle with this is a mystery.
There are certainly things Biden can be criticized for but your comment is hyperbole that has little bearing on reality -
> most of the major cities here are no longer safe
objectively, nearly every major cities is safer now than at virtually any time in the past 50 or so years.
> massive hordes of illegal immigrants
This uptick trend has been noticeable for the last 30 years so I'm not sure how this is attributable to Biden. Additionally, as a percentage, we are still not yet relative to the percentage of population that is an immigrant as compared to the late 1800s.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
> But yes, I agree, ignoring the reality of all of those things, pretty good!
But yes, I agree, if you ignore reality, you can blame Biden for everything :)
Haha, he says he is European, talks about decions he's noticed from a "world stage" point-of-view, and you respond with your partisan vitrol.
I'm not sure you can claim moral lapses when you've cited propogandized and exaggerated far-right talking points. I think felonies, positively adjudicatied rape accusations, and paying for sex while your wife is pregnant are all the new standards for a POTUS that lacks moral fiber....
>The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date certain of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal.
>And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.
> He came to power under questionable circumstances, winning none of the bell weather counties, most votes ever received (even more than Obama), massive dumps of mail in ballots after the close of the election day, etc.
Honestly, I think the rest of your point can be safely ignored after saying something like this
They have been 100% better than the 4 years previously. I make 2.7x more than I did in 2020 and my net worth has 5x'ed. I knew a lot of people in my team at Amazon that got laid off - they all landed better jobs or other jobs at Amazon.
Most importantly, I no longer have to contend with a pandemic due to a world-beating vaccine rollout championed by Joe Biden.
Also - I don't know what kind of soup you're buying, the kind I like hasn't changed price much. It's around $3.60. I'm also aware that a 10% tariff as championed by the last President will raise prices even further on things I rely on - like out of season fruits.
The last time we had a sitting president not seek reelection like this was LBJ and he announced his intentions in March, 1968 [1]. We don't have the communications media we have now. This had a massive impact. The Democrats were largely unprepared, in part because RFK was assassinated in June.
This ushered in Nixon who expanded the war in Vietnam, started the illegal bombing of Cambodia that killed hundreds of thousands [2], started the War on Drugs [3], reshaped the Supreme Court and ultimately created a crisis leading to his resignation in 1974.
Biden should've announced last year he wasn't seeking reelection, giving time for a real primary process. But we are where we are.
Some will point to Biden's achievements, and there definitely are some major achievements, but elections are forward-looking. It's not just about how Biden is now. It's how we would've expetged him to be 1 year from now, 2 years from now, 4 years from now. And those prospects weren't good.
I do believe this was the right decision (albeit way too late). This is an opportunity to reset what otherwise was looking like a bleak race for so many of us.
It’s for the best. The man is not in his best form and he has repeatedly shown that he isn’t. He attempted to rectify the situation since the debate but even those attempts fell short.
Seems totally reasonable: I am confident in my ability to do this job now, but I'm less sure I'll be able to do it three or four years from now, so I will be seeing out this contract and won't sign a new one with you. A perfectly normal thing most working people do in their 60s.
He's still competent enough to be president. He just doesn't have the chops to skewer a lunatic in a live TV debate, which is unfortunately very important, because if he can't, the lunatic might be the next president.
Yes, his decision making is sound, and comes with a huge weight of experience and understanding of how the world works. His ability to communicate effectively has diminished, but not his ability to assess facts and make effective determinations.
Isn't Biden pretty good at getting out of the way and letting experts make the decisions? That seems like a pretty valuable trait in a leader assuming the advisors are high quality and that you're not in a time of crisis and need a strong leader (e.g. war).
Disagree. The debate showed that his communication abilities are nearly gone, but his mind behind them is intact, just slower than it was.
Which is a really unfortunate position for him to be in. It can't be pleasant. He's not suitable to lead the country for another four years for sure. The country needs a leader who inspires people, and no one on that debate stage was that.
He is clearly not competent enough to be president. He is, arguably, barely competent enough to be a ventriloquist's dummy at this point, which is effectively what he is. We just don't know who the ventriloquist is.
Does anyone believe that he should have his finger on "the button" controlling thousands of nuclear weapons? If you were in charge of a boomer or a Minuteman III silos and you got a launch order purportedly from Biden, would you execute that order? If so, really? If not, what deterrent is currently in place?
If that's the situation, then he's not the president and should either step down or be replaced via mechanisms of the 25th Amendment.
He is not able to hold his own in a debate. Yet you believe he's strong enough to lead the nation and decide when to go to war or not?
Being president should take a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness. At all times.
If Biden's age has been causing mental issues, fine. That'll happen to everybody. But if it's bad enough to stop him from running, it should be bad enough to keep him out of office.
> Being president should take a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness. At all times.
You're basically saying a superhuman is the only thing that should be president. There doesn't exist a person that can navigate politics while having a high degree of intelligence, integrity, and awareness at all times.
> He is not able to hold his own in a debate. Yet you believe he's strong enough to lead the nation and decide when to go to war or not?
Because when he has to decide when to go to war or not, he's surrounded by a group of trusted advisors.
Damn, where are all the HN regulars who chant "How the fuck is a one hour pressure-cooker leetcode session relevant to someone's capability as a software engineer? We're measuring the wrong thing!" ...
* Also, are we just ignoring the context that Biden is stepping down because otherwise Trump might get elected? I know this forum is not a place to call for Trump's resignation, but I can practically taste the double standard today ...
And he also has to be able to make a decision at a moments notice.
When the alarm bells are flashing red in the nuclear bunker, do you want a half senile man deciding to press the button or not?
He's unsuited to be President for another four years. That doesn't mean he needs to step down right now. It just means he shouldn't run for re-election.
He’s clearly incapable of making any serious decisions. He refers to his defense secretary when he can’t remember his name as “the black man”. He thought a different woman was his wife a few days ago and tried to kiss her. He’s delusional about the current state of the race. He can’t even descend two steps unassisted.
He should have stepped down months ago, and the Democrat party is responsible for hiding this from the public. They really thought they could just shield him till after the election.
Why say "the Democrat Party"? The party's name is the Democratic Party. It feels like an attempted slight, but I don't get it, except that I know Donald Trump occasionally says this as well. Which I also don't get as an insult.
He purposefully said "Democrat Party" to publicly identify himself as a right wing Trump supporter. It's a childish right wing shibboleth. He wants you to know he's a Trump supporter who listens to and parrots Fox News and right-wing media and politicians word for word: that's exactly why he and Trump and other MAGA supporters say that, to "virtue signal" their support of Trump. It's just like wearing a bandage on your ear. Look at all the other words he wrote: he's just being a parrot, as a way of announcing his political bias. He's just a concern troll, not serious about what he says, pointedly making that mistake on purpose.
>Remember “Democrat party” is the key right wing shibboleth when describing the Democratic Party. You gave yourself away. There is no such party as the “Democrat” Party in America.
>A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ ⓘ;[1][2] Biblical Hebrew: שִׁבֹּלֶת, romanized: šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.[3][4][5] Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.
It's telling that there's no attempt to refute the argument or examples that Biden is incapable of continuing to act as President or that the people around him have been lying to the public about it for months, if not longer.
Reminds me of the classic adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.
You loudly and clearly signaled to everyone that you are not arguing in good faith, so you certainly don't deserve a serious response. All you're doing is parroting ignorant uninformed right wing talking points and childish schoolyard bully epitaphs, and it's a complete waste of time taking you seriously, since you have absolutely nothing useful or interesting to contribute, you don't even believe you own words, and you know very well that it's called the "Democratic Party" yet you went out of your way to make that "mistake" on purpose, and you just parrot what you heard without any thought or evidence, so you've forfeit all rights to expecting a response or being taken seriously.
It's supremely ironic that a Trump supporter like you would get his panties in a twist about somebody other than Trump lying in public.
There’s a process for removing him if enough people in congress believed that it was an issue, but there’s no reason to do so at this point in the presidency. Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
It does follow. The reason is if the president is cognitively incapable of leading the country. There's a good argument that Biden isn't competent enough to drive a car or work at home Depot. He makes gaffes every time he speaks and is rude and demeaning to people around him according to reports. It's pretty likely that he is effectively not the president right now, that his trusted senior advisers are actually running the country.
I'm not saying all of this is certain or that Biden should be removed, but it is certainly plausible, if not likely.
Trump just had a 90 minute off the cuff acceptance speech at their convention. I can show you the disagreements I would have I can’t show you any major gaffes.
If you want to split hairs and say that the verbal diarrhea that comes out of his mouth every time he opens it is not in itself one giant "gaffe," I guess I'll just concede the point and move on. He's still a giant asshole, always, to everyone, so my original point still stands.
And why was his acceptance speech so "off the cuff" if it was at an official function where he had months to prepare?
> you don’t ever consider that you are the one who was intentionally kept in the dark
There you go again, asserting that you know what's in my head. Please stop.
I've seen mentions of that catchphrase floating around. Based on the wording you used, I thought you were referring to her saying the word "broke" in some context, and I wasn't sure what you were talking about.
Perhaps you should work on your communication skills some more before acting so haughty?
As we age we do have a decline in mental and physical function, but it is generally not uniform. From the reports I've heard his speaking ability is down, but his analytical abilities are still fine.
| there’s no reason to do so at this point in the presidency
The man is still the Commander-in-Chief. Anyone of limited mental faculties (which clearly describes President Biden), irrespective of their politics, should not be in the chair if they are not of sound mind. Consequently, I believe the responsible act would be for President Biden to resign the Presidency and allow his Vice President to take the mantle.
| Even the Republicans aren’t likely to try that.
I actually don't think it's in the Republicans best interest to do so. Tactically, the Democrats would be wise to let Kamala Harris sit in the Oval Office and make her the nominee. It would legitimize her as both a nominee and a candidate. Given that isn't happening, the cynic in me believes that suggests the Democrats don't want her as their candidate.
Regardless, the political machinations are irrelevant. It is irresponsible for Joe Biden to continue as President given he is obviously unfit to continue as the nominee.
The thing is, there needs to be a Vice President to declare the winner of a Presidential election, as we all learned on Jan 6, 2021.
If Biden resigns and Harris becomes President, a new VP would need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the (GOP controlled) House.
What if the House refuses to take up the vote, similar to how McConnell refused to bring up Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court confirmation? In theory that kicks the election to the states, and each state counts as one vote, winner takes all.
I don’t think that’s a gamble the Democrats are willing to take, being that a majority of states (not a majority of the population) are GOP controlled.
The President pro tempore of the United States Senate (currently Patty Murray, D-WA) acts in place of the VP.
“The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.” Article 1, Section 3
A submarine launched nuclear missile takes about six minutes to hit its target. Presidents probably shouldn't even be permitted to drink alcohol during their time in office as responding to nuclear attacks is one of the major duties of office, even if one we hope they never have to perform.
I think you interpreted the parent as saying the president might be drunk & order an unprompted nuclear attack.
The parent was really saying that the president might need to respond to a nuclear attack at any time, therefore they should always be sober and ready to respond. Essentially, the president is oncall 24/7 for reacting to nuclear threats.
There are some protections though where the presidents orders can be disobeyed, which are mentioned in that Wikipedia article you linked.
> "What if [the president's] mind is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated? ... Can he launch despite displaying symptoms of imbalance? Is there anything to stop him?" Rosenbaum says that the answer is that launch would indeed be possible: to this day, the nuclear fail-safe protocols for executing commands are entirely concerned with the president's identity, not his sanity. The president alone authorizes a nuclear launch and the two-man rule does not apply to him.
Even if they didn't mean that, drunk or not, the US president has the sole authority, both legal and practical, to launch a nuclear strike.
Respectfully, you might want to read something more current on the subject. The excellent book Command and Control [1] is a good place to start.
The "protections" you appear to be alluding to presumably mean the "NCA"'s role in this. That's a term that has no official meaning since 2002 (and before that the president also had the sole authority to order nuclear strikes).
Don't forget, Saint Ronald I. was (allegedly) basically a potato in the latter year(s) of his presidency. So there's precedence, with such a situation.
Republicans would have to confirm a VP replacement, which they won't do. So even if he had to resign, he would be held hostage by Republicans because they would rather he lead the country badly than let someone else take over.
It’s completely possible that he’s fit for office now but realizing that he won’t be able to convince voters that he will remain fit for the next 4 years.
Not in his best form doesn't mean unfit for president.
But yeah, it might be better if he steps down, especially if the candidate will be Kamala Harris
Given the recent claims that the President was healthy and fit for office despite evidence to the contrary and now this admission, how can anyone trust the party?
To their detriment? I'm not sure. They just had the Republican convention. At that convention, they took a lot of shots at Biden. Now the Democrats say "Wrong target, suckers!"
They take over the news cycle from the Republican convention, and they neutralize a huge amount of the talking points from the convention. That could be pretty brilliant.
(I mean, it would have been better for Biden to clearly not be running last year at this time, and let the primary process do its thing. But dropping out right now might be pretty decent timing.)
This is actually huge. The Dems now get several cycles of genuine organic interest... Kamala as nominee, then "who will she pick as VP" and the convention will get a lot of natural attention, all getting earned screentime (while pundits and pollsters have a field day of pageviews and engagement).
The media class now has months of things to talk about wrt the Dems. The less screentime Trump gets the better, and his convention is already over and spent zero time attacking the actual candidate.
Yeah, it certainly /can/ work. For example in New Zealand in 2017: The labor party (our big centre-left party) had an unpopular/uninspiring leader and was polling terribly. The existing leader stepped down and Jacinda Ardern took over just seven weeks before the election, and rolled to a win.
YMMV, we have very different political systems and cultures, etc. etc.
Nate Silver was already a Cassandra months ago about this issue and was proven right, better than the entire Democrat establishment. The internet is quite the dichotomy. There are easily available sources to the common man that are more right than the most powerful people in the world (Ivy League SAT removal fiasco, Alperovitch on Russian invasion, etc.). But, most people don't listen to them and instead regurgitate brainrot.
The rules allow the DNC to have an open convention. They just haven’t had one for more than half a century. the interesting thing is apparently if they do that its available to all candidates. So it’s possible that somebody that is well liked by the public, but not by the DNC becomes the leader ie Bernie sanders.
The tough thing though is that money donated to Biden doesn’t transfer to other candidates.
The daily wire did an Extensive breakdown of each scenario a few days ago:
is there something specific about this extensive breakdown of the laws around a candidate stepping down that you find incorrect? Is there any news source you have found that isn’t biased in someway?
I'm guessing the person actually just meant that Ben Shapiro is extremely annoying. That's why I avoided clicking at least. I've found people use negative modifiers more or less randomly to signal disgust as opposed to thinking through what each word means
The challenge is transferring to someone not named Kamala. [0] You need some campaign finance oversight with accounts, etc., and refunding and transferring to a "new" candidate would take time and jeopardize tying up ~$100 million in funds.
That's the way it should be? Donations to a candidate's reelection committee are for the benefit of that candidate and severely limited by law ($3300 per donor per candidate per election). Treating inter-committee transfers as something other than donations would allow trivial circumvention of the 'per candidate' restriction - just run a bunch of nobodies, fill their coffers, and then have them drop and transfer to a single candidate
I'll admit this is a bit silly in light of PAC/SuperPAC spending now, but we did have election spending rules at one point and this was one of them.
Endorses Kamala so probably no 'mini-primary' or other challengers which is a bit of a shame. Kamala was pretty uninspiring in the primary and hasn't seemed to get a lot done as vice president while trump has gathering momentum and, maybe more importantly, money. The 'king making' party apparatus that pushed Biden despite the health issues has a lot to answer for.
I wish folks wouldn't speak in absolutes this much, it's incorrect and tends to raise the temperature of a generally already heated discussion.
Biden's approval rating was like 40% for most of his term. So many many many people voted for Biden for Biden. Many people followed his progress and are happy with it.
The reality is that the campaign donations accumulated by the Biden/Harris ticket are only available to Harris. Anybody else is funding-challenged even more than Harris at this point. From the standpoint of campaign finance laws and the practical realities of fund-raising, it was Harris all along.
I've been seeing things that say they could form a SuperPAC with the existing donations and we know SuperPACs have more or less no real limit on spending as long as it's not coordinated with a candidate.
OTOH, candidates get a better ad rate than SuperPACs, so there's a lot of dollar effeciency lost if you have to go that way.
I must admit that I don't know all the nuance of campaign finance laws, but the donors gave their money to a particular campaign. It isn't completely clear to me under what circumstances those funds can be pledged to another candidate without getting the original donors' sign-off. But as I understand it, much of the Biden/Harris money is restricted to the campaign.
I am, admittedly, very glad that Biden stuck to his word in 2020 that he will be a single-term incumbent president for the last 4 years... I just wish the DNC kept their word on bolstering a more compelling candidate within that timeframe as well.
They had 3 1/2 years to bolster the reputation of Kamala, and largely sidelined her after using her as a play for minority vote. Now they're (likely) running her in a remaining timespan of a little over 3 months left before election -- after no one has thought of her since the last election. This isn't good.
I wouldn't frame "he was campaigning and only pulled out when it became clear everyone was against him" as "he stuck to his word that he will be a single term president". Sticking to his word would've been never campaigning to begin with.
No, you're completely right; I still have a bone to pick with Biden for waiting this long and doing almost no favors for his VP's image over the period of his term. But, he still fulfilled an old promise by technicality, and I'm not one to cut corners for giving credit.
This is really misunderstanding how that works. The 2020 field at that point was wide open, no one candidate was looking dominant. She absolutely "could" have stayed in with a real shot at winning, which was true for basically all of them. She got out because (1) staying in costs money and fundraising in a wide-open primary is extremely hard and (2) she judged[1] that she'd have a better path to the presidency by positioning herself as an obvious VP candidate via playing kingmaker with her political capital and identity markers. Which is exactly how it played out.
"Sen. Kamala Harris drops out of 2020 presidential race": [0]
"Following that debate, her polling numbers dropped to the single digits — and never really recovered.
Amid those problems, Harris' campaign reorganized — laying off some staffers in early states to focus its resources and attention on Iowa.
The latest RealClearPolitics average of recent polling showed Harris with just 3.4 percent support nationally, and just 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent backing in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively."
With all their talk of campaign finance reform, it is not clear to me why the DNC does not finance their most valid primary candidates? Why make them jump through hoops and raise money to stay in the race between the primary elections?
No. I want the DNC to provide some basic money all valid candidates (say those who get above certain percent of votes) so that they can spend their time making their case to the primary voters, instead of trying to raise money.
In the end, it is the primary voters who will pick the candidate who will run for presidency.
> She absolutely "could" have stayed in with a real shot at winning, which was true for basically all of them.
This was true for three of them: Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg; but if Buttigieg stayed in, it was looking like at the time that he and Biden both would have lost to Sanders. I remember my last act as a registered member of the Democratic Party was going to be to vote for the candidate who had the best shot at beating Sanders in my State specifically thus denying him some delegates, and I was having a difficult time up until nearly the last minute figuring out who that was going to be up until Buttigieg made the decision extremely easy by removing himself from the race.
Harris didn’t even make it to the starting line. Her campaign simply ran out of money in December before the Iowa Caucus.
I wouldn’t say Biden stuck to his word. He fully intended to run, until people (rightfully) objected. I’m glad he ultimately backed down and stepped down. But this whole process would have been easier to nominate a real candidate if he would have stuck to his word from the beginning. He still deserves the blame for that, even if his most recent actions were correct.
It will be an interesting case study but I think there is a chance that the short runway will allow her to maintain some semblance of high energy. Basically, if you thought American elections were too drawn out, here is your opportunity to be proven right.
Then the senate would refuse to approve a VP replacement. Remember that leading up to counting the electoral votes loose-lipped GOP senators were saying that Pence (the VP) wouldn’t be counting the days electoral votes? How do you think that would proceed?
Note that by the 25th Amendment both houses would have to confirm. The (bare) Democratic majority Senate would be a challenge. The GOP majority House an even stronger hurdle. Though confirmation is a simple majority, not a supermajority (2/3 vote):
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
There's also the fact that in ascending to the Presidency, Harris would no longer be President of the Senate, which would lose her tie-breaking vote, AFAIU.
The problem is that the Republican controlled house would have to confirm the appointed VP. The senate might take a minute, but it would likely get it done.
Yeah, I meant the house: it would be much in the majority's interest* to leave the position vacant through the election.
* I mean the way they seem to operate these days, where keeping the system running properly isn't considered important, and to a hardcore group is considered something to firmly oppose.
The VP's confirmation would be beneficial, solidifying their position for re-election. However, if the confirmation fails, it could reflect negatively on those responsible, particularly if the candidate wins the general election, as it would highlight their inability to secure a key appointment. Regardless, the process would attract extensive media attention, offering free publicity, which is a win.
One could argue the chaos and uncertainty from upending his currently functional administration is not worth the upsides, while allowing for a natural transition via the standard election and end of term process is worth it.
The important consideration is that he’s unfit to serve for four and a half more years, and also that he’s unfit to win the election. In contrast, he’s probably not considerably more unfit for the next six months than for the past six.
He’s mildly unfit to serve now but there’s reasonable doubt he’ll be at all fit in a few years. That would be what the more rational people should be thinking. It’s not about day one it’s about year two, etc.
Ordinarily, yes. But she doesn't poll well with a lot of key demographics due to her tough on crime stance as a DA. Making her president would mean she'd be the presumptive nominee, and I think the party has more optimal choices lined up.
This election will come down to four battleground states. Those are the only states and battles that matter.
Polls indicate Harris is holding her own, and it's clear that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already found it in the Biden-Harris ticket. By selecting Harris as his running mate, Biden has given them a viable choice. Now, it's essential for Biden to see this through and commit to the path he's chosen. Ultimately, he should resign at a time of Harris' choosing, ensuring a seamless transition and maintaining the momentum they've built together.
> and it's clear that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already found it in the Biden-Harris ticket
Do you have anything to back up that claim?
There are scores of voters planning to vote third party or sit out the election due to the lack of good, viable candidates. If the DNC nominated someone who honestly spoke to the ways our country is messed up and the things we'll need to do to change them they could easily see a considerable increase in their votership.
It's evident that someone in this thread is employing stylometry to profile users, likely to uncover user identities, all the while concealing their true identity. The comments' content, which tackles recent events and complex political strategies, is clearly written by individuals with a deep understanding of the subject matter.
Doxing, or attempting to dox, is a toxic behavior that should be strictly against HN rules. It's essential we maintain a safe and respectful environment for open discussion. Instead of indulging in digital detective work, let's focus on the topic at hand and avoid perpetuating a culture of surveillance.
I'd argue that voters seeking an alternative to Trump have already coalesced around the Biden-Harris ticket. You question this claim, citing the presence of third-party voters and disillusioned citizens. However, I've examined the data from various angles, including voter behavior, incumbent advantages, legal challenges [link], and polls (hundreds of them, in fact). The reality is clear: for Democrats, there's one obvious path forward, and denying this is, in my opinion, a self-destructive stance.
Link: This video discusses the legal implications and potential consequences of Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential election, including the role of delegates, party rules, and state laws.
That's certainly a factor but not the only factor. She bears a lot of the same baggage as Biden for failing to prosecute abusive cops and enforcing so-called "tough on crime" drug policies.
I'm more worried about how divisive the race will be if they nominate her (black vs white). It'll allow the media machine to paint numerous "oh it's because she's black, isn't it" kind of rhetoric as a smear on the Republicans.
Reading this entire thread tbh has been a sad and worrying re-affirmation of my beliefs that we're all collectively "fucked". We literally can't put aside differences (myself included) and argue on facts and details, and instead resorting to tribalism.
The big reason we're resorting to tribalism, I think, is because of a peculiar element of human nature about wanting to "right" past "wrongs". So if me looking in from the outside, see the other side winning unfairly last time round, I'll support my side's wrongs despite them being objectively wrong (or what I don't even want) because I want to right the wrong of the past. That topped with the fact that the stakes are a whole lot higher each time means that neither side wants to "take one for the team" - because they know that if they did, the other side will just use the opportunity to the detriment of their opponents.
Yes, it would be beneficial for Biden to step down, as this would make Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee and simultaneously break the glass ceiling of a female US President. This would also demonstrate her presidential capabilities to the general public, who may not fully comprehend the responsibilities of the office. Furthermore, if Congress were unable to confirm a VP, it would reflect poorly on them and dominate news cycles, shifting the focus away from Republicans. As President, Harris would be able to address the nation with authority, rather than just as a VP campaigning for the top office. Additionally, it's been apparent for some time that Biden has been facing mental and physical health challenges; it's surprising that this isn't more widely acknowledged.
Note: As an independent observer, I'm offering this perspective as a political strategist or from the perspective of Americans seeking to overcome the historical gender bias in US presidential politics.
Harris already earned it by being elected, so it's not about letting her earn it. The choice is Biden's alone to make, and it's obvious that it would politically amplify his endorsement and significantly reduce the likelihood of further drama within the Democratic Party so close to the election. Moreover, it would likely mitigate any legal challenges related to Biden's transition to Harris.
This argument seems to be missing the point. The discussion is about what Biden should do, not about Harris's qualifications or the primary process. Stepping down would give her a significant advantage and make her presidency more likely, which is presumably what Biden wants. It's a logical step to support her candidacy.
It is surprising how the past three Presidential elections the Democratic party has had the least democratic process during the primaries.
In 2016, the Clintons ran a normal primary, but Bernie was creatively railroaded by the establishment and the superdelegates. The superdelegates went for Clinton 78% to Sanders 7%.
In 2020, COVID caused a lot of problems and Biden was basically selected without much of a real primary. Although he did secure the nomination and go on to win.
This year, due to party control they concealed the fact that Joe Biden was deteriorating. Fear of Trump was used to keep anyone from really challenging the incumbent. There was no real democratic primary here either. Due to campaign finance laws, the money donated to the Biden/Harris campaign is now locked to one of those two candidates. In effect, Kamala now is likely to be the candidate because of the lie about Joe Biden and collecting all the donations. For tons of reasons, the Democrats are now locked into a Harris campaign.
All of this is just a way to subvert a real democratic process...
Don't forget the 60+ rules they changed to keep RFK from winning the primary. Basically what they accuse Putin of doing to secure his election wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFjZZjP25jk
Better yet, this needs to be the law of the land for all parties. Once someone reaches 60-65 or so, they need to step aside and serve at most in an advisory role. Let the younger crowd take the helm of leadership.
I guess I like this at the party level, not enforced by law... but I understand I'm being pedantic and it probably means the same thing. I just don't want the law to say, "Hey 65+, we don't have to listen to anything you have to say any more!"
I like the idea of some crusty old Bernie Sanders type running for office on his own, for years on end, sniping votes and still managing to steer the candidates a bit on some of his pet issues... but I think it's irresponsible for major parties to endorse people who are so old.
Like... look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg... a beloved judge who just overstayed her time on the bench and died in office... opening the door for Trump to replace her. But... then again Mitch McConnell kept Obama from being able to replace a judge too... just a tricky spot. Democrats got outplayed, and we'll be feeling it for the next generation to come. Ugh. But I do think that if RBG had just resigned at say the start of Obama's 2nd term that we'd be in a better spot today. Can't imagine even McConnell would have been able to keep the vote from coming up for 4 years...
Given Biden's endorsement of Harris, a fellow Californian, Newsom will probably not be on the ticket, due to Constitutional limitations. That's not dispositive, but has generally been interpreted as requiring the two executive candidates to be from different states. The actual language concerns how electors must vote, in Article II, Section I, Clause III:
The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.
In strict compliance, this would require California's electors to split their votes on candidates from other states, though other states wouldn't face this limitation.
And on reflection: If California's electors couldn't vote for both Harris and Newsom (or any other CA-CA ticket's members), there's the prospect of Democrats winning the Presidential vote whilst Republicans win the VP vote. That would be ... interesting. And all but certainly a prospect that the Democrats would seek to avoid.
Two points that people are making that I feel necessary to refute because they come across as being offered from a place of bad faith or ignorance:
1) the suggestion that Biden should resign from the presidency because he is standing down from running. Biden is not saying that he is incapable of running. He and his team just understand how to read polls and don't want their party to lose the election which seemed almost certain with him at the top of the ticket.
2) the suggestion that Biden stepping down is subverting the will of the primary voters. There was no real 2024 democratic primary just like there was no republican primary in 2020. There were no serious candidates and no debates. I am sure there are Biden supporters who are disappointed and angry that he has dropped out but it was his choice to make. If he had stayed in the race, I am sure he would have secured the nomination. This wasn't taken away from him. He voluntarily stood down. A candidate should not be obliged to remain in a race just because they won a primary.
This was also a subversion of the will of primary voters. It's not a defense. A huge portion of Democratic voters wanted the candidate replaced, and there were Democratic politicians that announced their intention to be the candidate that replaced him, and others undoubtedly who would have if there hadn't been so much pressure not to, yet a serious primary wasn't run.
Democratic insiders decided that no one was going to run against Biden, Democratic insiders decided after the debate that Biden was not going to run. Democratic insiders will also be choosing who will run. The most democratic and likely option will be Harris (because that's her job) but she was also chosen by Democratic insiders in 2020, not by Democratic voters, who mostly hated her. If not Harris, then Democratic insiders will either choose an arbitrary process or simply directly choose another candidate.
> A huge portion of Democratic voters wanted the candidate replaced
Those democrats should’ve joined the party, found a good candidate and done the job of fielding them. But they didn’t, because they just like to complain not do the actual work. We had primaries. Fact is simply that none of the fantasy candidates that people like to name in wonky circles actually wanted to run.
Dean Phillips was a candidate who tried running against Biden in the primaries. I'll link to him talking about his experience in congress and how he felt that the Democratic Party retaliated against him for running: https://youtu.be/1hh8lcoJ1NA?feature=shared&t=1308
Pretty much. He ran in the primaries, they were mad at him, he lost his committee memberships and is no longer seeking re-election to congress, he speculates that this attitude from within the party is why no one else seriously ran against Biden.
I'm not alleging a grand conspiracy or anything. It just seems like internal party politics and personal incentives led to the democratic party ultimately ending up with a nominee that people aren't excited about (who I will vote for anyway).
On 2 I think the suggestion is more that this whole chain of events has resulted from persistent and willful dishonesty by Democratic leadership (including Harris) about the President’s health. So the argument is that if the public was not intentionally misled then there would have been a real primary. And now we are getting whoever those same party elites decide we should get.
On point 1 I checked the polls and they look no different than Bidens. Recent articles say the same thing. So that can't be why they chose her.
"A flurry of polls conducted in the wake of the June 27 presidential debate showed Harris performing roughly the same as Biden against Trump (who has been leading the president by a slim margin for months), and more recent polls after the attempted assassination of Trump show similar trends."
If she wins she'll be 60 years old and 3 months old the day she assumes office. That'll make her the 13th oldest president (out of a total of 47)[1].
That's "old" by any objective definition. The only thing that makes her seem young is that the two candidates who've been in the race so far are #1 and #2 on that list.
She'll certainly be a young president compared to the two oldest presidents to have ever held the office.
There is a difference between being older and being old. But even if we are comparing we are talking a 5 year difference from the median age from start of presidency and at a period where life quality and expectancy is much higher.
Sure, but even in countries where you can retire with full pension at 60, it's not _uncommon_ for people to remain in senior positions up to their late 60s.
No. Due to the game theory of the (non-parliamentary, winner-take-all) system, 2 is an equilibrium for number of parties. As in, smaller third parties are quickly “absorbed” into one of the two large parties to have any shot at winning.
As a consequence, the two parties are constantly changing, to the point that, for instance, the Republican Party of 2024 has little to do with the Republican Party of a decade ago.
The Democrats now need to emphasize that Trump, who is 78, is too old too. They can feature clips of Trump in 2020 saying that Biden at 78 was too old.
Is this the quote you're referring to (from 2019)?
> Trump added, "I would never say anyone is too old, but I know they're all making me look very young, both in terms of age and I think in terms of energy. I think you people know that better than anybody."
(I'm looking for it in old articles and having trouble finding what you're talking about.)
I also found this from an AP article in 2020:
> With Election Day less than four months away, Trump has spent more money on one television ad claiming that Biden lacks “the strength, the stamina and the mental fortitude to lead this country” than any other single ad this year.
> Agreed. But it doesn’t mean people need to have as little character as possible.
One side is a cult of personality that was bullied into thralldom by an angry old man because they lacked a spine, and the other side cloistered around and hid the decline of a frail old man because they lacked a spine.
Character is the last thing to expect from these people. The Democrats grew at least a vertebrae after George Clooney told them off. George Clooney for President.
I really dislike this idea that someone can be "too old" to be president. The issue isn't age, it's the conditions and diseases that often come with age.
The issue with Biden for me wasn't his age at all, it was that for whatever reason he was struggling to form coherent sentences. Trump on the other hand seems more or less completely fine. I'd actually argue the best thing about Biden was that he was perhaps the most qualified person to president ever given his long history and respected history in politics.
That said, I do think the older the presidential candidate is the more important it becomes to weight their VP pick when casting your vote, but still, I don't think this reason trend of discounted people solely on their age is a healthy trend. I'd even argue that the ideal age for a leader is probably quite old, maybe around 50-60.
It seems pretty clear to me that Netanyahu is trying to stir up a wider war in the Middle East. If he's successful that will be terrible for the security of all the surrounding regions, Europe included.
Disagree, I think everyone has more or less the same (accurate) view of trump it's just the things that his supporters like about him are the same things that make you hate him
The parties are not as strong as your typical European party - if you win the presidency, in a very real sense your people become the party. Biden's people picking a process that favored Biden is expected here. For better or for worse there is no smokey back room of elders with superdelegate powers driving the show, the closest is probably the donor class who aren't part of the formal party leadership but back horses in the party.
Agreed, it's been obvious for the last year to everyone in my bubble (educated liberals mostly in tech) that Biden was demented. The democratic party is now holding every non-conservative american hostage more or less (what are you gonna do? vote trump?) and I would love to see the party collapse or have a serious overhaul. Why can't they put up candidates people like? At least trump has actual fans, I don't know anyone who actually likes Biden they just prefer him to trump
You’ve got it exactly right. The DNC has been a clown show since as long as I can remember. Probably Clinton? Obama was an obvious favorite at his time, the party couldn’t even get Clinton across the line against Trump and Trump was so bad, most people voted anything but. Basically it’s all been accidental success.
The party is run by a weird mix of blue dogs who don’t really reflect progressive values, and left wing extremists who kowtow to the dogmatic sect of the party. The middle class, who they’re _supposed_ to represent are completely forgotten.
I don't personally think it's relevant... but more importantly the comments are pretty much a dumpster fire. I don't begrudge people their positive opinions of Biden (even if I do disagree), but even fairly tepid pushback on that idea is being flagged into oblivion. That's completely one sided, and not worth much as a discussion.
It's for flagged comments. If you click the timestamp link, it takes you to a view of just the comment where you can 'vouch', which is a statement you think it is unfairly or inappropriately flagged.
Stories too - all the other flagged dupes at the time showed the vouch option while this one didn't. I suspect this thread got auto-moderated as spam and therefore vouch wasn't available since it could be used to circumvent the moderation. Whereas the user-flagged stories were all vouchable.
Several factors affect it... high number of upvotes and comments in a short amount of time, users flagging it because of politics, etc. Hopefully it gets manually unflagged.
Not sure, but I think you can only vouch things that are dead, not just flagged.
With a comment, I think that if it's flagged (more than some number of times), then it's dead. (It's also dead if the user is shadowbanned, or if it's downvoted to -4.) If you think that's wrong, you can (and should!) vouch for it.
With a post, it can be flagged but not dead. Such threads can be replied to. Or a thread can be dead, in which case it cannot be replied to, but it can be vouched.
As others have pointed out, Lyndon B. Johnson declined the nomination for Democratic Presidential candidate in March of 1968, well before both most of the primary contensts and the then-open Democratic Convention in Chicago. Rather famously, that convention didn't go particularly smoothly.
(In an interesting coincidence, this year's Democratic primary is also in Chicago.)
George McGovern's 1972 vice presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, stepped down after it was revealed Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy, two weeks after the Democratic Convention. McGovern selected Sargent Shriver as the replacement candidate.
Horace Greeley, Liberal Republican Party and Democratic Party candidate in the 1872 election, running against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, died on 29 November 1872, after the general election but before the Electoral College met to count its votes. Greeley carried no states and won no Electoral College votes.
It was probably the right decision on Biden's part.
My main right now is who are they going to position in opposition to Trump? This is too little, too late. Four months until the Election... and I don't feel like the Democrat party has a strong candidacy showing at this point.
All of this discussion. Most people don't understand, were not voting for Biden, were voting against Trump. The DNC could nominate a floating turd in a bowl, and we'd still vote Democrat, because it's not a vote for Trump.
To the best interpretation of the above post, the poster seems to forget that those who take care of winning an election need to focus on the undecided voters in the middle.
More people voted in the 2020 presidential election than any before it, not because they were Biden supporters, but because they loathed Trump. The Democrats need to stop being apologetic, and keep reminding people what a horrible person Trump really is. That's how they will win the 2024 election.
I actually think this loses Democrats the election. I don't know who the nominee is going to be but if it's Kamala I think they REALLY lose the election. People may be lukewarm on Biden but they despise Kamala for her shady history as a prosecutor.
The history as a prosecutor might be a significant advantage in a general election. The anti-police senitment has waned and she can position herself right at the center w.r.t. rule of law.
Most Black folks want safety in their neighborhoods, period, and that is not possible without police and hence most support it. You don't hear "Defund the Police" anymore because we know how well it worked out.
In Seattle, many police quit or transferred on grounds that they refuse to serve a populace that sought to defund them. Net-net was that police force size and responsiveness dropped.
After this, our Black mayor ran on a campaign of funding the police and won.
We slashed police funding in Portland and decimated the force available (to the point where the 911 response time to a robbery in my building was ~6 hours, local businesses my friends work at have private security for employees to call instead of 911, I've been on hold for the non-emergency police line for over 3 hours on multiple occasions, etc).
Things are swinging back the other direction now, as seen by people like Rene Gonzalez (who ran on re-funding and utilizing police toward the local homeless problems) beating out the incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty (who refused to work with police in almost any capacity) in 2022, and a few more police re-funding votes passed since then.
As an anti-trump voter (aka a circumstantial democrat) - that’s what I’m worried about too. It feels like we’ve left it til too late without the democrats putting up anyone that people are excited about - while we know how the other side feels about trump.
My question, and I know no one knows the answer, is are we afraid of a ghost? The ghost being a person who was all in on Biden, that now goes: "fuck that, I'm not voting for Harris"
Are there large numbers of people like this? Nobody knows, but the media certainly does a good job of pushing that narrative. Informing you is not their job, getting you scared and angered is.
I'm gonna vote for the non-fascist one. I wish Biden had stepped down much sooner, but it doesn't change the reality that I am scared of the violence that might arise if the right wins. Our country is in a state of corruption, the supreme court needs to be radically reigned-in and I only see one path before November to have a chance at addressing all these issues, and it's voting Democrats as much as we can.
I would really like to see one of the pragmatic, centrist governors be nominated. Someone who can stop feeding the culture war and rebuild a centrist coalition. There are plenty of Trump voters in swing states who loathe Trump and support him only because they are voting against the far left.
The most recent poll this Saturday had Trump up 7 points in Michigan. It's basically impossible for Biden to win in that scenario.
I think they were well on their way to losing and so they hit the panic button with good reason, if anything this will now introduce some uncertainty which improves their chances.
It sure seems like there are better chances with him gone; but yeah, he might have already given Trump the presidency by waiting so long (and for running for this election in the first place)
I'm wondering if the Obamas haven't because Michelle hasn't ruled out running. She has said she wouldn't but that may have been to support Biden and now that there is an opening, she may take it.
Obama generally doesn't endorse early to avoid the optics of him putting his thumb on the scales. The DNC will likely go through the motions of a primary, so he'll wait for the right time.
She's probably the only person that would stand a better chance at winning against Trump than Kamala.
Kamala's already got it in the bag, and if the DNC pushes her aside and replace her with a man, they risk losing the women swing-state voters that they desperately need. And if they replace her with a white person, they risk frustrating the black voters in the south that they need just as much.
Name recognition matters a ton in presidential elections, and there's no time to build up a new candidate from scratch: literally the only black woman that's famous enough and politically competent enough to reasonably challenge Kamala is Michelle Obama.
(I don't think she's going to do it though, she hates politics and prefers working in the nonprofit space.)
You are probably right. I stated the why in my comment (known name, trust, experience). The requirements for VP are usually lower than for President. If the only reason to be unfit is age, Trump is just four years younger than Biden and also makes mistakes and says nonsense (Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley…)
Because Trump is an idiot but his movement of grifters is not. If Trump was smart he’d have picked a candidate of color. Instead he went with a mediocre Peter Thiel VC plant who wants to make America like the Handmaid’s tale.
I think they were banking on Biden staying in and being stubborn. Do you really think Biden would leave his son’s incarceration up to chance? That he voluntarily left the run for POTUS is huge and while they say they’re prepared I think Trumpville is scared.
If the democrats run an open primary and let the merits of the candidates win they’ll emerge with a slam dunk.
Because it’s about winning and politics is as much about appealing to the most people as it is merits. If you think it’s only merits that anyone wins on then tell me in what universe Trump wins on merits?
People can be diverse and the best for the job too ;-)
There has been a massive wave of bot and probably real human activity to supress assasination talk on line. Wouldn't be surprised its because of this. Even in these comments from these farms trying to downplay Kamala and Biden, posting obviously false information.
I think it's pretty obvious that the assassination attempt will not generate good discussion.
Most online platforms are just a collection of spicy take memes about the event.
In case of Biden stepping down, there's a lot more to discuss, ranging from his legacy as a statesman to the future of the election.
If there was a leftist bias don't you think it'd make sense to promote a story of Trump getting shot by his own base? Sounds like there's a right wing bias.
The large majority of voters wanted him to step down after the debate according to every poll. This is not a decision that goes against the spirit of democracy. To the contrary, sacrificing personal power for the good of the country and the preservation of the ideal that the institution matters rather than the figurehead. It's something we've almost forgotten is possible in the modern age of personality cults and wannabe strongmen.
The problem is that primaries are giving people the illusion of a choice. This country hasn't been a democracy or a republic for many decades yet it's constantly held up as something we are protecting. People decide who the president is as much as an employee of Google or Meta decide who their CEO is.
This is democracy in name only. There are much better alternatives in existence. Don't defend the current system, build a new one that is more resilient and fairer.
He ran virtually unopposed in those primaries and many people sat them out, so I don't think anyone takes those victories as a strong signal. It's become clear through recent polls that he lost the support of many of his party's voters.
They literally cancelled the primary in multiple states. There was not a credible, legitimate, nationwide presidential primary for the Democratic party in 2024.
Political parties aren’t democratic institutions. They are essentially private organizations who can operate however they want. It’s only been the last 50 years or so that either party has used primaries as anything more than a straw poll
One of the problems with the US being a two party state is exactly this, people conflate political parties with the institutions themselves, which is not great.
The DNC and RNC are legally bound to follow rules established both by state law and by Congress/legislation. Yes they are private institutions but they can not set arbitrary rules.
The rules set by state law and Congress for candidate selection offer a pretty wide berth in terms of methodology for selecting which candidates appear on the ballot. There's no (federal) Constitutional mandate for primaries; procedures for how a state selects its presidential electors are up to the legislators of each state.
When it comes to their primaries, the only obligation that they have to is to follow their own rules, and the only people that are allowed to hold them to that obligation are they themselves, and maybe their vendors.
They aren't even obligated to donors who donated under the assumption that there's some promise or legal requirement that their primaries be fair. That case was dismissed, and resulted in the quote from DNC lawyer Bruce Spiva:
"You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions."
Political parties should be democratic institutions. Who else should be democratic if not the parties? In many countries candidates are rejected from elections if parties cannot show that they were selected in a fair, transparent and democratic process. The USA has much to learn from the rest of the democratic world.
But, currently, Republican primaries are largely democratic and Democratic primaries are at best a marketing period in which their membership makes no binding decisions. Compromise with the tea party forced Republican primaries to democratize, which eventually ended with the party being forced to accept Trump as a candidate against every wish of party insiders. Democrats have "superdelegates," and a ton of other ways to fix the primary, and have gone to court to establish legally that they have no obligation to run it fairly or honestly.
The same sort of democratization happened to British Labour under Ed Miliband, which culminated with the election of Corbyn as leader. In order to fix the problem, they had to purge and expel anyone from party membership that had any sort of firm value system.
Democrats don't have that option in the US, because in the US, people aren't members of parties; they're people who have registered to vote in that party's primary, or people known to have supported that party in the past. US corporate parties have employees, not members. Getting a portion of the public to participate in their primary is the closest thing they have to rallying the membership, and the way that both parties have written election law makes it difficult for them to change anything, or to prevent anyone from voting in them.
Primaries are a relatively new aspect in American democracy (became the norm around 60 years ago). Before that, the parties largely decided on the candidates
> in circumventing all the Democrats' vote during primary
It wasn't really a primary, there was no actual opposition. I don't think anyone is somehow offended that they voted in a primary for a person who stepped down due to age as if their choice was taken to them.
I actually do think that whoever becomes the next president has huge implications for all tech companies in the US and even abroad. E.g. the whole issue of AI regulation, UBI in case we get to AGI / SI soon, all sorts of tax issues etc. depend on it, not to mention that the president appoints a lot of judges...
US politics is intimately connected to technology.
1. This election will play a big part in what regulation is imposed on AI. The Democrats are more in favor of ethical and privacy limits on AI. The Republicans see AI as a crucial technology for the US to maintain military superiority and want to see a pretty much anything goes approach to get there.
2. There are similar large differences in how the parties approach privacy in general.
3. One of the common areas of technology discussed on HN is EVs. One party wants to encourage adoption of EVs. The other wants to discourage that--their VP candidate says EVs are a scam wants to cancel EV tax credits and give a $7500 tax credit for purchasing ICE vehicles.
4. They are also very far apart on areas of business law that massively affect technology companies, such as antitrust.
I'm glad to have read it here, it's newsworthy to me, but I don't think the discussion would be worthy. Maybe it'd be nice to have those two be disconnected.
That's not how flagging works. If enough users flag a story, it's automatically killed, not killed by moderators. The active moderation tends to be suppressing the flagging on some amount of controversial stuff.
In the mean time, there are new posts about this same subject appearing on HN which are not flagged, linking to CNN, NYT etc.
But the very first post, linking to the primary source, was flagged. Seems unfair to me.
You've now had multiple people respond to you about your post, all trying (in vain, it seems) to help you understand where the initial confusion occurred, and you continue to either willfully misunderstand, or maybe it's some ESL thing? Or maybe you're just a bored troll? I don't know. Either way, not going to continue responding.
Are you being daft? You arrogantly told someone to “read the policy”, presuming they haven’t. And you stated that general politics are not allowed under the submissions policy. I’m pointing out that this is far from general. I think I’ve been quite clear.
>And you stated that general politics are not allowed under the submissions policy.
It's what the policy says. There's on-topic and off-topic with exceptions. Blanket statements about what "good hackers find interesting" is a partial representation of the policy.
> I’m pointing out that this is far from general.
Going back to you NOT answering my question, I'm not saying this is "general" either.
Generally discussion works best around here when each participant only has to explain their own points. If people have to explain your own points to you it makes discussion kind of hard.
And making points for someone else that they didn't make is also not productive for "discussion work[ing] best."
Explaining that the HN Guidelines has off-topic railings (with exceptions) too isn't saying that a tweet about POTUS resigning isn't a valid exception.
I guess people are on tilt because of the announcement.
This will be a much more relevant story on HN if it turns out that Elon Musk sent this rather than Biden.
(At the time that I write this, the only place this news is sourced from is Twitter. Every news org is quoting Twitter and then adding their own gloss.)
TBH a great many high comment high interest threads get [flagged] on HN thanks to fat fingers on little screens so it's hard to judge from that alone.
Watching it on the day they were mostly not flagged for much of the time .. dang (moderator) wasn't even "here" until hours later - he took an internet free holiday fishing somewhere or something.
does anyone know the psychology of sharing photos with Harris and Biden tilted like pi/8 radians counterclockwise?
I see it repeatedly since this story broke, but not earlier.
It likely relates to how outlets looking to promote a person (athlete, candidate, whatever) tend to show them from below, as if they're larger than normal, but that's just a guess.
As an outsider who lived in different countries and different regimes — i am very surprised substantial amount of people are still blind to the disaster which Biden’s administration are currently moving country to.
Hey I saw your old comment [0] but couldn’t reply there so was wondering if you worked on this medical system thing you talked about. I was impressed you knew so much about the private equity clinics and am interested in whatever you make.
Here's what @dang posted on the giant thread of Biden winning presidency (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967). I suspect this thread has been auto-killed by some spam algo and there's a good chance dang will resurrect it at some point.
"As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)"
The assassination attempt was suppressed until people had discussed it from all angles thoroughly elsewhere and gave up trying to discuss here. Definitely not allowed in the normal sense. But here it's nothing but an instant popup blue rally, for something was totally expected.
As a registered Republican who voted IND in 2016 and then for Trump in 2020 (which probably puts me in about a 0.1% minority on a site like this), I feel upset that the democratic process for choosing a nominee for the Democratic Party is about to just get bypassed. Are other folks feeling this? I’d be even more riled up if this were my party telling me, “Oh, that guy you voted for in the primaries? We thought he couldn’t win so we will harass him until he quits, then we are going to replace him with someone better (since we know better than the voters).”
Voting for the candidate at the convention actually is the process. It always has been. It’s just been a while since the outcome of the vote was unknown until we got to the convention itself.
Make up your mind, are you mad they pressured him to withdraw or mad they tried to keep him in the race?
Given your voting record and the fact that you’ve just criticized the democrats for two opposite courses of action in back to back posts (and I see your now several other posts hoping to find democrats mad at the DNC), I think you’re a plain ol’ conservative who’s inclined to find fault with the Democratic Party regardless of what specifically they do.
I mean whats the point of a having a primary system if you're going to just have the guy that won it back down and appoint a successor?
Sure, the convention is the votes that actually matter just like the electoral college but every time the popular vote gets upset by the electoral vote people are mad.
The primary and convention system have always existed in parallel. In fact, the USA doesn’t really have a primary system for presidents, just rules each state establishes on delegates should vote given the outcome of whatever happened in their state (and not all states have primaries of course, there are still caucus only state I think?). Even under a strict interpretation of the current system, the VP would take over the ticket if something happened to the president, so we aren’t even far off from that.
Conservatives are just going to have to deal with there already being a mechanism in here for nominating a candidate in a convention.
That isn’t the point. The point is that primaries were held (or in some cases, not held) based on a belief that the man would be fit for office, and the fact that he isn’t was being hidden from the voters participating in those primaries. I’m far beyond hoping for honesty from our politicians on either side, but I would classify this as fraud, albeit difficult to prove.
I think too many people on both sides consider it “legal if you don’t get caught” to do basically anything they please. And I think the fact that each side acts a lot further apart on issues than we actually are is just as sad. There’s no middle voice anymore. Either you consume left-wing media and hear their reactions to the 5% radical right or vice versa. All it means is that most Americans agree that 10% of us are batshit crazy.
You aren’t upset that an entire party conspired to keep Biden on the ticket until he bombed a debate? What if he hadn’t bombed it but instead done “barely enough”? Isn’t this basically what Trump was just convicted of some felonies for recently?
No, I am not upset about anything the DNC has done. Trump has more and nastier court cases (including a pedophilia case) than the convicted felony. The RNC is abhorrent and the two cannot be compared.
It's difficult to take this in good faith since the amount of effort to understand why this opinion is misguided is so minimal:
People voted for him in the primary based on the belief that he was and would stay in good health. The debate revealed that belief to be false. Post-debate, Democratic voters were massively (70+%) in favor of him resigning his candidacy. NOT stepping down would have been the UNdemocratic thing to do.
No, I am angry at Biden, he shouldn’t have run again. He is the one that created this situation by not accepting his obviously growing limitations. While the lack of real primary competition will further reinforce the elitist “kingmaker” perception of the Democratic Party, I also can’t really blame them for working within the system and the one we have doesn’t encourage hard primaries against your own incumbent President.
For reference, in February 2019, the RNC voted to provide undivided support to Trump. A few states outright cancelled their primaries.
All things considered, I’ll take an elitist party with a whiny progressive arm over a President and party that tried to stop the peaceful transition of power.
So as a Republican, what do you think about the certainty that your party will suddenly find themselves no longer concerned about the age of presidential nominees?
It wasn’t ever really about age IMO. It is hard to have a serious conversation about this because of personal lines and dislikes, so I’ll leave it at that.
I don't think most democrats actually care who the president is as long as it isn't Trump. That's why they voted for Biden in the first place. It is kind of ironic though that the party of "saving democracy" will not put the winner of the primaries as their candidate but I think practically speaking there is already somewhat of a consensus among the party for doing this. Also see polling that shows Harris with equal or better numbers than Biden.
Part of it is that there really wasn't a primary in the first place. Democratic voters gave their consent to Biden on the understanding that he was capable of beating Trump again. As it became more clear that that wasn't the case, it became less reasonable to rely on that consent. Polls have all along shown voters preferring someone else by a substantial margin, although I don't know that they ever agreed on the someone.
There is a degree to which this move is "less democratic", but we have to be careful. It is less democratic in the governance of the Democratic Party, but it's worth noting that the Democratic Party is not a polity. Running someone who can win instead of who the party chose might be a more democratic outcome with respect to the organization that matters more.
There's absolutely room for this to be taken too far. With mostly just the two parties, elites could (and arguably did, pre-'68) use these kinds of concerns as cover for excluding certain perspectives from power. That's something to watch for, but given the context it is obviously not what is happening here when the person being excluded is the current President, with the support of the party elites up to this point.
Not even a little bit. The Democratic Party has clearly stated policies and goals, the vast majority of which I agree with (possibly besides some of the trans policies). Who the final candidate is this time matters very little compared to making sure Trump doesn’t win and destroy American hegemony.
I tend to agree that for a party that spends a lot of time talking about the importance of democracy, we’re in fairly undemocratic territory here. However, you could make the argument that voters did kind of vote for Harris when they voted for Biden.
> I’d be even more riled up if this were my party telling me, “Oh, that guy you voted for in the primaries? We thought he couldn’t win so we will harass him until he quits
...What do you think your party has been doing to Trump challengers?
US Politics are the "keeping up with the Kardashians" of all political drama around the world.
It was clear they should not have let Biden try for a second term. How many hundreds of millions of people live in the US, and this is the best we can present as candidate in a two-party system? Instead of arguing why he's "actually not THAT old, he has good days too!" like an alcoholic defending himself by saying he only had light beers yesterday - it's ridiculous. completely missing the forest for the trees. Or the other way around.
Waiting from the debate until now (that the Republican convention is over) to announce Biden's retreat was just a waste of time. Especially without a clear and backed replacement. As a party they should have pulled him out and said, we as a party have a better representative of our ideas and values, here's Johnny! but they didn't because of losing face. To who? To the republicans. They were not voting for your team either way, you dummies!
You are red or blue in 2024. Any voter that can truly be convinced at this stage to change their color and vote, well, how can I put this without being rude. Let's say I would value my toddlers' navigational instructions more than your opinion and vote. You think any 'undecided' voter that might have gone with Biden, will now switch team because they don't like the new candidate, and then go 180 and vote Trump?
It's painful to even think of this hideous game of charades. Money wins in the end anyway. Apologies, this was perhaps more of a rant than a usefull comment adding to the discussion.
"Donald Trump is going to win. And I'm OK with that." - Jared Golden, Democratic House Representative of Maine
I really hoped it wouldn't be so, but anyone that's ever seen Kamala speak will find she is about as compelling as Joe Biden on a bad day. I believe this means China and Russia can prevail in the short term, unless he actually boosts Taiwan's defence meaningfully, which I doubt he will after the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid holdup fiasco.
It is what it is. I wish the nominee was Gretchen Whitmer with anyone but Kamala. I wish Biden had not run for reelection. I wish he hadn't endorsed Kamala. I wish the Democrats and Obama had backed Sanders or Biden in 2016 when they were fit to serve. I wish Trump moderated himself after the attempt on his life instead of business as usual a week later.
I hope I'm wrong about everything observably bad about Trump's first term and his decline since, because with another trifecta of loyalists, he's probably getting much more done this time.
At what point is it no longer my fault for not voting democrat? Is the democratic party responsible at all for putting up an appealing candidate? How many times can they bully us with fearmongering into voting for someone we dislike? What's the end game here? we just keep voting blue no matter who as things get worse and worse forever?
If you are a real human and not paid by Russia, I really shouldn't have to explain this.
You are not voting just for the president. You are voting for things like Supreme Court, that party legislation not being vetoed, as well as people who staff agencies.
At this point and time, the critical issue is the Supreme Court ruling of making a president a dictator. You have 2 parties - one party orchestrated this ruling through staffing cronies into the Supreme Court, with candidate representing extremist right wing views by Project 2025, which wants to use violence to subjugate people without giving a fuck about Constitution. The other party knows that it cannot use unlimited power to not lose trust of the people, and is actively working to negate that ruling.
Without even touching policies (where again, Republicans lose out massively in both effectiveness and results), your vote is not for a person, your vote is for sanity vs insanity.
None of this is up for debate. Everyone who doesn't vote or votes Republican in this election is supporting having US ran by a dictator.
After this election, if we have actual sanity in place with due legal process that both sides respect, then we can talk about who to vote for.
Come on man stop with the russia bot stuff, i'm just a normal guy who votes democrat. I'm sure we vote for the same people, I'm just really frustrated with the democratic party's lack of appeal. I'm really feeling "bullied" for lack of a better term. I'm being told anything I think would be a good policy or person to support isn't relevant or worth talking about because of Trump. Do you really not see any validity to this position? Can you really not imagine I'm just a normal american person?
What? Presidents from now until forever have that near unlimited legal immunity, regardless of party. That's what the Supreme Court ruled. That question doesn't even make sense to a Democrat supporter, it's not that simple, because that's the same no matter who wins. And I want the non-Trump candidate to win, but the party has sabotaged their chances in a manner as to appear deliberate.
Democrats have shown plenty of steps to rectify the supreme court ruling. If he have both executive and both houses control under Democratic rule, its very likely that they can clean out the Trump cronies from the Supreme Court.
Just looking at the top 1k comments to that joe biden's tweet, it looks like they are all written by one man. At least written by from one side i.e. hate and insults and pro republican side!
I wonder if we can give the voters an option of no president. I would choose it, barring some insane calamity (like country X deciding to invade USA) I think everything will run fine without a presidency.
Why are posting on HN? You should be escaping the feds. They’re after you! Hurry and wrap your head in foil so they don’t read your thoughts. And destroy the computer you’re posting from so they don’t trace your IP. You’re welcome.
Still sick with Covid. I expect him to address the nation early next week, like he promised in his letter.
It is unfortunate that this is on social media, mostly twitter though. I understand this is probably too close to campaigning for Biden to feel comfortable with posting it on whitehouse.gov, but I feel like the president should have a pulpit where someone contributing millions to the opposing party can't plaster their view right underneath it. Another problem with the centralized web - reading the president's letter with the promoted posts and ads on x right under feels tacky as hell here.
The party of let's save democracy, just had a successful soft coup against their popularly elected primary candidate. Now the party elite will choose your candidate for you.
I think it’s incredibly significant that the announcement came on twitter a network run by a prominent trump supporter. You have to wonder how that all went down for the administration to have to resort to that opinion.
For many hours it seemed like the announcement might have actually been a hoax because of how unofficial seeming the announcement was. I really want to read on how this all went down.
It sounds you actively want to read too much into it and find some conspiracy.
Announcing a scheduled time would be as silly as your question. As soon as they scheduled it, it would leak and they would lose control of the narrative.
I don’t know if you noticed this, but the internet is kind of a big deal and politicians have been using social media as part of their campaign and communications for a while.
This feels like evidence of interesting new phenomenon, I get why 99% of politics topics should be removed, but if we post one when presidents get elected, it seems like something as impactful as president dropping out should count too.
Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
E.g., you must be younger than the average life expectancy (currently men: 73yo / female: 79) - while in office.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html