From the Article:
For weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, his campaign publicly maintained the illusion that he was still well-positioned to defeat Donald Trump. Privately, they knew otherwise. As Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau revealed days after the election:
After the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine, and Biden was still the strongest candidate. They were privately telling reporters, at the time, that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. […] Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.
The implications of this are staggering, and it should be treated as a massive scandal.
I honestly have a hard time believing it was ideology and not the good, old fashioned inability of boomers to let go of power.
Edit: Not talking about the Democratic establishment. Speaking specifically about Biden refusing to step down until it was too late.
Biden is silent gen, the generation before boomers.
But yeah all the old politicians clinging to the levers of power because they’re selfish is a part of what has led us to this point.
It’s hard to truly know what went on behind the scenes, but there was a large amount of common disdain for Biden staying in the race after “we beat Medicare” - anyone who hadn’t already been clued into his cognitive decline was suddenly confronted with that reality, and people knew he was a clear loser at that point.
For Biden the floor only fell out beneath him after Nancy Pelosi and the donor class publicly announced they wanted Joe out NOW that the DNC/Biden camp realized the gig was up.
anyone who hadn’t already been clued into his cognitive decline was suddenly confronted with that reality
I remember when I said Biden was making more speeches like Trump, I was downvoted on Reddit for wanting someone younger than retirement age for president, even if I was going to vote for Biden.
Yeah. I understood the (good faith) arguments that the presidency is a high tempo, stressful, 24/7 job and that Biden was wiped out in interviews or public appearances - but that’s an excuse not an exoneration.
If he couldn’t make it through the work each day without being cooked, every single day, then he should have stood aside for someone younger/sharper who could. I voted for Jimmy Carter 2.0 in 2020, not for Biden - the downslope was apparent even before then if you cared to look beyond the news headlines. He never should have ran again in 2024.
You’d have a hard time believing a lot then, because that’s what actual voters were saying. If Harris had been more left-leaning in appearance, they wouldn’t have even captured the shift they did grab.
Clearly she didn’t support genocide hard enough or get the endorsement of enough Cheneys.
For your liking.
To anyone reading Ensign’s comment and downvoting, their claim is essentially an already established fact. Rolling Stone put out an article after the election saying that the Harris campaigned intentionally ignored Democratic party insiders and their advice and polling data against bringing the Cheneys on board.
A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020.
“We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.
