rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

Biden would announce his retirement, the Republicans would block anything and everything he tried to do for the next two years while the media portrayed him as even more feeble and worthless than they currently do, and whatever Democrat tried to run to succeed him would get steamrollered by Donald Trump and yay! Fascism ascendant!

Republicans are blocking everything anyway and the media is portraying Biden as feeble and worthless anyway. You're not reading the polls about how many people wish there was anybody else at all than these two creaky fuckers. People are broadly sick of it. They're sick of Trump too, but they were already sick of him after 2020. Now they're sick of Biden. Not all for fair reasons, but that's how it goes.

Massively unpopular oldest-president-ever seeks reelection is a bad idea, period, under any circumstances. If he manages to win it will be because of the massively unpopular second-oldest-president ever in the other lane.

It's all a mental exercise because he didn't choose to retire and he's not dropping out but waving away a major concern of a supermajority of the electorate is some serious MSNBC brain.

assuming the incumbent advantage holds true when 70% of the population has concerns about the incumbent's age and mental acuity is... bold.

I've no idea whether the incumbency advantage is still present, or to what degree it is if so. Its more that historically this has never been the case, and Democratic voters in particular have always traditionally been reluctant to run someone other than the sitting president.

Now, obviously Democratic voters didn't have these concerns in 2020 - although its also possible they did the same concerns in 2020 but factored them in accordingly and thought it a risk worth taking. The question is whether this has changed over time, and at what point. I'm not sure there's really been enough momentum behind the idea to go much beyond concerns.

There's also the question not so much of incumbent advantage, but perception of incumbent advantage - though its arguable they're the same thing. Which may be similar to Biden's win in the first place, people didn't necessarily think he was electable, but they thought other people thought he was electable, in a weird type of monkey ladder scenario

Newsom vs. Haley, assuming the two guys don't make it through summer, would be an interesting matchup.

Democratic voters absolutely had these concerns in 2020, which is why at the front end of the campaign his campaign was leaking stuff like this:

“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129

Also he was somewhat protected from age being an issue in 2020 by having his biggest challenge in the primary coming from a guy who was even older.

Right, so the concerns were there last time around too, but not strong enough to go with someone else. So the question then becomes, have those concerns become more of a factor this time around and to what degree

As to Bernie being older, chronologically yes, but Biden comes across significantly older than either Trump or Bernie, both then and now - which counts for more than actual age I think?

tipsy otm


so what other option do you propose?

why are you discounting his already-proposed “holding primaries” option

I'm less worried than in 2020, I think Biden is going to win this election and serve out 4 more years, and that will be that

is “that” the end of US democracy, or of life on earth, or

Um, primaries are being held. Indeed, there have been several already. There just isn't a serious competitor in them. Rfkjr and Dean Phillips are not viable candidates. Whitmer, Newsom, etc. would have announced long before now if they were going to run.

One can certainly wish Biden had retired graciously. One can certainly wish there had been a plausible challenger. But neither thing has happened, nor will it. It's mildly interesting to think about alternate universes, but we live in this one.

We can do wishcasting, or we can drag sleepy ol' Joe across the finish line one more time.

Newsom is perfect for the Democratic establishment. Like Warren, he is a pseudo-progressive who fundamentally believes in nothing and flip-flops whenever he needs to, and Republicans have been conditioned to hate him for years

Personal attacks are always classy.

Newsom campaigned on a single-payer system for Californians and has spent years trying to backpedal. He’s a joke

Also, Warren is a hawk paid for by AIPAC, but she was a registered Republican for decades, so no one with more than one brain cell should believe a fucking word that comes out of her mouth

Good morning, table! You might as well call me by name if you're as usual going to be cranky in the morning.

I'm not going to re-examine Warren's career, but the person who wrote two books on in part how bankruptcy adversely affects the poor and POC and later raked the Bush and Obama administrations for not splitting up the big banks is not a person whom I'd consider a conservative regardless of party affiliation. Her foreign policy positions as I remember in 2019-2020 struck me at best as unformed and at worse gross.

I officially apologize, beamish.

I just think you apologize too much for these ghouls, Alfred. Whethet Warren has changed or not is immaterial— she can say all she wants and write many more books about breaking up the big banks, but by hoarding wealth (she’s worth a surprising amount!) she is simply talking out of one side of her mouth. The appearance of virtue and principle is not borne out in any sort of reality, the most notable being that she hasn’t achieved many of her goals of breaking up the big banks. Poor people don’t need some rich white wonk in Cambridge to do bad advocacy for them!! AIPAC- funded politicians can go to hell!!

that said, sorry for being cranky. But Warren is not it.

We can do wishcasting, or we can drag sleepy ol' Joe across the finish line one more time.

Think people can very easily do both?

We will drag him as we drag him.

It’s only February and we’re already snarling at each other. 2024, baby!

(Then again, if posters weren’t snarling at each other, it would feel weird, wouldn’t it)

Bernie owns two houses wotta hypocrite

There were differences in her tax plan vs Bernie’s plan— under the latter, she would have been taxed at a rate close to 50%. Under her plan, nope.

She’s a prime example of someone who has totally forgotten where she came from while exploiting those origins to dupe liberals into thinking she’s someone worth voting for.

And don’t get me started on the Indigenous ancestry stuff, which should be enough to disqualify her in any reasonable person’s mind.

Pocahontas amirite?

But tell us how you really feel

I don't know if you and I have the same definition of "reasonable."

Love how ILX is ever-ready to call people out on racist bullshit unless that person is a politician they happen to like.

Pretending to be Indigenous for more than two decades is egregious and totally offensive, and the only reason it didn’t ruin her career is because popular wisdom doesn’t consider Indigenous people as still-existing, and thus Indigenous concerns can be completely disregarded. If she had been pretending to be Jewish for all those years, many on ILX would be up in arms, and rightly so.

But she wasn't "pretending"; she believed she did have Indigenous heritage because that's what her family had told her. (And her DNA test revealed that the family story wasn't entirely baseless.) We can argue about how she chose to wield this claim during her career, but it's disingenuous to suggest that it was outright fraud.

(argh I can't believe we are having this conversation in 2024, I regret taking the bait)

feel like my eyes just rolled into the back of my head

feel like my eyes just rolled into the back of my head

You're not the only one.

i cannot think of anybody who is IT, but as a former warren canvasser, i feel fine saying she is NOT going to be the candidate. that's even more than ok. i wish someone besides biden were, and as importantly, that he or his team had any idea or inclination to have made that done. here we are.

now keep warren's name off of your FILTHY FUCKING TABLE. that's joeks more about me, not you tabes, sorry, and i appreciate your sincerity and clarity.

even after the in joke apology that feels wrong table. i am never funny.

all good Hunt3r.

From a pure electability POV, I used to think Warren would have done better leaning into a "sensible conservative" image, but now I think she should have gone more "macho man randy savage."

well pretty much every candidate would see points go up if they cut things like a wrestling promo.

Biden could bill himself as The Flying Corpse

His social media team did score a lot of points co-opting Dark Brandon which is a wrestling moniker if there ever was one

That is true— his social media team is doing okay

and his own comment about "memory is bad enough to call on you" was pretty live tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHrOo59LCas

Re: Warren, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - regardless of what you think of it - was something she created, worked hard on, ran, and believed in. So saying she believed in nothing isn't fair.

The indigenous ancestry thing seems like a simple mistake, based on family lore. Not evidence of malice, but a sin of omission (i.e., not looking further into how actual native folks view and conceive of their ancestry.

Despite her flaws she might have been okay if given a chance. As it happens, almost no one did. So it goes.

xp: oh man, the only thing I remember from that era is Obama struggling to straight-face "do you smell what Ba-Rack is cooking?"

re: warren, and also hillary -- they both struck me as essentially small-c conservative in temperament and background so I always thought they should have more crossover appeal with (R) voters, but that never panned out.

Oof Hillary has the same dead-eyed "I've buried my soul in a volcano pit to do this horseshit" look Bob Saget had every week on America's Funniest Home Videos.

xp i was a bernie supporter but warren would have been an excellent president.

i don't think she was knowingly lying about being indigenous. i used to think i was part norwegian and it later turned out i wasn't.

there is no way to replace biden at this point with a candidate that seems legitimate to the voters. it's too late for a primary contest. this is a big problem because biden is definitely senile.

I supported Sanders in 2016, Warren in 2020, then realized her white-lady appeal wasn't going anywhere.

she was right about a lot of things. she has insight into the deep problems in our economy and our political system. it's absurd that someone like that ran, and we ended up with biden as president. he seems like a nice man, but my god this recent press conference.

people who are saying it wasn't that bad are in denial. biden seems like a nice guy but he sounds way older than 81.

the notion that one of these guys is functionally younger than the other one is so fucking delusional. literally any 16 year old person on the planet with two functional arms could beat either of these guys to death. neither of them could run four city blocks without dying. both of them are old, old men, and that's fine, I hope to be one too one day, and you know what I won't be asking you to do when I get there? take me seriously as a person who ought to have a lot of power. we're not the first country to be incredibly ridiculous about this, but with this discussion we are making our bid for being the most ridiculous. it's one thing to install guys ten years past retirement age as premier because you have a weird ass meritocracy. it's another to split hairs about which old ass man is marginally less out-of-it. and yet all my commie buds are carrying water for the trump campaign, senile old biden, yessir he's practically a vegetable, blah fucking blah.

they are old ass men who should sit down, both of them.

biden seems like a nice guy but he sounds way older than 81.

love this btw. can you tell me what an 81 year old sounds like and how this is different from how a 76 year old sounds, or an 84 year old

where did i say that trump sounded better? i have higher expectations for democrats

I'm only 81
But my mind is older

love this btw. can you tell me what an 81 year old sounds like and how this is different from how a 76 year old sounds, or an 84 year old

people of an extremely advanced age tend to move differently and speak differently than people who are just senior citizens. not always. some people have early onset dementia, and we have all known, like, extremely spry octogenarians. biden isn't one of them.