I try to keep an open mind to any legitimate point of view. But one of the main problems I have with the "Team Panic" people advocating for Biden to resign is that their arguments are so often divorced from actual fact. Here's just one example among so many possibilities from this article:
"And, in contrast to Biden, they had it in them to simply outwork Trump—to appear constantly on television, constantly on the campaign trail, and, by contrast, to make Trump appear meandering and reactive."
So I ask you, in what world is Biden failing to "outwork" Trump? First of all, Biden is very busy doing the job of President of the United States while Trump goes to court and plays golf. But then there's this (from the AP):
"As President Joe Biden visited five cities in a multiday trip last week, former President Donald Trump was hardly seen in public, spending most of his time in South Florida.
Trump has held just a single public campaign event since he locked up the Republican presidential nomination on March 12: a rally in Ohio funded not by his campaign but by backers of a Senate candidate whom he had endorsed. The events page on his campaign website has had nothing listed.
Biden, meanwhile, has been barnstorming the country. After a trip to North Carolina on Tuesday, the Democratic president will have touched down in all of the 2024 swing states in the less than three weeks since his State of the Union address."
These "Team Panic" people expecting Biden to withdraw often just come across as lazy and therefore unconvincing. It's as if they're not even trying to craft a convincing or persuasive argument based on reality. They just make stuff up.
But in the actual reality that the rest of us live in, Biden is an incumbent President who negotiated and then signed several transformative laws that have helped usher in a booming economy. He presides over a mostly peaceful and hugely prosperous era in a country mercifully free from any major or long term disruption or protest that could be tied back to him. And modern history tells us that incumbent Presidents in these or relatively similar circumstances go on to win re-election (see Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama).
But you know what else modern history tells us? A party risks losing the White House if their incumbent President bows to pressure and resigns rather than seeking re-election (see Johnson).
So I just don't know what exactly explains these zombie columns promoting Biden's resignation. They just keep shambling on even when facts, historical precedent, and yes, recent polling all increasingly point towards a Biden victory. Biden is by most measures a strong candidate while Trump is on one of the most historic losing streaks in the history of our national politics (Trump and/or his party lost the national vote in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022).
Oh, but Biden's old. And that pretty much seems to be all "Team Panic" has got. Sorry, but that's not convincing. Nor is it really a good look for the zombies still making these increasingly stillborn assertions that Biden should step aside.
The fact that it's so close should disturb you. There is a reason it's so close, and that reason isn't that half the country are idiots. It's that a large chunk of people in this country can only see what is convenient to their beliefs.
Roaring economy...where everything costs 20% more on average and inflation is STILL higher than 2020 (though thankfully considerably reduced from its 2022 heights). You can blame the inflation on Trump, but that's a hard sell when Biden has been talking about giving money away this whole time, and some of the spending increased spending bills didn't happen solely because they were defeated, and not because Biden wisely decided to fight inflation. His own Inflation Reduction Act has surprisingly little provision to fight inflation. CHIPS act bogged down in tons of red tape that's horribly slowing it, ensuring that it mostly fails at what it was set to achieve.
Then let's add to that his not-so-moderate statements and actions regarding things like DEI or gender affirming care for minors, where it looks pretty clearly like he's been coopted by more radical members of his party. Or forgiving college debt, which is a plum to college-educated younger voters, who least need the help. Want to forgive those who have loans who had to drop out of college? I'm sympathetic.
That's the NICE version of what your typical Republican sees. I'm not arguing in favor of Trump; I'll vote for Biden over Trump. But it's not crazy to look at Biden and see someone who used to be a moderate, but now looks like he's incapable of leading his party...or even his own administration. I hear people claim he's so sharp in meetings...why the FUCK is that not on display in public, where it actually matters? I'll tell you: those people are lying. They are lying, and I don't know which is worse: that they think anyone is stupid enough to believe them, or that they think they have to toe the party line and repeat the lie (or else).
I have not been a Biden fan since he took office. I backed him in 2020 because he was a moderate and, I thought, an adult who saw the value in not responding crazily to Trump. He's been dragged towards the radical side of things.
You want to argue that we're stuck with the choice we have now? Okay. That's an argument, and I don't know that it's wrong, however much I dislike it. But please don't tell me everything is good and Biden SHOULD be the nominee. He should have announced two years ago that he would be stepping down.
Thank you for the reply, but I feel your response is based more on feeling than on sound analysis. In that sense, it’s similar to the article that we’re commenting on, and thus it suffers from similar faults.
For one thing, I’m relatively certain that all of my statements in my initial response are facts. We are, objectively speaking, in a booming economy. Inflation is much lower now than it was when Reagan won reelection in 1984 with the theme that it was a new morning in America. And it’s also a historical fact that incumbent presidents with booming economies typically win reelection. Hence, it’s a fairly objective conclusion to assert that the Dems are wise to stick with Biden and foolish to dump him.
I am not arguing that anyone needs to be happy about having Biden or Trump as the nominees. Rather, I’m pointing out that the arguments I’ve heard for dumping Biden are typically shallow and unconvincing. And this article is a prime example.
I will also point out that I find this aspect of your response to be especially misguided:
“He should have announced two years ago that he would be stepping down.”
Two years ago, in 2022, we had the midterm campaigns and election. Dems had full control of the federal government and the inflation rate was, I believe, more than twice as high as it is now. The Dems should have been trounced. Instead, they arguably won. They expanded their majority in the Senate. Stunning. And they kept the Republican wins in the House so low that the ensuing Republican majority there has remained largely reliant on Dem votes to get anything done.
I personally suspect that if the Dems had been badly defeated in those 2022 midterms, Biden would have indeed retired at that time (early enough to allow other Dem candidates time to start their campaigns). But Biden and the Dems won those midterms. And an incumbent president who wins his first midterm is EXACTLY the kind of candidate a party wants running for reelection.
In fact, I genuinely believe that it is entirely fair on my part to assert that your statement declaring that Biden should have retired two years ago makes precisely zero sense. That’s the kind of statement I critique above when I assert that the “Team Panic” people demanding Biden’s retirement often seem to be making stuff up.
Not to go on too long, but I’ll add that I agree with a few of your points. Some of Biden’s statements on DEI are indeed unnecessarily divisive. I disagree, however, that such positions are in any way a reversal on his part. He’s been saying since at least the 2020 campaign that he’d pick black women for VP and Supreme Court seats. That was an obvious promotion of identity politics since before he was even elected president.
So, sorry, it’s not that Biden is above critique, it’s just that your critique isn’t very good. It’s not that he’s perfect, it’s just that he almost certainly remains the best candidate for the Dems to run against Trump.
"For one thing, I’m relatively certain that all of my statements in my initial response are facts. We are, objectively speaking, in a booming economy. Inflation is much lower now than it was when Reagan won reelection in 1984 with the theme that it was a new morning in America. And it’s also a historical fact that incumbent presidents with booming economies typically win reelection. Hence, it’s a fairly objective conclusion to assert that the Dems are wise to stick with Biden and foolish to dump him."
Reagan's 4% inflation looked pretty good stacked up against the 11% inflation in 1979, the 13% in 1980, and the 10% in 1981. It was lower than 4% in 1984, but not by much, so 4% was basically better than most of the immediate decade prior. Very poor choice of comparison. Still, yes, solid economies tend to result in re-election. One wonders why Al Gore lost...the economy was pretty strong at 4.5% in that election year. Close election, though, and lots of factors play into that. In any case, roaring economy doesn't guarantee anything. Bear in mind, though, that Trump's economy in 2020 was total shit, and Biden barely beat him. I'm not sure how much that means given that Trump did a lot of things after the election that a lot of people really didn't like, so perhaps this isn't going to matter, but I dislike finding out this way.
"Two years ago, in 2022, we had the midterm campaigns and election. Dems had full control of the federal government and the inflation rate was, I believe, more than twice as high as it is now. The Dems should have been trounced. Instead, they arguably won."
This is true, especially since everyone expected a bloodbath. So the incumbent Dems won even through their shitty economy; 1.9% GDP and 8% inflation. So it looks like the actual facts don't really support either of us...or support both of us, depending on which ones you choose.
I think it's fair to say that no one would expect Biden to voluntarily step down after the midterms. I don't think Biden was a major deciding factor in Democrat performance in 2022, but I understand it makes him look like a strong leader. Given that, there's really no way Democrats were going to demand he step down. And the confounding thing for me is that there's no obvious great candidate waiting in the wings. Perhaps we'd have developed one, if he announced he wouldn't seek re-election early, but it's probably even more likely that we'd just be stuck with, say, Kamala Harris, who does not appear to be a very strong candidate (though IMO an upgrade from a man who appears to have lost his edge). It's not like the mid aughts after the 2004 DNC where people were looking at Obama and saying "man, that guy will make a great candidate when he runs."
"One wonders why Al Gore lost" Well, that's a whole different controversy. Sure, Gore conceded the election, but did he actually lose?
"So the incumbent Dems won even through their shitty economy; 1.9% GDP and 8% inflation. So it looks like the actual facts don't really support either of us" I wouldn't go quite that far. Certainly, fundamentals matter. And that's what I've been getting at. But an election theory based on fundamentals usually incorporates certain assumptions: both parties will at least try to nominate good candidates, those candidates will try to appeal to enough voters to win, and most if not all of the various campaigns will be at least somewhat professional. But, in 2022, the Republican party violated most if not all of these strategies (its main achievement - abolishing national abortion rights - was not particularly popular).
I brought up 2022 only to say that the electoral events of that year (a surprisingly good result for Dems @ the midterms) almost certainly helped convince Biden to run for reelection. I did not mean to downplay the importance of fundamentals (the economy, major legislative achievements with a measurable impact, domestic safety and security, etc). Those fundamentals are indeed important for 2024. But campaigns still need to be run competently on winning issues. And so far Biden seems to be doing a better job of that than Trump (although that point is admittedly subjective). And, in that case, that simply gives Biden yet another advantage on top of the fundamentals already described in detail.
"And the confounding thing for me is that there's no obvious great candidate waiting in the wings. Perhaps we'd have developed one, if he announced he wouldn't seek re-election early, but it's probably even more likely that we'd just be stuck with, say, Kamala Harris, who does not appear to be a very strong candidate" My understanding is that other potential Dem candidates like Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris poll worse against Trump than Biden does. This is an important point. I think that articles like the one we're commenting on take it largely as an assumption that just about anyone stepping in to replace Biden would immediately poll better against Trump, but I'm unaware of any actual data supporting that idea.
And FWIW: Whereas I currently believe that Biden will win in 2024, I also believe that Kamala Harris would lose in an epic landslide. I think a lot of us have forgotten how Obama became the first black President. He was (usually) quite vocal in distancing himself from the potentially divisive elements of the angry and extreme Far Left. He publicly broke with his ("God Damn America") pastor Jeremiah Wright. It was of course unavoidable that he would be recognized as the first Black President, but he publicly urged Black people not to think of themselves as separate or as victims.
Kamala Harris, as best as I am aware, has adopted the opposite approach. She is incredibly vocal in her embrace of the Far Left "anti-racism" that explicitly promotes racial discrimination (to favor Blacks) and has repeatedly promoted the Leftist concept of "equity" or equal outcomes. I don't personally fathom why on Earth she is sabotaging any future career in national politics in that way, but she will never win the Presidency. She has already made herself unelectable in a national election. She only gets in as VP because Biden wins, not her. And, in my own estimation of an otherwise good presidency (so far), the selection of Harris as his running mate strikes me as perhaps the worst decision of Biden's presidential career.
"Polling suggests Donald Trump will win the presidential election"
It says nothing of the kind.
What model are you running to reach this conclusion?
You surely don't think that you can just look at the top-line numbers, which represent a less-than-1% sub-sample of all the people asked, and draw any conclusions from it. That would be, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic. No one so innumerate as to look at top-line numbers and think they represent the electorate should be allowed near a prognosticator's podium.
Even a relatively simple model--which are often the best kind, as they are robust against a diversity of assumptions--based on recent electoral and primary outcomes, and accounting for top-line polling results-- shows Biden with a five-to-seven point advantage over trump. And that's today, before his first criminal conviction and before his slide into dementia becomes so extreme that even the paid incompetents of the mainstream press are forced to acknowledge it.
So please stop with the doom-saying nonsense based on a profoundly innumerate response to raw polling data. It serves no one, other than click-hungry ghouls trading on fear and outrage, and the worst elements of the anti-democratic right.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to use the term "Innumeracy" to describe the prognosticators you're criticizing, much less the general population or adult electorate's capacity for understanding news reports; but you're certainly right about the unfortunate consequences of the widespread ignorance of the most basic concepts of statistics and statistical reasoning. What I often find myself wishing in vain is that a basic course in statistics would be required for any four year degree, even, say, French Literature or Grievance Studies. Publishers could use that standard in hiring decisions, of course. At the least, style sheets could prohibit reports of changes in any data that were not statistically significant as if they were newsworthy. We're entering the season when we'll see reports of truly inconsequential, tiny changes in political polls treated as if they were truly reliable harbingers of an important trend.
Curious: what do you mean when you say "top-line numbers"? I'm not a poll-watcher at all (I only know that the polls don't look as promising as they did in 2020, which doesn't mean a lot to me). I do have basic literacy in the concept of statistical power and the significance of random sampling (though I'm hardly a statistician). I have no problem believing the media will draw the most dramatic conclusions it can from the available data (even if the available data doesn't say anything particularly dramatic). I simply haven't heard of "top-line numbers" before.
I dream of a Buttigieg/Whitmer ticket someday, but I still think that Biden is the only one who can beat Trump this year, and beating Trump is what it's still all about.
If only this were true! Alas, the DNC party machinery treats an incumbent President like the infallible Holy See. One must never question incumbent primacy. To do so is heresy.
I try to keep an open mind to any legitimate point of view. But one of the main problems I have with the "Team Panic" people advocating for Biden to resign is that their arguments are so often divorced from actual fact. Here's just one example among so many possibilities from this article:
"And, in contrast to Biden, they had it in them to simply outwork Trump—to appear constantly on television, constantly on the campaign trail, and, by contrast, to make Trump appear meandering and reactive."
So I ask you, in what world is Biden failing to "outwork" Trump? First of all, Biden is very busy doing the job of President of the United States while Trump goes to court and plays golf. But then there's this (from the AP):
"As President Joe Biden visited five cities in a multiday trip last week, former President Donald Trump was hardly seen in public, spending most of his time in South Florida.
Trump has held just a single public campaign event since he locked up the Republican presidential nomination on March 12: a rally in Ohio funded not by his campaign but by backers of a Senate candidate whom he had endorsed. The events page on his campaign website has had nothing listed.
Biden, meanwhile, has been barnstorming the country. After a trip to North Carolina on Tuesday, the Democratic president will have touched down in all of the 2024 swing states in the less than three weeks since his State of the Union address."
These "Team Panic" people expecting Biden to withdraw often just come across as lazy and therefore unconvincing. It's as if they're not even trying to craft a convincing or persuasive argument based on reality. They just make stuff up.
But in the actual reality that the rest of us live in, Biden is an incumbent President who negotiated and then signed several transformative laws that have helped usher in a booming economy. He presides over a mostly peaceful and hugely prosperous era in a country mercifully free from any major or long term disruption or protest that could be tied back to him. And modern history tells us that incumbent Presidents in these or relatively similar circumstances go on to win re-election (see Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama).
But you know what else modern history tells us? A party risks losing the White House if their incumbent President bows to pressure and resigns rather than seeking re-election (see Johnson).
So I just don't know what exactly explains these zombie columns promoting Biden's resignation. They just keep shambling on even when facts, historical precedent, and yes, recent polling all increasingly point towards a Biden victory. Biden is by most measures a strong candidate while Trump is on one of the most historic losing streaks in the history of our national politics (Trump and/or his party lost the national vote in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022).
Oh, but Biden's old. And that pretty much seems to be all "Team Panic" has got. Sorry, but that's not convincing. Nor is it really a good look for the zombies still making these increasingly stillborn assertions that Biden should step aside.
The fact that it's so close should disturb you. There is a reason it's so close, and that reason isn't that half the country are idiots. It's that a large chunk of people in this country can only see what is convenient to their beliefs.
Roaring economy...where everything costs 20% more on average and inflation is STILL higher than 2020 (though thankfully considerably reduced from its 2022 heights). You can blame the inflation on Trump, but that's a hard sell when Biden has been talking about giving money away this whole time, and some of the spending increased spending bills didn't happen solely because they were defeated, and not because Biden wisely decided to fight inflation. His own Inflation Reduction Act has surprisingly little provision to fight inflation. CHIPS act bogged down in tons of red tape that's horribly slowing it, ensuring that it mostly fails at what it was set to achieve.
Then let's add to that his not-so-moderate statements and actions regarding things like DEI or gender affirming care for minors, where it looks pretty clearly like he's been coopted by more radical members of his party. Or forgiving college debt, which is a plum to college-educated younger voters, who least need the help. Want to forgive those who have loans who had to drop out of college? I'm sympathetic.
That's the NICE version of what your typical Republican sees. I'm not arguing in favor of Trump; I'll vote for Biden over Trump. But it's not crazy to look at Biden and see someone who used to be a moderate, but now looks like he's incapable of leading his party...or even his own administration. I hear people claim he's so sharp in meetings...why the FUCK is that not on display in public, where it actually matters? I'll tell you: those people are lying. They are lying, and I don't know which is worse: that they think anyone is stupid enough to believe them, or that they think they have to toe the party line and repeat the lie (or else).
I have not been a Biden fan since he took office. I backed him in 2020 because he was a moderate and, I thought, an adult who saw the value in not responding crazily to Trump. He's been dragged towards the radical side of things.
You want to argue that we're stuck with the choice we have now? Okay. That's an argument, and I don't know that it's wrong, however much I dislike it. But please don't tell me everything is good and Biden SHOULD be the nominee. He should have announced two years ago that he would be stepping down.
@Andrew:
Thank you for the reply, but I feel your response is based more on feeling than on sound analysis. In that sense, it’s similar to the article that we’re commenting on, and thus it suffers from similar faults.
For one thing, I’m relatively certain that all of my statements in my initial response are facts. We are, objectively speaking, in a booming economy. Inflation is much lower now than it was when Reagan won reelection in 1984 with the theme that it was a new morning in America. And it’s also a historical fact that incumbent presidents with booming economies typically win reelection. Hence, it’s a fairly objective conclusion to assert that the Dems are wise to stick with Biden and foolish to dump him.
I am not arguing that anyone needs to be happy about having Biden or Trump as the nominees. Rather, I’m pointing out that the arguments I’ve heard for dumping Biden are typically shallow and unconvincing. And this article is a prime example.
I will also point out that I find this aspect of your response to be especially misguided:
“He should have announced two years ago that he would be stepping down.”
Two years ago, in 2022, we had the midterm campaigns and election. Dems had full control of the federal government and the inflation rate was, I believe, more than twice as high as it is now. The Dems should have been trounced. Instead, they arguably won. They expanded their majority in the Senate. Stunning. And they kept the Republican wins in the House so low that the ensuing Republican majority there has remained largely reliant on Dem votes to get anything done.
I personally suspect that if the Dems had been badly defeated in those 2022 midterms, Biden would have indeed retired at that time (early enough to allow other Dem candidates time to start their campaigns). But Biden and the Dems won those midterms. And an incumbent president who wins his first midterm is EXACTLY the kind of candidate a party wants running for reelection.
In fact, I genuinely believe that it is entirely fair on my part to assert that your statement declaring that Biden should have retired two years ago makes precisely zero sense. That’s the kind of statement I critique above when I assert that the “Team Panic” people demanding Biden’s retirement often seem to be making stuff up.
Not to go on too long, but I’ll add that I agree with a few of your points. Some of Biden’s statements on DEI are indeed unnecessarily divisive. I disagree, however, that such positions are in any way a reversal on his part. He’s been saying since at least the 2020 campaign that he’d pick black women for VP and Supreme Court seats. That was an obvious promotion of identity politics since before he was even elected president.
So, sorry, it’s not that Biden is above critique, it’s just that your critique isn’t very good. It’s not that he’s perfect, it’s just that he almost certainly remains the best candidate for the Dems to run against Trump.
I appreciate the conversation, thank you.
"For one thing, I’m relatively certain that all of my statements in my initial response are facts. We are, objectively speaking, in a booming economy. Inflation is much lower now than it was when Reagan won reelection in 1984 with the theme that it was a new morning in America. And it’s also a historical fact that incumbent presidents with booming economies typically win reelection. Hence, it’s a fairly objective conclusion to assert that the Dems are wise to stick with Biden and foolish to dump him."
Reagan's 4% inflation looked pretty good stacked up against the 11% inflation in 1979, the 13% in 1980, and the 10% in 1981. It was lower than 4% in 1984, but not by much, so 4% was basically better than most of the immediate decade prior. Very poor choice of comparison. Still, yes, solid economies tend to result in re-election. One wonders why Al Gore lost...the economy was pretty strong at 4.5% in that election year. Close election, though, and lots of factors play into that. In any case, roaring economy doesn't guarantee anything. Bear in mind, though, that Trump's economy in 2020 was total shit, and Biden barely beat him. I'm not sure how much that means given that Trump did a lot of things after the election that a lot of people really didn't like, so perhaps this isn't going to matter, but I dislike finding out this way.
"Two years ago, in 2022, we had the midterm campaigns and election. Dems had full control of the federal government and the inflation rate was, I believe, more than twice as high as it is now. The Dems should have been trounced. Instead, they arguably won."
This is true, especially since everyone expected a bloodbath. So the incumbent Dems won even through their shitty economy; 1.9% GDP and 8% inflation. So it looks like the actual facts don't really support either of us...or support both of us, depending on which ones you choose.
I think it's fair to say that no one would expect Biden to voluntarily step down after the midterms. I don't think Biden was a major deciding factor in Democrat performance in 2022, but I understand it makes him look like a strong leader. Given that, there's really no way Democrats were going to demand he step down. And the confounding thing for me is that there's no obvious great candidate waiting in the wings. Perhaps we'd have developed one, if he announced he wouldn't seek re-election early, but it's probably even more likely that we'd just be stuck with, say, Kamala Harris, who does not appear to be a very strong candidate (though IMO an upgrade from a man who appears to have lost his edge). It's not like the mid aughts after the 2004 DNC where people were looking at Obama and saying "man, that guy will make a great candidate when he runs."
"One wonders why Al Gore lost" Well, that's a whole different controversy. Sure, Gore conceded the election, but did he actually lose?
"So the incumbent Dems won even through their shitty economy; 1.9% GDP and 8% inflation. So it looks like the actual facts don't really support either of us" I wouldn't go quite that far. Certainly, fundamentals matter. And that's what I've been getting at. But an election theory based on fundamentals usually incorporates certain assumptions: both parties will at least try to nominate good candidates, those candidates will try to appeal to enough voters to win, and most if not all of the various campaigns will be at least somewhat professional. But, in 2022, the Republican party violated most if not all of these strategies (its main achievement - abolishing national abortion rights - was not particularly popular).
I brought up 2022 only to say that the electoral events of that year (a surprisingly good result for Dems @ the midterms) almost certainly helped convince Biden to run for reelection. I did not mean to downplay the importance of fundamentals (the economy, major legislative achievements with a measurable impact, domestic safety and security, etc). Those fundamentals are indeed important for 2024. But campaigns still need to be run competently on winning issues. And so far Biden seems to be doing a better job of that than Trump (although that point is admittedly subjective). And, in that case, that simply gives Biden yet another advantage on top of the fundamentals already described in detail.
"And the confounding thing for me is that there's no obvious great candidate waiting in the wings. Perhaps we'd have developed one, if he announced he wouldn't seek re-election early, but it's probably even more likely that we'd just be stuck with, say, Kamala Harris, who does not appear to be a very strong candidate" My understanding is that other potential Dem candidates like Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris poll worse against Trump than Biden does. This is an important point. I think that articles like the one we're commenting on take it largely as an assumption that just about anyone stepping in to replace Biden would immediately poll better against Trump, but I'm unaware of any actual data supporting that idea.
And FWIW: Whereas I currently believe that Biden will win in 2024, I also believe that Kamala Harris would lose in an epic landslide. I think a lot of us have forgotten how Obama became the first black President. He was (usually) quite vocal in distancing himself from the potentially divisive elements of the angry and extreme Far Left. He publicly broke with his ("God Damn America") pastor Jeremiah Wright. It was of course unavoidable that he would be recognized as the first Black President, but he publicly urged Black people not to think of themselves as separate or as victims.
Kamala Harris, as best as I am aware, has adopted the opposite approach. She is incredibly vocal in her embrace of the Far Left "anti-racism" that explicitly promotes racial discrimination (to favor Blacks) and has repeatedly promoted the Leftist concept of "equity" or equal outcomes. I don't personally fathom why on Earth she is sabotaging any future career in national politics in that way, but she will never win the Presidency. She has already made herself unelectable in a national election. She only gets in as VP because Biden wins, not her. And, in my own estimation of an otherwise good presidency (so far), the selection of Harris as his running mate strikes me as perhaps the worst decision of Biden's presidential career.
"Polling suggests Donald Trump will win the presidential election"
It says nothing of the kind.
What model are you running to reach this conclusion?
You surely don't think that you can just look at the top-line numbers, which represent a less-than-1% sub-sample of all the people asked, and draw any conclusions from it. That would be, not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic. No one so innumerate as to look at top-line numbers and think they represent the electorate should be allowed near a prognosticator's podium.
Even a relatively simple model--which are often the best kind, as they are robust against a diversity of assumptions--based on recent electoral and primary outcomes, and accounting for top-line polling results-- shows Biden with a five-to-seven point advantage over trump. And that's today, before his first criminal conviction and before his slide into dementia becomes so extreme that even the paid incompetents of the mainstream press are forced to acknowledge it.
So please stop with the doom-saying nonsense based on a profoundly innumerate response to raw polling data. It serves no one, other than click-hungry ghouls trading on fear and outrage, and the worst elements of the anti-democratic right.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to use the term "Innumeracy" to describe the prognosticators you're criticizing, much less the general population or adult electorate's capacity for understanding news reports; but you're certainly right about the unfortunate consequences of the widespread ignorance of the most basic concepts of statistics and statistical reasoning. What I often find myself wishing in vain is that a basic course in statistics would be required for any four year degree, even, say, French Literature or Grievance Studies. Publishers could use that standard in hiring decisions, of course. At the least, style sheets could prohibit reports of changes in any data that were not statistically significant as if they were newsworthy. We're entering the season when we'll see reports of truly inconsequential, tiny changes in political polls treated as if they were truly reliable harbingers of an important trend.
Curious: what do you mean when you say "top-line numbers"? I'm not a poll-watcher at all (I only know that the polls don't look as promising as they did in 2020, which doesn't mean a lot to me). I do have basic literacy in the concept of statistical power and the significance of random sampling (though I'm hardly a statistician). I have no problem believing the media will draw the most dramatic conclusions it can from the available data (even if the available data doesn't say anything particularly dramatic). I simply haven't heard of "top-line numbers" before.
I dream of a Buttigieg/Whitmer ticket someday, but I still think that Biden is the only one who can beat Trump this year, and beating Trump is what it's still all about.
In the real world, Joe Biden has been a great President in his first term, and he will continue to be a great President in his second term.
If only this were true! Alas, the DNC party machinery treats an incumbent President like the infallible Holy See. One must never question incumbent primacy. To do so is heresy.