Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate
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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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually all it requires is the state legislatures of enough states to hit 270 EC votes to pass the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta.... It's at 209/270 at the moment.
The electoral college is an utterly idiotic system, but can be broken from within.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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's the point of the Electoral College. It weeds out groupthink, which is the downfall of direct democracy.
It's not stupid just because you refuse to use it right.
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.
The polls had Trump winning in 3/10 simulations, which is far from absolutely certain:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
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.
c.f. also Adams on presidential elections, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defe...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challenger...
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-ph...
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.
As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.
Exactly. There's no point in putting an upper age limit on a position when no one lives long enough for age to even be a factor.
Socrates made it to 71.
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.
Etc.
Plenty of people lived long lives back then.
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.
But fair enough.
It includes people who die at birth, childhood illnesses, etc.
Once you were past 20, your remaining life time jumped significantly
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
"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).
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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).
What does this have to do with my agreeing with you that approval voting wouldn't confuse people?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government-in-ireland/...
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.
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.
Democrats didnt get a chance to do that with Biden this time, there was no primary.
I meant that if the voters don't want an 82 year old president, they can just not vote for him.
I did not talk about primaries.
So why can't I pick a candidate that is under 30, or born overseas?
The rules make no logical sense and need updating.
Max age should be retirement age - max duration of the term.
In my opinion career politicians should be ended altogether but that's another matter.
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.
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.
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?
(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...)
age does not measure mental proficiency.
The maximum age is a different consideration.
while it is very much possible that an aged individual is mentally proficient.
That doesn’t mean no 80 year old is more mentally proficient than the average 60 year old, but we want more than average here.
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.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump, and Biden are all showing significant issues and they aren’t getting better over the next 4 years.
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.
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...
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 Biden will be 82 at the end of his term.
Trump would be ~6 months older than Biden in 4 years.
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
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.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-a-presidential-...
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 :-)
All governments, democratic or despotic can only govern with the consent of their subjects.
It's thus reasonable to dislike the precise mechanisms by which that consent (explicit and implied) is achieved in any particular country.
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).
That's the definition of a despotic government - ruling without consent. Any rule comes from the end of a gun.
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.
That can't stop an elderly candidate from running third party to spite the eligibility rules, but that's already the case.
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.
Either way, neither of them should have gotten as far as they did.
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.
Elect any LEGAL Citizen regardless of age.
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 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!
The podcast with AOC: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-power-broker-04-r...
Term limits make sense for POTUS. There should be regular changes in Executive management of any organization.
But not the Legislative or Judicial branch. Age limits (minimum and maximum) avoid the "lobbyist capture" issue.
yeah, so we can notkeep every international promise going forward?
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.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-inv...
He won that election by a landslide.
Roosevelt won the 1940 election with 55% of the popular vote, 38 of the 48 states, and almost 85% of the electoral vote.
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.
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.
The world's democratic governments tax and spend a greater % of GDP than ever before. The last time we were in this ballpark was in WW2.
Have a minimum (25 for House, 35 for Senate, POTUS, Judge) and maximum (75) age for all positions.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to say “LEGAL citizen” and am kind of afraid to ask you to unpack it.
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)
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.
Or is it the media running cover for the regime and gaslighting the public on the presidents fading mental capacity?
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.
†: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Just one example would be Tennessee, which recently banned the practice after a Memphis suburb attempted to implement the practice.
https://reason.com/2022/04/28/florida-tennessee-ban-ranked-c...
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.
So what do I know, I'm just a moron..?
...thanks for the great Reason/link.
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.
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.
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.
> you must be younger than
> the average life expectancy
> (currently 73yo) - while in
> office.
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].
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62591/
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.
I would want to limit it by social security retirement age. I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”
This is just tech people being tech people, as always.
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.
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.
I intend this charitably.
"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.
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.
That being said, I really hope we'd all agree a high IQ president would be favorable to a low IQ president.
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.
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.
Maybe, but I know a lot of 20ish year olds that aren’t all there either.
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.
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...]
That’s why I purposely linked to the official US government Actuarial Table.
Biden is 81.
The statistics state that an 81yo will only live 7-more-years.
When a presidential term (4-years) is more than half of your remaining life, the margin of error to die while in office is extreme high.
—-
Another way to look at it is …
The min age for POTUS is 35yo.
The Actuarial Table state that a 35yo will live 40-more-years (to age 75).
Then set age 75 to be the max age
he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job
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
President is only semi democratically decided as a courtesy.
That aside, if there's an issue with age, its having a foundation and reference points that are disconnected and out of touch.
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.
Sadly, that is not true in the US.
It's the only developed country where life expectancy is going down quite a lot.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...
And possibly that the negative growth looks to have been a relatively short outlier.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni....
The SSA, CBO, and the Census Bureau all predict life expectancy to rise over the next 30 years.
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.
The guy’s in his 90s and still does broadcasting for the NBA and is as sharp as you can be.
You’d never suspect he’s a person in his 90s while listening to it.
> Putting politics aside …
I admire your optimism in saying that then putting a political question to the room.
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.
Only the bad ones. The good ones have less downtime than a regular person. Random dudes you work with probably golf more than most presidents do.
https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/1981-patco-strike
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.
https://www.faa.gov/jobs/working_here/benefits
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.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.
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.
Any federal law enforcement position has this. For example, for the FBI or the secret service, you must enter by 37 and retire by 56.
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.
So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.
Edited to add documentation: https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_asses...
the president has entire staffs, including highly qualified generals, bureaucrats, line workers, etc. to drive the ship.
That's a silly argument.
Airline pilots have a mandatory retirement age based on health and safety studies associated with the risks and requirements of flying a plane.
Girl scout age requirements, as you might imagine, aren't based on the same criteria.
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.
But I think the argument is still valid for other reasons.
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.
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.
I always recommend folks read George Washington's farewell address and it's discussion of political parties.
That likelihood increases with age, and even the most well-informed population does not have the ability to withdraw their consent if it does.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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,
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.
The DNC is at fault for selected him as the candidate.
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.
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.
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.
Do we live on different planets. Most young people are able, most people over 80 will have mobility and/or cognition issues.
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.
The "pleb" had no say whatsoever in having only Trump or Biden as a choice.
Party elitists chose the horses in the race.
Further, there are many more democracies than just the USofA, rules vary and you don't see the same lack of choice in some of these other democracies.
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.
[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-a-presidential-...
That'd be a good way to force the government into caring about improving health and extending life expectancy.
Life expectancy is also an irrelevant measurement for this
Edit : Typo in TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
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).
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.
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.
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
Some countries give tax payer money based on how you did previously which greatly benefits the status quo
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
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.
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...
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. "
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"
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
[1] A president so nice we impeached him twice.
> the alternative to Chevron is legislating from the bench
Only when a law is unclear. Interpreting thaw is kinda why these courts exist
Others, from 1976 -- 2021: "Campaign Finance and the Supreme Court" <https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/campaign-financ...>
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The only possible way to vote earlier is when a government falls and they write out new elections but that is extremely rare.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdah_(pre-election_period)
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
During the talk people are cheering and laughing along... granted... in pure transcript form this does sounds rather nonesense.
The video is found at the very bottom of this article.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/06/26/trump-water-faucets-r...
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."
Has it ever been done?
Would it work to attract the center/swing vote, or more likely to be a negative?
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.
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
It's just the label and tribalism I reject, not their stances or some desire for a mythical "middle path".
I have no idea how common this is in the "unaffiliated base" but I'd be willing to wager it's fairly common.
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?
I've seen the same and done similar. I'm now in the unhappy position of voting against instead of voting for.
Hopefully Trump's loss will be the final nail in the coffin for MAGA.
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?
We've seen repeatedly that Democrats going to the middle are met with supposedly moderate Republicans saying, "But not like that."
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.
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.
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.
[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.
Honestly, just like undecided voters, they are either a myth or complete idiots.
And theoretically no reason it couldn't happen other than both parties definitely not being on board with it.
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 :-)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
(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.)
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.
https://x.com/VaughnHillyard/status/1811402883604050216
"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."
Here's the whole transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-delivers-k...
At the same time, Trump has been saying "I know nothing about Project 2025" and "I have no idea who is behind it."
Edit:
Also, CNN says 140 people from the Trump administration worked on Project 2025: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/trump-allies-project...
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
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?
Would you be OK with that?
[0] See this book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/economics-and-philos...
Did you actually read the project 2025 doc or are you just parroting back what you were told to think?
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jul/12/project-2025-...
Which page number was that?
In any case of course Trump had nothing to do with it, it was written for him not by him (as if).
Trump also didn't plan and participate in the decade+ Federalist overthrow of SCOTUS .. that was handed to him on a plate. Like Project 2025.
The first sentence of the first paragraph:
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.
does not state that Trump had nothing to do with the document.
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*.
(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 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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...
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.
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.
Trump basically did just that and Bernie Sanders came close.
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.
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.
You are free to do that but then dont complain if your rights are taken away.
If you want it to, you are free try to change the Constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People frequently make this statement and I think it’s wrong at face value.
If you vote you are giving legitimacy to the beltway uniparty. If the election is “free and fair” why does voting give you the right to complain?
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
- staying home strongly implies your ok with Trump winning and the GOP platform being implemented completely.
When I reference not voting I mean specifically for President. Thanks for calling that out.
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.
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.
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.
Literally nobody here is doing that.
> 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.
In the same way that not helping at the scene of an automobile accident is a personal affair, I suppose, yes.
Just not in this reality.
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.
And no, your ludicrous example doesn't change that.
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?
Such an dilemma doesn't occur in a Washminster system with preferential voting, that it does in the antiquated US election system is damning.
For president specifically, I usually vote for the least obnoxious or most amusing third party.
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.
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?
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.)
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'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.
My viewing water as a non-liquid doesn’t make it less wet. Not voting is a delegated vote for the status quo, i.e. whoever wins.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a Kamala fan, but the choice is so easy.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's fair to say that Donald Trump is to blame for this one. See https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-ang...:
"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 not merely voting for the President. You're voting for the full package.
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]"
Make of that what you will.
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.
To me that screams not an insurrection.
A unity ticket of two unpopular centrist candidates is not a recipe for success.
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.
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.)
Not at winning broadly of course.
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.
The Dangerous History Podcast: Ep. 0118: Party Systems in American History, Part I
Episode webpage: http://profcj.org
Media file: https://chrt.fm/track/95538/traffic.megaphone.fm/ADL66387574...
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.
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.
Thanks for the pointer to that podcast!
Slavery is very much an alive and active albeit illegal in most parts of the world trade, 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
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.
?
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.
(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.)
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.)
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Australia
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.
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.
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.
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.
Among whom? In what country would their policies be center right?
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.
barely left wing, please.
There's a reason not-America makes jokes about blinkered vision, American Exceptionalism, and Manifest Destiny.
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.
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.
I am quite liberal. I'd vote for this a million times before I'd consider Trump as a president.
(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.)
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.
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.
McCain/Lieberman almost happened in 2008.
If my only two choices were McCain/Lieberman vs McCain/Palin, I would hold my nose and vote for the second.
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.
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.)
For majors the benefit is clear: you don't get spoiled.
For minors, you don't have to overcome the barrier of being a spoiler if the race looks remotely close.
And of course voters are not disadvantaged just for having two acceptable choices rather than one.
Labour also picked Jeremy Corbyn an election back. Ultimately the rest of the country didn't want to vote for him.
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.
Labour now hasn't united its opposition because I think nobody fears it much.
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.
Labour's electoral prospects improved because of the implosion of the Tories, not anything they did.
> "Speak ill of no man"
Aha.
Thanks for calling that out.
A mixed ticket isn't going to align them better.
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.
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.
Other than promoting coal, what has Trump done for rural America’s economy?
And the IRA was a huge investment in “Made in USA”, whereas Trump spent years promoting an infrastructure week that never materialized.
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).
One would think so, but they've embraced him as literally God's gift, and his appointments to SCOTUS are deeply religious.
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.
The CHIPS Act is one of Biden's crowning achievements and is more truly protectionist than anything Trump every got done.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+7%3A21-... [2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+4%3A9-1... [3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A15&ver... [4] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+18%3A36&ve... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
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.
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".
The Republicans have moderated a lot over the last decade. Their current platform reads like the Democrat platform from the 2000s.
There are plenty of faults in the Democratic party, but “both sides” is a tired and inaccurate trope.
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.
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.
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.
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).
<https://www.npr.org/2021/01/14/956621191/these-are-the-10-re...>
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).
<https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impeachment-trial-live-up...>
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.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/opinion/biden-west-wing-a...
If you want to bolster the ticket, get someone that people already like. Hell, get Obama or Sanders to come back as the VP.
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.
Same with (partial) student debt relief, and you see shadows of the Green New Deal in the Inflation Reduction Act.
E.g. the current administration would be Biden and Trump.
I couldn’t imagine that working today, as divided as the parties have become (especially in the last 20 years).
[1] https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/s...
Yes Lincoln’s re-election was a unity ticket that included Lincoln (Republican) and Johnson (pro-war Democrat)
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.
[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/07/20/sorry-mitt-romn...
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.
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.
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."
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/21/harris-potential-vp...
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?
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.
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.
McCain considered Lieberman
None are likely, maybe Liz Cheney the most though (imagine if her father campaigned for her).
Romney is politically obsolete. He serves no further purpose in American politics.
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.
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.
2) republican candidate considered a crook
3) it's in Chicago
Whatever they do, don't do what the DNC did in 1968 again, lets try to at least make new mistakes this time I guess?
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.
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.
Also, I just read that Harris has money pouring in. The donors may effectively decide this before anyone else can get traction.
Question out of curiosity, not a challenge. I don't follow US politics that closely.
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.
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...
[1] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-us-trade-pol...
The issue was Biden was over-managed because of his reputation of "Bidenisms" for which he has been mocked about for decades [0][1]
This meant he kept campaigning to a minimum and was extremely managed.
It kept gaffes to a minimum but also severely decreased his media time.
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-biden-unspools-a...
[1] - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/joe-biden-bi...
> 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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-ford-ev-battery-plan...
https://apnews.com/article/ford-electric-vehicles-battery-te...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Budget deficits have been smaller under Biden though.
But I don't buy the point that current president is good because he is not as bad as previous in spending.
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.
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).
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
It took him a while to overcome Obama's economic policies, but he was certainly making headway in damaging the US economy and increasing deficit spending by the time covid hit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Donal...
>this is a loaded question.
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.).
could you give citation, who are those economists? Or all of them? Or majority?
You are making very many unobvious statements with chatgpt confidence.
There are other places as well, but this is the most accessible one I know of for people without access to economics publications.
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.
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
Modern politics is such a hole - we are praising a politician for not starting a war.
> Calling out china on its bs What does it mean?
Slava Ukraine
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?).
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.
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.
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."
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.
It all played out in public, just like everything with Trump. There is no need to lie shamelessly on HN, it won’t get you anything.
I'd rather listen to the thoughts of the Speaker directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0tl8d5G3g
There is no chance Republicans would vote for that bill, they don't need Trump to persuade them.
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.
> 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
That’s an issue with practically all legislation.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-conditi...
Blue=good Red=bad
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.
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.
Unless they had some tricky campaign finance exception, it had to be Harris.
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".
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!
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.
The Democrats have got it all going for them; both in absolute numbers of votes and also of financial support. Life is interesting...
He did not really do this.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-0...
"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."
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/09/politics/joe-biden-bridge...
(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)
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
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.
They quit because they got their faces ripped off in a fair fight, not because of some backroom party shenanigans.
https://www.newsweek.com/msnbc-host-chris-matthews-ties-bern...
The associated press wouldn't even call a winner for the Iowa caucus due to how poorly it was run https://apnews.com/article/fc6777e93b8c50b2fd20e0d31fcc43b3
There were definitely some interesting things going on in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_v._DNC_Services_Corp.
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.
As I understand it this was the position of the US Founders as well (and it is also mine).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ
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.
- 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
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/co-f...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-16/andreesse...
- https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
Here's a broader article on Silicon Valley support for Trump (potentially paywalled):
- https://www.ft.com/content/e2ffd807-1c18-436c-9f70-2fa7181ac...
- 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.
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.
> One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman.
> 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?
There's more; that's just the first two years.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/what-to-know-about-all-thr...
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.)
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.
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.
No idea if he’d be interested but Mark Kelly would be a great candidate to try and win independents.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
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]
[1] https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidit...
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.
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.
Seems like America has been going backwards for a long time.
The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.
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.
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.
At least now we’ll likely not have both major party candidates be too old for office.
Biden literally cannot walk down two steps unassisted.
Meanwhile Trump appears to be bullet proof.
You can disagree on plenty of policy, but no fair minded person could possibly think he’s mentally or physically more fit than Trump.
That’s a weird way to say “Even his own party is shooting at him.”
That was incredibly iconic and that picture will be in the historic books, and IMHO, alongside a biography of him as our 47th POTUS.
Yep, next to all of the other failed assassinations.
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.
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?
Here’s Biden unable to descend two (2!) stairs by himself: https://nypost.com/2024/06/28/us-news/jill-biden-helps-joe-o...
You’re seriously going to tell me that guy is more physically fit than Trump?
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.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/other/joe-biden-goes-for-bike...
"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."
> I think Biden is sharp
and also delusional.
So do a very notable fraction of the people who worked for him!
I’m not comparing him to Trump btw. Just explaining why I’m perfectly happy that the dems are replacing Biden with someone else.
That comment was posted by 'readthenotes1.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/probability-of-dying-by-a...
Can't really deliver on your campaign promises if you're more likely than not to be dead before the end of your term.
The doublespeak from the Republican side regarding Biden's capabilities has been, frankly, astonishing.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-mil...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unclear, but certainly not 0.
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.
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 think to say that Donald Trump is anything but narrowly good at Charisma and personal marketing is a stretch.
I wouldn’t give him an integral to solve but that’s not what a leader is supposed to do either.
I think a major world leader needs more than charisma but it’s one of the first requirements.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
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.
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.
You're arguing a different point. This isn't about charisma. It's about a baseline level of communication.
I'm a Joe supporter but in recent interviews (like BET) there were two parts where I could not make out what he said after 10 rewinds.
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.
The one we live in, it is a hard disqualification, and there's an election in 3 months.
We won't fix everything that is broken with how people select leaders in the next 3 months.
His vocal cords are fine, it's just that the words don't make much sense, which is a pretty big problem in that position.
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.
Even the Democratic Party has given up on the far-fetched excuses. It’s time to surrender to the evidence. That example is just one out of dozens.
Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.
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 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
2010, "Joe Biden, the vice-president who keeps putting his foot in it": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/28/joe-biden-vice...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe 10 years ago it was that.
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.
could you point out the timestamp where his speech impediment is evident? this was 8 years ago and he appears to be a silver-tongued devil
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.
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?
A latino man could almost certainly fit, though.
Given a person playing a Roman Emperor is acting in a role not laboring as a ruler, consider that:
The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius -- among Rome's best and wisest rulers -- and the poet Seneca all were of Spanish origin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/horizon/june9...
The Four African Emperors were Septimius Severus, Clodius Albinus, Marcus Macrinus and Aemilianus.
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.
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.
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.
* Swapping a name as he’s known to do, with the name of the person who is contextually-adjacent and the other main character?
* Thinking the man he just finished discussing our continual support against Russian expansion, was actually Vladimir Putin himself?
I’m only saying that life-long wors-swapping is not dementia, as so many say.
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.
The current generation reaching voting age would much rather send a text than call so.....
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...
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
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.
What a word, TIL
"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. "
* Tom Nichols, https://archive.ph/XcMbP / https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/07/the-...
> “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.”
* https://archive.ph/cQ4KA / https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/22/trump-chr...
And it's not like Trump is that much younger than Biden.
(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.)
Warning, explicit language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZMxgPxXU
The fact Trump has not changed from acting like a 'deranged street preacher' isn't exactly a point for him…
But looking across the pond, it doesn't look like Americans agree with me. :-/
Fun times, I guess.
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.
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.
Harris has been a ghost for 4 years, after dismally losing the 2020 primary, and being selected ostensibly because of her group identity.
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.
Exactly zero of them have the demanding job of a president.
Even Manifold politics had him at 20% two weeks ago. And 10% for the past week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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 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 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)."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
i suppose that this is one of the said exceptions then.
Curiously, his tweet from just 18 hours ago seemed like he was still in the race. I wonder what changed.
The stepping down announcement was probably a layoff notice to his staff. I bet many are/were shocked.
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?
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.
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
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.
Monday: layoffs
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.
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.
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.
I was so excited for the infrastructure bill, but unfortunately it got way stripped down.
You can tax me at any percent you'd like if you're using it (efficiently) for public transit.
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.
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.
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.
A few German right-wing dudes seems to have more or less provably received money and favors from Russia.
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/bystron-r...
There was also that strange Russia-Trump connection for which there was insufficient proof...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Farage got 12.6% in 2015 and 14.3% in 2024. That’s not a massive increase. Tory vote meanwhile fell from 37% to 19%
On the centre-left side, In 2015 Lib/Lab got 38%, by 2025 that had increased to 46%
On the left side the greens increased from 4% to 6.5%
It doesn't help that the EU parliament (elected directly) does not have much power compared to the commission.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
"His signature achievements essentially were one time cash payments to people."
Easily the most effective US president of my lifetime.
There's a reason people jokingly refer to him as President Manchin.
We need permitting reform at this point to tackle climate change in any meaningful way, which unfortunately the left doesn't want to touch.
The airlines would like all of your money next time they cancel your flight.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?tab=chart&tim...
About 3% of the US population is in the US illegally compared to about 1% in the EU.
Overall, about 15.8% of the US population are foreign born, compared to 6.1% of the EU.
Just like in the US, immigrants aren’t evenly distributed though so some countries have far higher percentages - just as some US states do.
Whatever Russia is paying to post dumb shit like this, its not worth it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I always say, imagine if it was France instead of Israel. Then you see how crazy the situation is.
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.
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.
What alternative do you have in mind?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-israel-g...
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.
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."
If today is not ending, how can there be a tomorrow?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
Agreed on NATO + Ukraine too but I wish they would allow us to strike Russia directly even with NATO equipment.
Maybe its China's turn to try to conquer the graveyard of empires.
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.
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.
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
Regardless, Obama, Trump, and Biden had to deal with the situation as they found it, whether they agreed with the lead-up or not.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Taliba...
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.
Yeah, it turns out all we needed to do was run away in the middle of the night and let the country slide back into a illiberal theocratic hell hole.
You do remember what the "Afghan government" partners and soldiers were like right? Mostly child rapists and gang leaders...
>Good support for Ukraine
You're looking through a particular narrow lens.
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.
[1]: https://www.history.com/news/lbj-exit-1968-presidential-race
[2]: https://www.history.com/news/nixon-war-powers-act-vietnam-wa...
Let’s see who is going to take the mantle now.
/edit: he is endorsing Kamala,
https://nitter.poast.org/JoeBiden/status/1815087772216303933
I only want to express my opinion that he (and the Democratic party) took a while to make this decision, to their detriment.
Interesting to see who their new candidate is going to be.
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:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vmeGPmDP0nopAlOwDZIV6
This particular scenario is covered at 0:30
That's wild and should be fixed.
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.
[0] https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/nation-world/biden-harris-...
The idea that the DNC has any power to steer the party is a joke. That is a mental model that is at least 20 years dead.
Kamala is not a strong candidate, let's see what happens.
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.
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.)
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.
YMMV, we have very different political systems and cultures, etc. etc.
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.
The bar is so low right now, I think most people will be impressed by basic competence, which all three have in spades.
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.
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.
[1] Correctly, with near-prescient precision!
In the end, it is the primary voters who will pick the candidate who will run for presidency.
"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."
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/sen-kamala-ha...
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.
If he's unfit to serve 6 months from now, then how is he fit to serve now?
He didn't endorse Kamala in his letter. We'll see what comes out of the spin cycle this week.
e: looks like Biden endorsed Kamala according to other publications
This election will come down to four battleground states. Those are the only states and battles that matter.
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.
I wish there was a filter to flag these AI profiles and just hide them in all threads.
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.
* 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.
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.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv>
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.
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...
DNC needs a policy where they won’t endorse candidates who will be over 65 on the day they take office.
Nobody in their 80s should be running for office. By then they had their chance to influence the next generation… or not.
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...
https://www.realclearpolling.com/betting-odds/2024/president
Because enough people wanted to bet on it and they make money on every bet.
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.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...>
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.
History.com addressed this earlier this year: "Can the President and Vice President Be From the Same State?" <https://www.history.com/news/can-the-president-and-vice-pres...>
So no, a Harris-Newsom ticket is highly unlikely.
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.
"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."
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.
And here's him on twitter reacting to the news of Biden standing down: https://x.com/deanbphillips/status/1815145481674358843
And Dean Phillips did run in the primary, so again, nobody stopped him. Biden defeated him.
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).
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.
> someone that isn’t old
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
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.
I felt the threads about the assassination attempt a week ago deserved similar treatment for the historical relevance.
Whatever is done here should be done with a consistent set of principles applied to both parties.
> 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.
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.
No, he very clearly does not. He's rambling and incoherent.
But jeez the Democratic party needs to new leadership. And I don't mean Harris or whoever, but the party leadership itself.
The gaslighting in the past year about Bidens age was insane to watch. Literally asking people to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
I mean, it seems to be a winning strategy for the other party.
Testament to two party system. But you can call it low standard as well.
The election of the next President will have a large effect on the security of Europe with respect to both Russia and Israel
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.
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.
Where is the mythical vouch feature I could never find ? A yes I believe it's not yet dead, so you can't vouch ?
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.
That's my understanding, but I could be wrong.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/03/politics/lbj-biden-what-m...
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.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_Party_presiden...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Eagleton#Replacement_on...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_United_States_presidentia...>
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.
I found that yesterday while trying to figure out how popular the "crowdstrike" post was, and it is actually the second most commented one.
https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIERJU1RJT...
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 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.
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.
After this, our Black mayor ran on a campaign of funding the police and won.
> Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.
Trading the open primary news on the prediction markets, there’s a lot of liquidity finally!
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.)
Do you really think they read the news to find the news? Or do you think there are layers and levels that you are not privy to?
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.
Sounds racist. How about he pick the person best suited for the role?
People can be diverse and the best for the job too ;-)
(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.)
267 points by happyopossum 8 days ago | 552 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957564
and multiple other threads (most eventually merged)
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.
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.
Elon and his wackos are going to ruin our country.
"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.)"
Don't need 20 threads about the politics of the day with 19 of them having the top comment being "duplicate of <link>".
That's a lot of made up shit in one sentence.
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.
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.
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.
...What do you think your party has been doing to Trump challengers?
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.
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.
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.
Do you want a dictator with near unlimited legal immunity in charge of the country? Thats what the November vote is for. Everything else is secondary.
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.
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.
There's a signed letter from Biden announcing it, published on reputable news websites.
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.
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.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
So was (I learned today) the one on Trump assassination attempt: