Comment by thefaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thefaux | Hacker News Reader

Two points that people are making that I feel necessary to refute because they come across as being offered from a place of bad faith or ignorance:

1) the suggestion that Biden should resign from the presidency because he is standing down from running. Biden is not saying that he is incapable of running. He and his team just understand how to read polls and don't want their party to lose the election which seemed almost certain with him at the top of the ticket.

2) the suggestion that Biden stepping down is subverting the will of the primary voters. There was no real 2024 democratic primary just like there was no republican primary in 2020. There were no serious candidates and no debates. I am sure there are Biden supporters who are disappointed and angry that he has dropped out but it was his choice to make. If he had stayed in the race, I am sure he would have secured the nomination. This wasn't taken away from him. He voluntarily stood down. A candidate should not be obliged to remain in a race just because they won a primary.

> There was no real 2024 democratic primary

This was also a subversion of the will of primary voters. It's not a defense. A huge portion of Democratic voters wanted the candidate replaced, and there were Democratic politicians that announced their intention to be the candidate that replaced him, and others undoubtedly who would have if there hadn't been so much pressure not to, yet a serious primary wasn't run.

Democratic insiders decided that no one was going to run against Biden, Democratic insiders decided after the debate that Biden was not going to run. Democratic insiders will also be choosing who will run. The most democratic and likely option will be Harris (because that's her job) but she was also chosen by Democratic insiders in 2020, not by Democratic voters, who mostly hated her. If not Harris, then Democratic insiders will either choose an arbitrary process or simply directly choose another candidate.

How did Democratic insiders prevent other candidates from running in the primaries?

Dean Phillips was a candidate who tried running against Biden in the primaries. I'll link to him talking about his experience in congress and how he felt that the Democratic Party retaliated against him for running: https://youtu.be/1hh8lcoJ1NA?feature=shared&t=1308

And here's him on twitter reacting to the news of Biden standing down: https://x.com/deanbphillips/status/1815145481674358843

So nothing specific? They were mad at him?

And Dean Phillips did run in the primary, so again, nobody stopped him. Biden defeated him.

Pretty much. He ran in the primaries, they were mad at him, he lost his committee memberships and is no longer seeking re-election to congress, he speculates that this attitude from within the party is why no one else seriously ran against Biden.

I'm not alleging a grand conspiracy or anything. It just seems like internal party politics and personal incentives led to the democratic party ultimately ending up with a nominee that people aren't excited about (who I will vote for anyway).

There is a word for stuff like this when it happens in companies. It's on the tip of my tongue.

> A huge portion of Democratic voters wanted the candidate replaced

Those democrats should’ve joined the party, found a good candidate and done the job of fielding them. But they didn’t, because they just like to complain not do the actual work. We had primaries. Fact is simply that none of the fantasy candidates that people like to name in wonky circles actually wanted to run.

On 2 I think the suggestion is more that this whole chain of events has resulted from persistent and willful dishonesty by Democratic leadership (including Harris) about the President’s health. So the argument is that if the public was not intentionally misled then there would have been a real primary. And now we are getting whoever those same party elites decide we should get.

On point 1 I checked the polls and they look no different than Bidens. Recent articles say the same thing. So that can't be why they chose her.

"A flurry of polls conducted in the wake of the June 27 presidential debate showed Harris performing roughly the same as Biden against Trump (who has been leading the president by a slim margin for months), and more recent polls after the attempted assassination of Trump show similar trends."

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