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"Can Biden beat Trump?"
What the polls say about a Biden v Trump matchup
(The polls say yeah so... yeah. Admittedly this is a repeat of 2016 and Ukraine will basically be the same thing as Clinton's emails and nothing is truly guaranteed.)
Can Biden beat Trump? The truth is he's just as risky as Bernie
(Neither of them is a guaranteed win. If there was a safe choice, it wasn't one of these 2.)
Stop saying Biden is the 'most electable'. Trump will run rings around him. (No. And not because of his record or gaffes, but because he is an establishment politician and Ukraine will leave the same impression on Biden as Clinton's emails. Are you people insane? Have you forgotten 2016?)
The short answer is that nobody knows. Anyone who thinks they know for sure is fooling themselves.
More precisely, nobody can give you a guarantee. At best there are models that give probabilities. As we learned in 2016, a 20% chance can still happen.
This doesn't necessarily mean the forecaster was bad at their job. Due to the way probabilities work, you can't judge that from a single prediction. The way they judge it is that, when a forecaster gives a 20% chance, it happens 1 in 5 times. You need quite a few predictions to tell how they're doing.
This means forecasts don't really do what we'd like them to do, but they're the best we have.
Yeah, this is a side effect of having discrete, centralized decisions. We have exactly one president at a time.
This means that whatever algorithm you choose to convert "the will of the people" into an answer isn't going to satisfy everyone, and the more divided the country is, the more dissatisfied people there will be.
Personally I do not think Biden stands a chance no matter who he is running against. No one actually wants him, he is just the option the party thinks is the safest.
The irony of that of course is that I think Bernie stands a bigger chance because he would bring out the millennial vote like Obama did. We haven't really been majorly involved in an election since 2008 and Bernie could be what brings us back to the polls.
It's not a conspiracy. He's winning most of the primaries because the most people are voting for him. There were plenty of other candidates that nobody wanted. They didn't get many votes, and they dropped out once it was obvious nobody wanted them. Biden clearly isn't in that group, and he's actually beating Sanders by a huge margin. It's about 1.9M to 1.3M so far, it's not even close.
I understand it's frustrating. I'd prefer to see Sanders win too, and I'm not even American. But the system is based on who gets the most votes, and he's losing that contest.
Then those people want him for a strategic reason. It doesn't matter. In the end, it's totally irrelevant why anyone votes for a particular candidate, just who gets the most votes. And the reality is that about 50% more people are voting for Biden than Sanders.
There’s a ton of signs out there that the system isn’t working well, but “the people I like keep losing” isn’t really one of them.
Political organization on the Left is weak and dependent on consumeristic wank voting is one. People are disenfranchised due to how maliciously designed the poll locations and voter registration processes are. The media is bullshit and fixates on horse race coverage and yellow journalism instead of issues while elevating the platforms of bullshitters and shills. We privilege the perspectives of a minority of rural white voters due to what amounts to a historic accident.
So yeah. Lots of problems. But the party system isn’t really one of them.
That's because you're assuming the political parties in the US are something they're not. Our system was initially designed to flow upwards from the smallest scale local communities with small constituencies sending delegates to making decisions on their behalf along progressively larger constituencies.
In other words, we vote for people moreso than parties and the political parties themselves are just broad coalitions of fundraisers and campaign infrastructure. The parties don't really have independent leadership and just end up being managed by whoever in the party happens to hold elected office. They have limit capability to whip votes and no capability decide who gets to run under their slate if the voters in any particular constituency want them.
Partisanship used to be fairly weak in the country and there used to be lots of conservative democrats and liberal republicans. This all got muddied with the advent of mass media and the distortionary effects of large individual donors. We're in a highly unusual period in history where we have weak parties (as in, management) and strong partisanship and it's largely a reflection of dysfunction and disagreement within society about social issues.
I genuinely have no idea how people are defending the party system we have in America.
The primary argument is, "Well, Biden got the most votes," which no one is denying. The point is how and why, and that's incredibly important. There's party favoritism, media bias, "strategic voting" based on FPTP voting (and faulty premises of "electability"), voter suppression, unequal vote weight, even just the order the primaries happen...
To simplify it to just "Biden has more votes, and that's that" is plastering over ALL the problems we have and creating this false impression that it was ultimately a fair fight.
I think @Deimos is saying that it's irrelevant because he did end up getting the votes: why is no longer important.
The how may still be for reference in future efforts to change the system for the better, but today – he has the votes, one way or another.
Whats your point?
I am a independent, most people I know my age are. We are literally not allowed to vote in this part of the election. Just because the party has decided Biden is the safest option doesn't actually mean most people agree. Even then, they are voting for him because he is safe, not because they actually want him. Plus the millennial voter turnout in the primaries has been abysmal, so its still really not a majority of their own party.
I thought that initially too, but given the results of the primaries so far, where young voter turnout has been abysmal, I am not convinced that is true anymore.
This isn't actually true. Youth turnout is up. I've personally seen thousands of college students wait 3 hours in line to register to vote all day on Tuesday. It's just that older folks are turning out in droves, and it's making the youth vote a smaller percent of the overall vote.
I’m not sure if you remember how cynical and apathetic people were before Obama. The fact that it took a rock star of a political celebrity to make people pay attention for 5 minutes is a problem on its own. But the fact is turnout and engagement is way up. It just happens to be up by even more among suburban rich people than among the youth.
Not who you were replying to but care to elaborate? I'm 14 so I don't even remember anything pre 2016, let alone pre 2008. Did people not care simply because they didn't know? Was it because TV news is terrible at politics (see the Dean scream)? Was everyone still on a Neoliberal trip? (Was it because of TV bias?) Was everyone distracted on 2008 Facebook and 'technological revolution' nonsense that would come until much later and thought politics wouldn't apply to the Internet? Were people too focused on stuff like gerrymandering and FPTP to take politics seriously?
And what about progressivism? Did it just not exist before Bernie? Did TV silence it to please advertisers? Was grassroots campaigning impossible without the Internet?
Again, how, why and by who? What would stop any progressive candidate to have run in the 90's or 2000's and gained a following? Sanders himself has been around politically for some 40 years now, what was stopping him then? Who would have done it? Was it cold-war propaganda saying the "US succeeded with capitalism" while ignoring the differences between the capitalism of Roosevelt and Reagan/Rockefeller? Was it just big corporations looking to rig the game? Was media that powerful then?
People just didn't care because it was "cool" to be detached and unplugged from everything. Caring was lame.
You still see shades of this in stuff like South Park where people who care about stuff are always depicted as insane and up their own asses.
Extending this idea to those who don't see it should be one of the primary efforts of any candidate whose goal is to extend the human ability, rather than diminish it out of fear or doubt or discomfort. In fact, it's one of the ways to extend the human ability: by providing people with the insight to make the better choice.
Not the only one, and not even the most important one, but an important one all the same.
I think part of this is that a lot of young people don't understand the primary system, and I don't think the Sanders campaign has done a good job of letting young people know that they need to vote for him twice: once in a primary and once in a general.
Back in 2008, I was connected enough with politics to have heard of Obama way back at his famous DNC speech. I supported him for President, and even drove an hour home from college to vote for him in the general. But back then I had no idea that a primary system existed, and I certainly didn't vote for him in it. I didn't really learn about primaries until 2016.
I think young people just don't know that some years you don't vote at all, and some years you vote twice: once in November, and once some other random time you need to look up based on your state.
That's a good point. Sometimes giving "obvious" directions will help.
I wonder how many people it applies to?
So most of my friend group (millennials around 30) are all registered as independents. I suspect this is true for most people our age as we are the demographic that seems to be the most opposed to the traditional party system.
Can't vote in the primaries if your not allowed to.
If you want to, you can change your affiliation for the purposes of voting in the primary. You can change it back for the general.
I'm on board with tossing the 2 party system with a single chosen candidate out the window though.
To be fair he was frontrunning at around 30% support for practically the entire race until Iowa, meaning his core base is pretty large. More interestingly, his base is also the second most committed to their candidate, only behind Sanders' base. Granted the youth vote is still pathetic with Biden.
If this election were held under the conditions of late 2019, I'd say Joe Biden wouldn't have a chance against Trump. However...
Coronavirus and the resulting recession may be the one thing that can haul Biden's lifeless campaign across the finish line--
It's also conceivable that Biden and/or Trump could catch covid-19, and really make things interesting.
Biden and/or Trump and/or Bernie* (Just saying, really, much of Congress could die from this, see Iran right now)
Whatever happens, now is a great point of inflection for alternate history of almost every type and outcome.
Life under a gerontocracy. . .
Maybe Julián Castro or someone young should just keep campaigning until November just in case.
Hey, that's why they 'suspend' their campaigns and Gabbard (38) is still openly running. Pete (38), Yang (47) and maybe Klobuchar (59) could come back in, although if any of them did it too late we might need to go back to worrying about a brokered/contested convention, which would all play into Republican smearing.
Everyone seems to forget that Gabbard is still in the race. I honestly think she's staying in the race just on the off-chance that Biden and Sanders both fall ill and have to drop out.
Nah. Everyone who dropped out "suspended their campaigns" so they're still on the ballots and they still have formal organizations the they can start collecting money for and signing checks at a moments' notice if they need to.
Gabbard is in the race because she gets to continue running a campaign and collecting enough donations to keep her friends and associated employed as "Director of Such and Such."
This is basically the Green Party's entire game these days as well (at least on the national level). They're professional campaigners. They're not focused on actually getting power or pushing policies anymore, just keeping the campaign going so they can continue paying staff and salaries for crony networks. Even if they win an election or two, it's in the service of keeping the grift going.
This would require honest media reporting to have an effect. If the US was uniquely bad, do you think that information would reach Trumps supporters? Do you think that they’d believe it if it did? (eg fake news).
I’m honestly asking, because I’m not American, but we have Murdoch media here too, and it generally feels like conservative politians are never held accountable by their media bubble.
This is what Allan Lichtman says who created the 13 keys to the whitehouse
Fortunately, it is election year, so Trump cares.
Unfortunately Trump is just focused on the stock market right now, and not on the number of deaths.
Could have sworn that this was a Vox article at some point, that neither choice was a very safe one, but Biden is the old reliable, and Bernie is the electric hotrod, and that's why they've both stayed in compared to people who tried to moderate the two.
Can someone riddle me why no one seems to care that Biden is showing signs of mental decline? Some serious gaffes that kind of indicate he's not nearly as lucid as we'd like the president to be, and the polls favor him over Sanders? What? Does the public not know about that, as implied by pro-sanders subreddits? Or do they just not care? Or has reddit lied to me and it actually isn't all that bad? I expect Biden to get torn apart by Trump over these things. Sanders is a bit harder to catch.
I do not know if Biden had a speech impediment/stutter or not, but to your last point: Here is the clip of him making that exact statement.
Couple of thing that I want to point out:
(I am only making the above points to the clip in question. I do not know if he suffered from stuttering in the past or as a child.)
I apologize for replying without reading the article.
I do hope people have a conversation about stuttering and hope it is not ridiculed.
However, in this case, I feel like Biden supporters seem to be using the fact he suffers from stuttering to cover any and all of his gaffes.
This has already lead to a trend of people correlating Dementia with Stuttering on social media. This is not good.
Stuttering also does not make people say completely made up phrases like "Lying-dog-faced pony soldier" or incoherent phrases like "I am a caucus".
People make gaffes and people in the spotlight are unfortunate to have those gaffes recorded and saved by the internet. However, I think people should stop using the narrative that he is just stuttering when he is making these kind of gaffes.
Neither I nor anyone not close to Biden/His physicians know if he is actually suffering from Dementia or not. It is not an easy thing to diagnose in a 30 minute check-up with a physician either, especially if it is in early stages.
Nor, should people be trying to build a narrative he has dementia from video clips of his. I really wish people would pay more attention to the candidate's policies than spending time on these kind of things.
(However, If Biden is in fact suffering from Dementia, I (emphasis on I) think it is his responsibility to the people of US as a public servant to step-down or at least nominate someone else)
In the context of this original-post, Trump mocking Biden and mock-stuttering (thanks to the narrative that has been built already), is only going to give us a clip similar to him mocking Rubio for sweating. Unfortunately, his base will also eat it up.
(I do not want to bring up my own personal experiences with stuttering, but once again, the clip you mentioned above, does not look like him stuttering, nor him using a learned stutter avoidance mechanism. But, I am not a native english speaker, so stutter avoidance in english may be quite different. I do not know. This statement is also just my opinion.)
My best friend has a stutter, and it manifests in interesting ways. He says that he often chooses odd vocabulary choices because he knows/feels he will stutter on certain words. Do you ever experience that?
Yes, I do have words I am more comfortable with than others and I have grown to use words I am more comfortable with more frequently, often times, even if the meaning I wanted conveyed could've been more effective with another word.
Kind of comes with the territory of electing the naked Democratic machine, I guess. Trump seems to have inverted the whole "Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line" truism, so my guess is that there's going to be a whole lot more "this is fining" from Democrats since Biden is pretty much the nominee at this point, and they're on a unity kick.
I think people just really haven't seen it. In the televised debates to date, Biden's only really had to speak for 1min 15sec at a time--and even then he'll cut himself off. There are several compilations of his major brain malfunctions going around the internet, but these don't get any play on TV at all--but they will in the general.
The Sunday debate could change things if he has a major malfunction on TV.
IMO many people here are out of touch and don't understand US politics as much as they think they do (look at the sheer amount of Bernie support in past threads and compare it to how well he's done in the primary). Biden is beating his polling expectations and spending almost no money doing so. States that were thought to be favorable to Sanders haven't been so. Most people in the US are still moderates and they are comfortable with Biden.
On top of that, turnout has been significantly higher than 2016; which shows a great trend for the general election. Biden is an absolutely known quantity. He's gaffe prone and getting old, but he signals a return to normalcy many are wanting for, and after 2016 and the Trump administration's constant scandals, most voters don't seem to care about things that might affect Biden.
They're polling for him in the primary because they think he's "electable", however safe is usually boring, and boring loses elections. We didn't win against Bush with John Kerry, we didn't win against Trump with Hillary, and I suspect we won't win against Trump with Biden.
I don't think that conventional wisdom applies anymore after 2016.
The massively increased turnout is direct proof that people are willing to show for Biden, and it's a great indicator for the general election.
The idea that the older generation can carry this through on their own, despite young people being far greater in number is something that we have yet to see in any democrat election. New events can happen, however the new surprising events that we have seen don't seem to be aiding the older generation.
If young people voted in the numbers that mattered, we wouldn't be in this position, but here we are, and turnout as a whole vastly surpasses 2016 and it greatly favored Biden, not Bernie.
It's really a testament to how unpopular Clinton was.
It's quite frankly scary to me that when confronted with the idea that Biden won in a legitimate election the only fallback is "Well, voters didn't really want him, if condition we would have Sanders". This is the stuff that undermines our democracy.
Voters did really want Biden over Sanders. Sucks for those of us that support Sanders but that is just the reality of the situation. The US as a whole isn't ready for Sanders yet, despite his major support among the younger voters.