I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
I’m voting for Biden so don’t give me shit about being a Leftist helping Trump win. But if he does win, remember that Dems had a million chances to run someone better and this is what they let happen. It’ll be their fault if we get more of the bad man.
The dems suspended the primaries in a number of states and more or less coronated Biden.
The Dems believe in democracy only when against the GOP but do not believe in democracy when deciding matters inside their party.
The “Democratic” Party my ass cheeks. Clowns and hypocrites.
Agreed. The coordinated pullout to sabotage Bernie in 2020 was shameful. “Vote for us or you’ll be sorry when the GOP takes over” is all they offer.
They sabatoged him in 2016, too… 2020 they had learned how to just do it better.
Right before Super Tuesday they got scared the DNC types made calls and then it was over.
The neo-liberals who took over the party completely after Reagan would rather lose to Trump than let Sanders, or Warren, or AOC, or anyone else who’d actually even slightly joke at the possibility of forcing the billionaire class to finally start contributing instead of leeching.
I will vote for Biden, just like I did in 2020, and Hillary in 2016… but they won’t change and if they lose they just blame the left anyway.
If they won’t change and they’ll just blame you when they loose why are you voting for them?
Because they aren’t the only ones, because Trump and any R is worse.
The Ds may cut off a finger, but the Rs will eat your whole goddamn family and make you watch.
Both suck… but sitting out or voting for anyone who has no chance is inviting them to feast.
Do you think it’s worth it to help the democrats win rather than build an alternative and show them where to shift their platform towards?
That’s not feasible in a FPTP system. Best you can do is keep voting for the least bad between the two “real” candidates and shift the Overton window overtime.
Or have a violent revolution, but that’s a bit more difficult to coordinate.
It’s literally what every third party campaign in our lifetimes has done.
Perot 92 pushed both parties to actually address nafta instead of sweeping it under the rug, Nader 2000 forced the democrats to run left in 04 and 08.
I saw these things happen with my own eyes and if anecdote isn’t enough for you they’re both well studied!
Build an alternative in… checks calendar, 4 months that can gain more votes than the active democratic nominee and beat the stir mad republican candidate whose supporters are voting for out of pure spite. This comment is either in bad faith or you literally have no idea how the election works. Best case here isn’t even winning, it’s taking as few votes from the sane candidates as possible because all this’ll do is split the democrat voting block.
At what point does a person recognize and admit that Biden or trump, we lose?
If someone is only going to do the least they possibly can, vote in the election, when should they stop trying to pick the least harmful winner and instead start working towards an alternative?
If all a person will do is vote then is t it most important to record their policy preferences in the only way that can’t be glossed over, lied about or deepfaked?
You already gave up. Don’t try to blame it on the time left being only 4 months. If you’re willing to for for a genocide enabler you’re already commenting in bad faith.
As long as the US has a two-party system where the third-party mechanically ONLY acts as a spoiler candidate - see Ross Perot for Bush in 92, Nader, Stein, whoever you want to fucking name… whichever THAT 3rd party candidate is most closely aligned with are the ones that get screwed the most.
Voting third-party is about as stupid a fucking thing you can do outside of not voting at all.
Voting third-party is the worst kind of dipshit gesture - like raising your middle finger to flip someone off while a helicopter blade is spinning inches above you. Voting 3rd party means you effectively give another vote to the candidate you want the least.
If the US had ranked-choice voting, then voting for a 3rd party would make sense, but both parties know that this helps them stay in power and so as long as they keep it the way it is, our ONLY choice with a demonstrably positive outcome of any kind is to try and fight super fucking hard in the primaries and hope to God that we can squeeze someone through before dark corporate PAC money missiles or the ring-leaders in the DNC recognize what they are before being able to stop them.
It’s how we got AOC, and a few others from the squad… and it’s how we were even able to see Bernie get to push Biden just a TINY bit more left than Biden would have been otherwise.
If you want to tell them to fuck off… then show up and volunteer and phone bank and knock on doors for the best candidates you can find DURING THE PRIMARIES.
If someone really awesome makes it through to the general… then great!
But if they don’t, hopefully they were strong enough presence (thanks to brave volunteer supporters who wanted to say “fuck you” to the shitty party leaders) to force the right-leaning Democratic members to lean a little bit more leftward than they otherwise would have been (like Bernie helped make Biden do… as much as he could).
Don’t bring Perot 92 up if you really want to believe in spoilers. After everyone freaked out and made that accusation his campaign was shown to have only decreased Clinton’s margin of victory in the electoral college.
It seems counterintuitive but remember that Clinton ran conservative to scoop up republicans who were mad hw bush lied about taxes.
Perot 92 also refutes the idea that third parties can only act as spoilers because perots nafta platform drug Clinton and hw bush’s positions on the trade agreement into the public view kicking and screaming. It’s the reason there was no argument from anyone that we’d need to replace it after it expired before Clinton’s first term was even over.
Political parties aren’t stupid. They have people whose whole education and job is all about knowing how to pick up just enough votes in particular districts in order to win. If you always vote for them no matter what then why would they adopt your platform and policies when they could tack right on the border and pick up a district in Pennsylvania?
You went out of your way to describe third party votes in a lot of flowery language, let me describe third party votes in concrete language:
Third party votes, like all votes, are a record of exactly what positions a party needs to take in order to win each district. If you vote for a candidate who is imprisoning people at the border and funding and denying a genocide, you are telling all the political parties that will spend years poring over the recorded votes “you can lock migrants up and supply and deny a genocide and I’ll still vote for you”.
Stop doing that.
Vote for a candidate from a party with a platform that reflects your values and politics and reap the real documented benefits of it instead of throwing your support behind your abusers.
It’s not a “fuck you”, it’s not a middle finger, it’s telling politicians in the literal only language they listen to what they have to do to get your support.
Right, stick to what’s not working, voting Democrat. 🥾👅
History, procedure, common sense, and logic all said that was what was going to happen. They didn’t cancel the primaries. They never started the primaries. A lot of states started holding primaries assuming the incumbent wasn’t running again. But that was never the case. Biden never said that he was only going to run the one time and not again. People in his orbit discussed that he might do that. But that was nothing that he said or that they ever committed to.
You and I are welcome to believe this what he should have done. But historically if an incumbent decides to run for another Term. No party ever Has primaried them. We can criticize Biden on not telegraphing that well enough. That’s fair. We can absolutely criticized Biden on things like that. But policy-wise and as far as his administration goes. He’s been fairly popular and consequential. Despite the one really big issue which seems to be all people want to talk about ignoring the fascist in the room.
And this lack of pragmatism and adherence to “tradition” when the republicans openly don’t stick by those rules will cause the Dems to contribute to the coming of fascist amerika
Fascists support genocide so you must be taking about supporting Biden?
THANK YOU!!! MORE TRUMP WILL BE THE DIRECT RESULT OF DOGSHIT LEADERSHIP IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!
Are you a leftist that denies that there is a genocide going on in Gaza?
No. I’m a Leftist who’s outraged that my government is funding said genocide while actively denying it’s happening.
Then how could you possibly vote for Biden? He only once held up funding, for like two days, before the heat got too high for him and he relented. He’s marginally than Trump better but voting for him is still supporting genocide.