We had this debate months ago, and with people now on the "replace Biden" train following his trainwreck debate performance yesterday, I'm gonna talk some realism into you guys again.
I never liked Biden. I mean, I've come to tolerate him and think he's okay, but I never wanted him for president. The DNC forced him on us. And I voted for Hawkins. But, as things evolved, I felt a need to defend him with great urgency, Trump and the GOP are increasingly dangerous, and the democratic situation is deteriorating fast. It's been deteriorating. This entire time, from October 2023 on, Biden has NOT ONCE reached even a 50-50 probability of winning in my models. It was normally like 30-70 in Trump's favor or worse.
There have been calls to replace Biden for months. Cenk Uygur, the host of TYT, ran an entire campaign against him on this idea. Progressives have been wanting him replaced for months. We wanted a fair and open primary with candidates like Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson making their case against him. But, nothing stuck. nothing gains ANY traction. Biden won overwhelmingly in the primaries, by such a margin that no one had a chance. It wasnt even close. Gone were the 45-55 days of Bernie 2016. Gone were the 35-65 days of Bernie 2020. How about 2% of the vote? 3%? While Biden walks away with 85%+, often 90%+.
Even worse, when DNC alternatives to Biden were approved, they did far worse. Kamala Harris did anywhere from 2-6 points worse than Biden. We went from a roughly 31% chance in November 2023 to a 16% chance if we replaced him with Harris. If we replaced him with Newsom, we were talking a 0% chance as state level polling gave Trump overwhelming double digit leads.
As such, I've given up on replacing Biden months ago. it's a nice idea, but right now, we got a 24% chance of a Biden victory. If the scaling remains similar, his replacement expects to have at most a 12-13% chance. We go from 1 in 4 to 1 in 8.
If people REALLY want Biden replaced, polling companies better get off their butts and start polling people on this matter. And I'll follow the data, but so far, the data suggests to me replacing Biden would lead to a far worse outcome than sticking where we are. I know that this isn't an outcome many are comfortable with, but you'd need to get a new candidate out there, and hope that they stick and hope the voters go for them. And they very well might not. We would be losing whatever incumbency advantage we have by throwing Biden away and as it stands that advantage is more valuable than his age is a liability.
We're literally about 4 months out from election day. This is, effectively, going into the final stretch. The conventions are typically in July, although the democratic convention is in August. If the delegates and superdelegates go for someone else, they'd only have about 2.5 months to get their candidate to the finish line. As George W. Bush said in 2004, you dont change horses mid stream. We're crossing the fricking river at this point. We could've entertained this discussion in late 2023, or early 2024 even when primaries were actually going on, but doing this now would be chaos for the dems. And unlike the GOP side, we wouldnt even get a polling bump for ditching our candidate. Sure, replacing Trump with say, Haley, would give the GOP a huge bump. But replacing Biden with harris or someone else is likely only to hurt.
That's just what the numbers say. I'm leaving my own personal opinions out of it, because my heart says draft Dean Phillips or Nina Turner or something. But if you wanna convince me that replacing Biden is a good idea, I need hard data to justify it. Until then we're stuck with the 82 year old guy who looks like he just escaped from the nursing home. That's just how it is.
And yes, I still blame the DNC for this. They forced Hillary on us in 2016, they forced Biden on us in 2020, they didnt allow us to have an actual FAIR primary in 2024. They just decided they wanted what they wanted and seem to systematically try to run progressives out of office. And their leadership is what brought us to this point. I do 100% blame them for everything. Bunch of rich out of touch old people who are perpetually stuck in the 1990s. It's not 1992 any more, and they're not in their 40s and 50s, but their 70s and 80s. And this centrist strategy of theirs is a fricking failure in the modern environment. Sorry, not sorry.
But yeah. Still, we're stuck with this guy, and we gotta rally behind him or we're risking our democracy falling to the fascists and religious nutcases, so...what can we do about it now?
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