I don’t want to harsh everyone’s high too much so I think the majority of this conversation can happen after the election. However, it’s important enough to talk about it that I wanted to bring this up to highlight it and we can put a collective pin in it to address after the election. What’s my issue?
My issue is that we (meaning many Democrats, media, regular people and billionaire donors) just sabotaged the presumptive Democratic nominee who won the nomination process. Now before you get all up in arms on why you feel this was justified (or not justified) I’d like to remind everyone that there was a great deal of disagreement on the justifications. But even if we all agreed it was justified, we still just broke the process and it may not be justified the next time someone tries this. And they will try.
Let’s start by clarifying what has happened. I’m amenable to justifiable changes in these description as I’m not interested in making a point so much as to start to address the pandora’s box which was just opened.
- Joe Biden won the primary in 2020 and everyone had full knowledge of his age.
- Everyone then also knew there was a possibility of him not living through his full term (this is true of any person, but his age range has increased chances)
- Everyone knew then he could seek a second term. (I recognize there is debate on what he meant by being a “transition president” but whatever he meant by it he was legally allowed to seek a second term)
- In 2023, when the primary process was beginning, Biden ran in the primary and was contested by two people whom most people did not consider serious challengers. For brevity from here on out I will call this “unchallenged” but when I use that word I mean no challengers of a level sufficient to create doubt in who was going to win the primary.
- After the primary process was (mostly) completed Biden challenged the other guy to a debate.
- Let’s just say the debate did not go well…
- After the debate there were a variety of opinions on whether Biden was mentally competent.
- The Cabinet and VP did not invoke the 25th amendment so I will contend that however severe some people considered Biden’s mental state, it did not rise to a level requiring that action in the opinion of the people who, by law, get to make that determination.
- Biden proceeded to make many public meetings and showed a level of knowledge retention far above most ordinary people (see the NATO presser)
- The debate around Biden semi-bifurcated into:
- He’s not competent enough
- He’s not capable of winning
- As most people claimed up and down they would vote for a ham sandwich over Trump, I’m not going to dwell anymore regarding not competent enough.
- After the NATO presser specifically, the major claim for pressuring Biden to step down came from an electability argument.
- The electability argument, on both sides of it, was entirely subjective. Polling, what-ifs, and authoritative “I know for a fact people will...” encapsulated the entire argument on BOTH sides. We simply will never know if Biden could have beaten Trump or not. If you would like to argue this point please let me know the scores of this year’s World Series, the MVP, and put $10,000 in escrow to be given to me if you are wrong. I thought so.
- As people tried to pressure Biden into quitting there was most likely a negative impact upon his campaign. It will be hard to prove why polls moved in whichever direction when they did (and whether they were anywhere near accurate enough). So this is a debatable point, but I think we can at least all understand the logic of a significant portion of our own party calling for the candidate to step down will most likely have a negative impact.
- Assuming a negative impact, the pressure campaign becomes self-reinforcing as the candidate’s polling and ratings will suffer making it difficult to pull out of the loop.
Okay, why does this matter? Because in 2028 Kamala Harris will most likely be seeking a second term and we now have precedence for launching a coordinated campaign to pressure the candidate to step down if they have bad polling. Think this is far fetched? Let’s look at two scenarios.
Scenario 1, uncontested Primary:
In this scenario Harris has a successful enough presidency that no serious contenders emerge to contest the primary as is generally typical with an incumbent President running for reelection. Let’s hypothesize that after most of the primary voting is done, her numbers begin to go down for whatever normalish reason. We then have a trigger point where Harris makes a stumble which generates a Biden-doom-loop. Maybe she puts on a funny looking tank helmet, or a “scream” is taken out of context or simply used to smear her. Or maybe she has a medical issue like a minor, treatable cancer. This trigger creates a narrative in the media that she can no longer win the election, or is unable to fulfill her presidential duties.
Point 1 against her: She has the perception of being unable to properly serve in office (however flimsy).
Point 2: She has never won a “contested” primary. Considering all the arguments I heard justifying what happened to Biden based on him having an uncontested primary this WILL be an argument.
Point 3: Due to unhappy Democrats voicing their displeasure, her polling and donations begin to suffer even more and we’re into the Biden-doom-loop.
She is asked to resign and all hell breaks loose. If her VP is not popular and the opponents are prepared (knowing 2024), then even the VP may not survive the whisper campaign.
Scenario 2, contested Primary:
In this scenario Harris is challenged from either the left or the right by someone who has impassioned (or astro-turfed) followers. She wins the primary but then starts suffering in the polls and has a trigger event (per above).
Now, per the acrimony in 2016 plus the precedence established in 2024, the followers of the challenger start the Biden-doom-loop using whatever gaffe or problem is sufficient to “justify” attacking the presumptive nominee. She may have won a contested primary, but now the challenger gets a second chance at her. And what prevents a third challenger of attacking the second if the second manages to oust the first?
Suddenly our primary season becomes pointless. Millions of people end up voting for a candidate who then has to fend off whisper campaigns from their own party after the issue is supposedly decided. Sounds far fetched? We just witnessed it.
We simply seem to have gotten away with it due to everyone coalescing behind Harris in quick order. Some of you will tell me it could never happen again because this was so unique. We have a different appraisal of who we are up against then. I see no end of amoral individuals with too much wealth willing to astro-turf such an operation at a moment's notice and next time they will have a follow up plan in place. All it takes is a single screwup by Harris over a 4 month (or so) period to create the opening. And there will be plenty of bad actors trying to generate such a moment.
I’m excited we have Harris and have avoided a chaotic resolution to this ordeal. But what just happened is not okay. I’m happy to stick a pin in it for now, but after this election (which Harris will win), we need to come back and address this issue. Otherwise we are inviting our real opponents (oligarchs foreign and domestic) to try again in 2028.
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Update. There have been a few criticisms of the article along the lines of “why bring this up now?” And “why start the argument and claim its for later?” The reason being is that the process is broken. As I predicted a week ago, the people who were rocking the boat to get Biden out now don’t want the boat rocked anymore once they’ve won. It’s a do as I say, not do as I do situation. The Biden out people got to vocally express all their stuff as loudly as they wanted even though it was damaging Biden’s campaign. But now that they have won dissent is forbidden and counter productive. It’s hypocritical.
Well, I don’t live in a codependent household where disagreement with the loudmouth is all hushed up for the “sake of peace”. I live in a household where we strive for fairness, equality, and that people’s concerns are heard and heeded to the best of our ability. We work through disagreement instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or pressing people to just clam up and hold it in.
I’m sorry if you feel threatened so much by a critique of the process we just went through that you need to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend nothing is wrong. We become stronger when we objectively confront our disagreements. Many of you refuse to even acknowledge there is a problem which worries me the most. You’re trying to gaslight us into thinking it was just a few kind words with Joe and he agreed to step down instead of an orchestrated plan to damage his campaign.
I am fully aware that further dissension is even more destructive to our chances after YOU have caused us so much damage from dissension already. I get you think you are correct. But that doesn’t give you the right to do what you just did and not expect pushback. I get to disagree with you and I get to vocalize it too. I will be bringing up this discussion back up in December, January or February provided we are all not running for our lives and there is a democracy left to argue about.
At that point I hope we can discuss a better process we can advocate for. A process that is more fair and democratic than what we have just gone through. I assume you want a fair and democratic process too, so it doesn’t even have to be an acrimonious process if we truly share the same goal.
