could she blow it badly by choosing the wrong running mate?
Hope she says nothing about guns. Everytime I hear a dem bring it up I can hear muricans running to vote gop.
Yep there are a lot of Republican single issue voters, guns rights and abortion bans are two of the biggest of those issues.
But damned if the Democrats don’t do it to themselves nearly every time, I’m surprised Biden didn’t.
They should just all campaign on “read my lips: no new gun reforms” just to get the votes
Like they want to win. Seriously all they need to say they will be focusing on abortion rights and drop gun restrictions for the time being and bam win.
As someone who’s extremely left leaning, it’s so goddamn infuriating, because there are so many pro-gun Dem leaning voters that wind up voting ® down the ticket, almost solely because the Democratic candidate went on an idiotic speech about AK-15s and their 30 caliber per second clipazines. It’s not like the anti-gun Dems they’re pandering to are going to vote Republican because the Democratic candidate said nothing about guns during their campaign.
It’s literally one single issue that the Dems could just not say a word about. Literally, no work involved. No campaigning, canvassing, or fundraising. Just don’t bring it up, and it would massively improve their odds in some of the most critical swing states. But no, they just have to virtue signal to the areas that are basically ultramarine blue, and it fucks them over every goddamn time.
She could completely blow it by picking the wrong running mate. For instance if she picked Hillary, it would be over. That isn’t going to happen though and she has good options for a running mate if they choose to accept.
People are high on her now because it’s refreshing news they won’t have to vote for Biden. We’ll see if the momentum can carry over into the election and if Kamala shoves her foot in her mouth. I don’t think she will inspire a lot of people to vote but Trump will inspire a lot of people to vote against him.
This is the one area where I’m optimistic. Of all her failings, she seems to present well.
I think she has more charisma than Hillary. I went to a Hillary speech once - smaller audience at a university, Obama-era - and while she’s a good and compelling speaker when speaking to her base, I think she’s prone to phrasing that’s too easily taken out of context out simply easily misinterpreted even in context. The famous example being, of course, when she told middle-America that she wanted to destroy their way of life and put them out of jobs. What she said was that she was going to shut down the coal industry, but that means different things to different people. Kamala is less prone to that, I think. And Hillary was hard to warm to, and I’m kind of a fan of hers.
But we haven’t really seen a lot from Kamala yet.
What I think she has in her favor:
- 4 years in the White House. That’s tremendously valuable experience, even if she was only a proxy and exigency case.
- She might draw support from law enforcement, who’ve been solidly in Camp Trump. She’s going to have to play that carefully, because she could also easily alienate another entire sector. If all she accomplishes is to drive a little wedge in there, that’d be a big win. If you look at polling, Trump leads in “tough on crime.” Kamala could shorten that lead.
- She’s a woman. Yeah, this is one of those big questions of whether it’ll hurt more than help, but there’s an ocean of women (and men) who are still furious about Hilary’s loss, and the fact that the USA is one of (maybe the only?) developed country which has never elected a woman leader. And she’s pro-women’s rights. If she can rally the feminist community, carefully, without alarming the misogynists (is that possible?) such that it becomes a club the One-Eared use against her… I think it’s a potential positive.
- She’s a woman of color. Hell, she has not only a black heritage, but Asian as well. I don’t really know how the mixed race thing plays; I’ve heard that it can hurt more than help. Again, it’s a card that, if she plays it carefully, could bring in a lot of votes. Shit, 5% of New Jersey residents are of south Asian heritage.
- So far, she’s a Middle-East wild card. You publicly support your boss, and her boss was Israel Über Alles. But we don’t know what position she’ll take when she’s making decisions. This gives her wiggle room. Frankly, I think openly supporting Palestine is political suicide - Israel has invested far too much in lobbying, and Palestine hasn’t; she’d lose more votes than she’d gain, despite the outrage on Lemmy about the genocide. But she at least has an opportunity to pick her own position that could offer hope to the victims in the West Bank, without giving Israel the finger and sending their vast financial resources in the US to Trump.
- The debate will be huge. She’ll need to learn from the mistakes in the format, and try to arrange something more debate-ish. But she’s hella sharper than Trump, and that’ll show if she gets good coaching. Look, everyone knows how Trump is going to present; it should be easy for some smart people to use that to maximize making him look more like an idiot. Maybe a little baiting, to get his ego talking more than his incoherent ranting full of dog-whistles. I don’t know, I’m not an expert. But Kamala can hire experts.
- Biden’s staff are incompetent boobs. They’ve mishandled this entire election cycle, giving him bad advice, and bad support. They’ve been so bad, it’s hard to believe they don’t have saboteurs in his cabinet. His performance at the debate? It’s like someone gave him Nyquil, when they should have given him amphetamines. Fuck, if there’s any time to risk a stimulant and pay the price tomorrow, it was at that fucking debate. Anyway, Kamala has an opportunity to hire her own West Wing team, and frankly, that alone can make or break her campaign. She needs a smart, savvy, experienced, and maybe a little devious and ruthless team, and she has a chance to hire them without it looking like she’s chaotically shuffling the deck like Trump’s term.
Look people shouldn’t vote based on heritage, or skin color, or gender - but they do, and you work with what you’ve got when the stakes are this high, and you’ve only got a few months to capture votes.
I think she has a lot going for her. We don’t even know if she’ll be the nominee; maybe someone stronger will win. I think Booker wouldn’t be a bad choice; he’s white, male, and young - that’s removes a lot of variables and is safer. But it it’s Kamala, I think she’s got a lot to work with. If she, or her team, can play her cards well.
I never liked reddit gold but this comment is a masterpiece worthy of it. I don’t really have anything to add because you basically covered it all, and each point is a 10/10 take.
I really hope you’re right, that she can play both sides on issues like law enforcement and the Situation (genocide) in Gaza to really swing those swing voters. I’d really like to know how much of this had been planned from the get-go and how much is really just the democrats scrambling for some semblance of control again. I’m not proud to admit I’m susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, but at a certain point you have to acknowledge that there are huge teams of people with aligned interests who have no job but to make sure that their political master plans have contingencies on contingencies. Politics used to look too coherent for it to be as disorganized as it has become.
I’m sure this was well planned given that Biden’s donors were threatening to withhold funds
Thank you!
TBH, when he was first elected, I thought this was the plan. Run the first term, give Harris huge exposure, make her a household name, basically a 4-year movie about how presidential she is… and then Biden bows out and Kamala is the heir apparent. Maybe with some luck break the 8/8 cycle and get 12 years of Democrats in the White House.
But then, nothing. Kamala disappeared, Biden was always in front. And then, Biden ran for a second term, costing valuable campaigning time, spending a ton of money on the wrong person (if your plan was to have her take over); the fiasco at the debate, which did the Democratic party no good, and then a further delay wasting more time before bowing out.
Maybe political strategists had some reason to play it this way - 3D chess. Maybe Biden had to stay large and in charge to get anything done in legislature. But it just looks fumbling, and wasting time, and why the hell wasn’t she given more face-time on behalf of the White House? That was 4 wasted years of publicity.
No, I don’t see it. This wasn’t their plan. Or, maybe it was, but Harris just polled so low they abandoned it. It wouldn’t have been a bad strategy. Ending a second term at 84? It’s, like, the most stressful, aging job in the world. You go in looking fresh-faced and youthful; come out looking like your grandfather.
I’m going with “scrambling” on this one.
I think when the dust settles people are going to realize it’s her race to lose. That should answer both questions.
It still boggles my mind that a 34-count convicted felon is even a presidential nominee. Such is the state of the education system in this country. sigh
How is that even legal. Smh.
The obvious answer is: because then it would be incredibly easy to target any “undesirable” (who just so happens to be politically active) and come up with a felony to charge them with.
Is it incredibly easy to charge people with felonies?
It is if you control the judiciary.
This makes sense. HOWEVER. That’s not really what’s happening here now, is it?
I find it mildly upsetting, to say the least, that if Ted Bundy or <insert serial killer> had decided to run for president for shitz and gigglez, they could’ve totally done it.
You can be upset, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to outlaw running for president as a criminal. Russia exists as a case study/prime example why even in modern times that founding wisdom holds.
It’s a problem because it’s not just Trump, it’s whole party that has gone way off the rails. Bundy could run but he wouldn’t win.
There’s only like 3 rules to becoming president and one is age and other is being an american. The bar is intentionally low.
Well, one of the rules is not committing treason or sedition and yet we’re still here, so that shows you how useful rules are
Because a president could then simply jail his opponents. If the people want to have a convicted felon as their president, in the spirit of democracy, nobody has the right to tell them that they can’t
According to the polls aggregated by 538, she does significantly better than Biden. But Trump still has the advantage in polling.
Does she have a chance? Yes
Could she blow it by a number of different items, including choosing a bad running mate? Yes.
Maybe she’ll eat arugula
This is a bad framing. As soon as the media can figure out a narrative, they’ll try to convince us she “blew it” by doing whatever.
The Democrats have an unusually deep bench right now. Honestly there’s probably at least 5 very high quality candidates for Veep. Another 5 won’t take it because they plan on running for Prez themselves and don’t want to backbench when their current gig is going so well.
The veep choice won’t be a problem.
Shouldn’t there be an actual primary now that the incumbent is out?
Ideally, but there’s essentially no chance that can be organized in time. The US is big. Biden should have just not run for a second term and let us have the primary as is normal.
Maybe this was all planned so they could shoehorn Harris in there.
It’s possible, but I doubt it. If that were the case I’m pretty confident some aid or something would eventually talk and we’d find out. That’d be pretty scummy.
I have long trusted, alongside polls, Professor Allan Lichtman’s system of keys to the White House. The system uses thirteen true/false questions and asserts that American voters vote for president based on the governing performance of the incumbent party. It has been right 11 times in a row, if you believe that the Supreme Court allowed Bush to win even if recounts were going to turn it in Gore’s favor. It correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 victory along a number of other upsets.
Per this system, Harris has a less lenient board but is still probably favored at this point. She has lost incumbency and unfortunately does not bring charisma (defined as broad appeal past their party). Nonetheless, if the remaining undecided keys fall as they stand now, she would win in October.
In my opinion, her candidacy could be better than Biden’s if this allows Biden to focus on securing a ceasefire in Gaza instead of campaigning. This would allow a foreign military success, making up for the loss of incumbency. She may also hurt RFK’s campaign if there are a good deal of protest voters who are simply tired of two elderly men (and thus picked a slightly younger elderly man).
Because of this system, I was very very worried about Harris replacing Biden. Professor Lichtman’s streak is unparalleled and he has little skin in the game since he is not a pollster doing this for a living. Thus it’s difficult to see it as pure luck. Lichtman himself believes it’s still winnable though, and that has been relieving to hear.
Outside of the system, I can see how Harris could win. She polls better. She’s younger and can be a reasonably decent speaker. She’s certainly more exciting than Biden, and has more energy and time to campaign. With the media focused on her now, she could get her message out quickly and powerfully. I can see her winning by a significant margin.
If I’m honest, I’m not totally optimistic, but there are many factors in her favor. I would’ve felt better if she had the charismatic appeal of Kelly or Whitmer. It’s fine though. Her strengths of being a coherent non-fascist that has never been found legally liable for rape should help separate her from her opponent, and she’ll demolish him in a debate if he develops the courage to show up.
The one thing I’m kinda worried about, that I just learned yesterday, is her tendency to do “word salad” when she just doesn’t know what to say. So we get things like (paraphrasing) “the importance of the passage of time is important, for the passage of time is the passage of time and it’s important.”
She tends to do that a lot apparently :/
I have to say I am too. She’s had a few incidents of odd speech patterns; if not this, the poor soundbites like weirdly explaining things (“Russia is a country” or “do not come”). Trump’s word salad is so normalized that he won’t be scrutinized for it. There will probably be sexist comments on it as well.
I hope she gets new speechwriters and a bit of training on what to say instead. It’s probably a lot to hope that she can quickly override this pattern, given it’s likely something she’s done all her life, but her duties as VP are relatively minimal and the campaign can afford speech training. She’s better than Trump either way, but being consistently on point would be useful
Betting odds are 1:1.5 for Trump and 1:3 for Harris while Trump is slightly ahead in the polls. I’d still think it’s a toss up since the Democratic election machine is going to kick into high gear and they have a pretty good youth angle by saying Trump is a relic of the past.
The Trump campaign has been saying Biden is too old forever, and Trump is barely younger. If anyone on their base actually bought that rhetoric then it’s probably going to fly back in their faces now. I have (maybe too much) hope that this can be turned around quickly.
She’s got a decent chance. She was already on the ticket, but I feel like she is less known than Biden.
I hope she goes with a safe VP pick like Pete Buttigieg.
I would absolutely love if she picked Pete. I’m not sure how likely it is that will happen though.
She does not have a good enough history to drum up the support necessary. Popular image matters, money matters, big media matters most. She doesn’t have it.
Anectodally - the young people I knew who were going to sit out the presidential election because they were so mad it was just two ancient white men, or were mad because Gaza, now say they will vote for “whoever the democrats run”.
Which is only two people, but she has at least some votes that otherwise would have gone to nobody.
I personally know one individual who was going to write-in RFK who will now be voting Harris. So far, it’s definitely having a positive effect.
Same with my brother because he thought Biden was too old. But he will vote for Harris. Realistically a vote for 81 year old Biden would have been a vote for Harris anyway, but I guess this is more straightforward.
I think she has a good a chance as anyone and I doubt any running mate pick would blow it unless it was like that one guy that was a dem and went independent because hes basically a republican.
You mean the certified piece of shit: Senator Joe Manchin.
Sounds right.
I wouldn’t agree with the choice but I could see the logic in picking the rightest, most obstructionist Dem they could find as the running mate as sort of a bulwark against “radical leftist!” attacks.
Kamala has the charisma of a potato, so it’s not yet clear how well she’ll do. She has a few sketchy things in her past as the former California attorney general which will likely come up (taking bribes to drop serious charges).
Thanks troll
Do you have a source for such a bold claim?
Do you have a source for such a bold claim?
As a matter of fact, I do.
Steve Mnuchin and OneWest Bank were, according to a memo obtained and reported on by The Intercept, guilty of “widespread misconduct” in the form of over 1,000 legal violations. The memo was the result of a year-long investigation and it asserts that OneWest Bank operated to intentionally boost foreclosures. The Campaign for Accountability called for a federal investigation of Mnuchin and OneWest Bank claiming they used “potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes.”
Yet despite internal memos explicitly mentioning numerous prosecutable offenses by Mnuchin and co., then California Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to prosecute.
She’s never given an explanation for her decision and Mnuchin later donated $2,000.00 to Harris’ campaign. It was his only donation to a democratic candidate.
Will I vote for her if she’s the Democrat nominee for president? Yes, I think this election is far too important to abstain from voting. Is Harris a flawed candidate with a sketchy past? Also yes.
