Biden wasn’t just selected. People voted for him from a pool of 20-ish candidates in the democratic race. Yes, Biden is soft. He is not an entertainer. He probably has many missing qualities that Trump had. However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.
Out of the 20 candidates, Biden was the most likely to defeat Trump. He is a realist compared to the other candidates. People realized that and voted for him. If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.
I feel it’s so easy to live in a Democratic bubble in Washington state. I guess same goes to California. Middle America thinks in a very very different way than we do.
Saying that Bernie was cheated isn’t exactly right but also not exactly wrong. The entire news media apparatus beat him down with a lot of extremely bad faith questions. “Do you support confiscating everyone’s guns?” “Ok so do you think guns are great and everyone should have them?” kinda thing.
That may be half of the problem, but the other half is that I think most people think Bernie was just over promising and that they could never have socialized health care, even though most everyone else has it. Much in the same way that the UK couldn’t imagine a country without socialized healthcare, thus voting in Boris Johnson, the US can’t imagine a country with it. We’re just completely stuck. It’s a shame.
> However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.
It is extremely notable that Biden is the first candidate in ~30 years to win the presidency and have what I'd call a "serious" career in US Federal politics.
There is circumstantial but somewhat compelling evidence that American's don't like Congressional experience. Congress is despised, their wins are thin, their lies are large and their missteps catastrophic.
There is zero evidence that Biden has had any type of mental decline. He has battled a stutter for his entire life. His stumbles in his public speaking appearances are almost assuredly related to his speech impediment and not an issue with intelligence or coherence.
The fact that HNers are saying Biden has clear dementia is so embarrassing. At best they're mistaking his speech impediment for cognitive decline, which is a perception they should fix since it is unfair. At worst, they have fallen for falsehoods and propaganda.
He absolutely has visible decline, compare youtube videos of him from 2016 vs 2020. Obviously, 4 years make difference at his age, but you can easily see how he struggles maintaining even simple conversations, which cannot be explained by abovementioned 4 years. I mean Sanders is of the same age as Biden and he did not decline nearly as much in 4 years, I; say barely changed. There is something wrong with the dude, and lots of people see it.
I've watched Biden live multiple times. He is not as skilled an orator as Obama was, and he indeed clearly has a speech impediment. None of that means dementia.
Either you fell for the old "youtube conspiracy hole", or you're seeing what you want to see.
I like Biden more than Bernie or Trump, and he's not wrong. His then vs now speech and debate performance is clearly not the same. He doesn't have dementia, but he's a lot slower and comes across as less intelligent than before, which is to be expected for a man his age.
It takes a lot of work and persistent energy to overcome a speech impediment. It will often return at times whenever that energy is sapped such as when tired, stressed, drunk, or yes even when aging. There is no evidence this is anything else.
I remember Biden and Sanders in 2016; Biden actually appeared to be speaking more eloquently than Sanders. Sanders did not change like at all, and Biden - he appears to have declined very significantly, as if if he had stroke or something. Perhaps dementia.
I'd bet it has more to do with how little sleep candidates running for president tend to get. I'll be interested to see if he perks up after a few nights of really good rest. He can take a short break while his transition team does most of the legwork and brings him decisions to be made. He has no need to do any rallies for a bit.
His interview at his home was bad. He was way slower than he was in 2016. Something began to happen to Biden somewhere in 2018. He looks like 2 different people now and then. I do not understand animosity towards what I am saying: he clearly appears having decline, and if some hard-core democrats are willing to give and believe in excuses for that, many regular people are not.
If there were a candidate who was going to demolish Trump, as you suggest, they should’ve easily demolished Biden for all the reasons others have mentioned about him being completely uninspiring.
>The same was said of Hillary when she "beat" Bernie. Same was said of Biden who barely squeaked out wins in key states.
Biden is winning those key states with more votes than Trump did in 2016, and the margins are going to continue to increase.
This narrative is driven almost entirely by the fact several of these states are now allowed to count mail in votes until the start of election day or after polls closed on ED. Without that, the narrative would be talking about Biden's decisive victory in all these states.
Trump also got way more votes than he did in 2016, so that stat is kinda meaningless. Biden could have done better than 2016 Trump and still lost.
GA and WI are probably going to end up with less than 1% difference between the two candidates, and PA might end up at 1 - 2%. Those aren't huge margins regardless of how they got counted.
Every single member of the House progressive caucus in swing districts won re-election.
Everyone knows that Biden isn’t going to follow through on any of the progressive parts of his party platform. We already had eight years of the the Obama bait-and-switch with him as VP. He’s expressed more interest in appointing actual Republicans to his cabinet than doing any of this.
> Drug decriminalization and minimum wage increases are in the party platform already.
Crucially, though, voter support for progressive policies and for Biden did not necessarily correlate — most significantly in Florida, which Biden lost and where the state Constitution was amended to raise the minimum wage.
That seems to have hinged on south Florida. Bernie would not have done well there given his comments on Cuba and Venezuela. In fact Bernie's comments may be the reason even Biden lost there.
That’s the narrative, but Biden consistently distanced himself from those comments (“Listen, I beat the socialist!”) and the GOP seems to think that anyone to the left of Mitt Romney is a communist. I think Biden’s intentional lack of attention to Latinx voters did more harm than any actual Democratic position.
Biden's loss with hispanics was due to his campaign's explicit choice to not target hispanics. It has more to do with bad strategy than what another candidate said or did.
Out of the 20 candidates, Biden was the most likely to defeat Trump. He is a realist compared to the other candidates. People realized that and voted for him. If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.
I feel it’s so easy to live in a Democratic bubble in Washington state. I guess same goes to California. Middle America thinks in a very very different way than we do.