Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.

All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden’s inability to walk down 2-3 steps.

I don’t know where this idea that Trump has “no chance” comes from.

Whelp… Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey’s Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We’re going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump’s, they’re going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

Polls have significant predictive power, especially when you poll reportedly and/or aggregate them. Which is why all political campaigns, R or D, spend literally millions running their own polling. Moreover, it’s now July, the first convention is literally coming up within days, so the excuse of being “far out from the election” no longer holds.

Okay, this settles it: Biden is gonna be the nominee. Nobody else on the Dem side is gonna want to be the sacrificial lamb going up against Trump after today.

Are you being wilfully pedantic, or do you not know that it’s possible to tell someone is ahead in a contest?

Lots of people seem keen to jump to this being staged. That makes zero sense: Trump was already winning before this, especially with Biden (his preferred opponent) looking to hang on to the nomination.

Bernie isn’t a Democrat most of the time (not sure if he is one this year…), represents a state that will remain safely deep blue even in the event of a Trump landslide, and is far removed from the constituencies where voter support for Biden is cratering. So it’s not surprising for him to have this opinion.

Not to mention his vested interest in the idea that politicians should remain in power long into old age.

Pick the old man as nominee, and you’ll get the Nazis in January.

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

That’s the point. Biden’s legacy is most likely a Trump second term, alongside a Republican Senate and House. Even if he wins by dumb luck, it would still have been a bad decision, like a bad poker play that wins.

Suppose the “best case” scenario for Biden materializes. He hangs on, remains the nominee, and pulls an upset against Trump in November.

Even in this scenario, I’d argue that his legacy is irrevocably tarnished. His decision in 2022/2023 to run would still be a terrible decision, like a poker player betting the whole pot on a horrible hand and winning by dumb luck. His staff would still be complicit in lying to the world. It would be the shabbiest victory imaginable… and all that before the question of how he lasts another four years in office.

This makes sense. Frankly the Teamsters union leadership would be negligent in not trying to court Trump. There’s a political realignment going on right now as more working class people are shifting to the Republicans, and urban upper-middle class to the Democrats. If union leadership refuses to budge, they may find their membership drifting away.

Biden is declining!

The main lesson is “don’t be an incumbent”.

They sprayed him orange like Trump, lol.

Seems like the interview didn’t go bad enough to force Biden out, but also not good enough to reassure anyone who had doubts about him. The Biden campaign death march continues.

Maybe they were also the ones who stole his trains of thought.

His trips to Europe were two weeks before the debate…

Anyway, I thought they were blaming a cold and/or being over-prepared…

why kick that beehive before it’s ACTUALLY necessary?

Because by the time it’s actually necessary, you’re fucked. Case in point, if Sotomayor had resigned last year, her replacement would have sailed through, and there could be a 40 year old solidly liberal justice in her place, penning equally liberal opinions and poised to continue doing so for decades.

But she didn’t, so if she acts now, her replacement would get caught up in “senate can’t nominate in election years for reasons” BS. Big political fight, but one that’s winnable since Dems ultimately hold the Senate.

If she puts it off yet further, she would have to continue for the next 4, possibly 8+ years. And maybe by that time the democrats don’t have both the presidency and senate anymore, so her replacement is a less liberal consensus candidate.

Failing to think strategically is an extremely bad idea when it comes to institutions like the Supreme Court.

You haven’t put any thought into the situation.

SC justices are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. Both are currently held by the democrats, the latter narrowly. Both are likely to flip next year. Sotomayor is over 70, diabetic, and travels with a medic.

If she wanted to do the right thing for the causes she believes in, she should have resigned during the past one or two years. Biden would have been able to replace her with a younger, equally liberal justice. But she didn’t and probably won’t, so if she dies anytime in the next 4 years (or 8 years if the Rs win the presidential election after that) then the court goes 7-2 and will remain conservative-dominated for decades.