One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”
The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.
Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.
A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.
Biden’s big problem in the debate was that, for a few moments, he mumbled a confused answer that sounded like Donald Trump.
That’s a pretty fatal mistake when your average person is only gonna watch a 10 second clip of the debate.
Isn’t it too late to get a new democrat as candidate anyway, right? I mean you need to register in all states before a deadline no?
I’m pretty sure he could step down and hand it to Kamala. Maybe he could even run as VP. That might rock the boat the least, and while I don’t like Kamala, I have more faith in her to actually do the job.
We need ranked choice voting, and this 2 party system is complete bullshit and needs to go. Obviously, neither will happen, but it should.
Just changing the voting system by itself won’t get rid of the two party system, we also need proportional representation. I much prefer Approval Voting and Sequential Proportional Approval Voting because the results are as good, if not better than RCV, they’re easier for the individual to understand, and it’s impossible to submit an invalid ballot using either method. Plus RCV doesn’t actually change the winner the vast majority of the time. Fargo and St. Louis both use approval voting and folks there appreciate being able to vote for everyone they like and know that their full ballot will always be counted.
RCV will end the two party system. France uses runoff and they have more than two parties
That said, I’m partial to the systems in Sweden and Germany, plenty of options to choose from.
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RCV and two-round runoff are very different in practice because the two round system encourages strategic voting, has a higher potential for spoilers (RCV has them too), and has an intermediate time where the advancing candidates have to fight over all the voters who didn’t pick them in the first round, which is meaningfully different from when they were a part of the pack.
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France has some amount of proportional representation at the local level.
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They’re not starting from an entrenched two party system.
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They’re honestly simply one of the big exceptions, it’s fairly well-established that single-winner methods tend towards two parties pretty much no matter what you do. Typically when you see more than two parties at the national level, it’s because there are regional pockets where only two parties are competitive, but it’s not always the same two parties. I’m not familiar with the details about the French political situation, but yeah, they’ve got a very unusual number of parties for a single-winner dominated structure. Compare them with Australia, who have proportional representation at the national level, and it should be pretty clear they’re just plain exceptional. If you need more evidence, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia already use a two round system for their legislatures but they still have a two party system.
I dunno how much you know about representation and voting systems, but the wiki article on two round systems is pretty good.
Ah that makes sense. I guess any time you elect a single person, it ends up being a binary choice. Here in Sweden we have parliamentary PR, but the parties are divided into a social-liberal block and a conservative block, so voting for a party is either a vote for the socialdemokrat prime minister or the moderat prime minister.
Pretty much any power structure is going to coalesce into the “ruling” group and the “opposition” group, because doing so is strategically advantageous. But, proportional representation ensures that those two groups are made up of sub-groups that have to negotiate within themselves and can even threaten to change sides. Compared with an entrenched two party system, you end up with much a more reasonable government.
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Bidens about to go down as one of the worst Democrats in the last century because of his hubris if he doesn’t. His decent domestic agenda will be overshadowed by him ushering in another trump presidency by ignoring all the signs for him to drop out. He didn’t early last year when polls repeatedly showed that people thought he was too old. He didn’t when unnamed democrat was leading him by 10 points. He didn’t when his Gaza policy alienated large chunks of his base. If he doesn’t in the next couple weeks when there will probably be polls coming out showing majority support for him stepping down then he’s gone full head in the sand.
It’s like RBG all over again, if these people could just get it through there heads to quit while there ahead they could preserve a decent legacy, instead of tarnishing it by leading the way to a regressive order that overturns everything they’ve done.
Dont worry the DNC will find a way to blame Bernie for it
