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7 Democrats who could replace Biden if he drops his 2024 reelection bid
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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politics
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I understand that you don't like Biden. But there is no evidence that another candidate would do better. I think that any Democratic candidate would be criticized as fiercely as Biden, especially the natural choice to replace him: Kamala Harris. And in this political climate, no Democrat is going to poll +5% against Trump.
Finally, recent history does not support your inclination to replace him. If anything it suggests that we should be more optimistic.
I understand that you want Biden to win. I do too.
What you don’t seem to understand is that, in your enthusiasm for the former, you’re failing to identify the difference between “we should have set up an inheritor three years ago” with “we should change the ticket right now! Or in a few weeks!” or whatever it is you’re imagining I’m saying.
I will absolutely guarantee you that our back and forth here - whether it’s an intellectual debate or your defense of Biden qua Democrat - will flip zero votes.
I’d also suggest - and please at this point let’s stop play fighting and just talk - I’d suggest that you take a look at data science or statistics as a career. I think you kind of have an intuition of an argument, but it’s something that you could construct more strongly.
So let’s pretend that we build a function that predicts that a given Democratic candidate wins an election versus Trump etc. We want to maximize the probability of a Democratic win. It’s not necessarily the candidate most likely to win the primary, especially one that’s explicitly non-contested. To be more clear, we want to maximize the chance of a Democratic win, and that may or may not be the candidate most likely to have won either a fairly contested primary election. And even from that model, we’re subtracting the fairly contested primary election. As I implied, no one is going to outpoll Biden because no one is opposing him (which would be VERY BAD) and he did not announce/enact a transition plan staring two years ago (WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT IDEA).
So to be even more clear - no, I don’t like Biden. I don’t especially dislike Harris, except that I think she’s a very very bad politician. The Harris we saw in the first debate just never reappeared. I’m not sure Biden will win, and I’m pretty sure Harris would lose. I’m not sure Newsom would have lost (I am a fan and would hate to lose him as governor) had he gotten a $1B coffer and establishment endorsements three years ago. Do you see the difference? I’m not saying that Newsom today could start from Jump Street and beat Trump. I’m saying some people who are supposed to be the adults in the room should have made that call three years ago.
If you built a function that predicts a candidate's chances of victory, you would find that it strongly favors an incumbent.
Furthermore, if you had to build a function that predicts a candidate's chance of winning a primary when the incumbent isn't running, you would find that it strongly favors the sitting vice-president.
So if three years ago a political scientist had to predict the person most likely to win in 2024, they should have chosen Biden. Especially if they had to predict, in 2021, the person most likely to win a rematch of the 2020 election.
And if they predicted that Biden would not seek re-election, then they should also predict that Harris would become the nominee.
Now, perhaps there is data in 2024 indicating uncertainty about a Biden victory. But that data would not have been available three years ago. So I'm not sure it does much good to argue that we should have made a different decision then. And frankly, I'm not even sure we got it wrong.