Depending on what happens with the congress. There are still some semi-sane (concerning foreign policy) Republicans in the Senate of course they'll probably struggle a lot more with manipulating him/keeping him inline like in his first term.
But I guess it's not unlikely that the democrats will lose both the senate and the house if Biden manages to lose. So yeah...
> the election of Mr. Biden to the White House is not impossible
As nice and warm and fuzzy it may be to believe that the Democrats regaining the White House would solve/help these issues, I doubt there'd be much of a difference. There weren't exactly huge top-down changes between Bush, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama.
Even if Biden wins but Senate is mostly republican (which is very likely), Biden can’t do much. Senate will keep tossing it out as it did with Obama’s 2nd term.
Democrats need both the presidency and majority senate to be able to get shit done.
> Also - merely making a nomination makes Trump look strong. Winning a competition against Dems - which I think he can because he has the votes - looks strong. I don't see any way for the Dems to win with this unless Trump nominates a total fool.
The conventional political wisdom after Kavanaugh was that Democrats would be demoralized for the 2018 election and would fail to retake the House. What actually happened was one of their biggest House wins ever.
> Trump is flirting with the same poll numbers Hillary had las time and Biden is not a strong candidate ... this is not a good position for the Dems to be in.
Kind of? There's no Johnson this time getting 8% of the vote (at this point in the race), so that group is dispersed between Trump and Biden. So while Trump is about where Hillary was at this point, Biden is cracking 50% in national polling on average, which is much higher than Clinton in 2016 and definitely not good for Trump.
Biden is much stronger than Hillary at this point, especially in swing states like Florida, where he is polling well with older voters (a complete flip from 2016, where older voters in Florida went decisively for Trump). If you look at Clinton's support in Florida it looks like a sine wave over the race. Biden's support is much more steady, so that is a difference. Biden wins Florida and it's over.
> I really did have hopes for the Democrats, but they just can't quit on Biden
Biden’s polling in the 20s, occasionally breaking into the 30s, and he's running low on money. Sanders and Warren have much bigger warchests, and there's a lot of votes to be picked up as minor candidates fall off, which it'll be hard to compete for without funds. He's in a weaker position than the early frontrunners that ended up not winning in basically every Democratic primary in a generation without an incumbent President or Vice President in the race. (EDIT: Yes, 2016 was an exception to this, but Biden has nothing like the DNC backing Clinton had, nothing like the office-holder backing Clinton had, and nothing like the DNC rules that magnified the effect of both of those advantages.)
> The election seems to be heading to a never-Trumper Republican's dream: Biden wins by about 1 electoral vote. Trump rides into the sunset. (Starts a new show on Fox?) The Senate stays Republican. Republicans pick up a good number of seats in the House. The Senate says no no no to anything but reasonable governance for four years. The Supreme Court looks askance at ambitious executive orders. The New York Times editorial page and lots of Very Annoying People fume about the Senate "resistance." Umm, they will have to pick another word.
> More broadly, the big news of the election seems a clear rejection of the far-left agenda.
100% agree with this conclusion.
I think the Biden administration will have a lot of problems in the next four years and set a massive red carpet for a huge Republican victory in 2024. They will have to pick up an economic crisis post COVID-19 and struggle with the senate. Additionally Biden has been so long in politics that he's not going to look at things with fresh eyes and question the system. He's quickly going to fall back to status quo and alienate a lot of his reluctant supporters. Trump had 50% of the country hating him, but he also had 50% of the country absolutely loving him. It's the hate for Trump which secured Biden a narrow margin, but let's be absolutely clear, nobody voted for Biden because they liked him. In some ways the Biden administration will have less support, less enthusiasm and less success that the Trump administration before him, which is kind of ironic when you think about it.
Anyway, that's just my perspective as an outsider looking across the pond from Europe.
Possible, but I doubt it. The early non-incumbent front-runner almost never wins the nomination, and while Biden has a big lead, it's far from a majority of the party and all of his opposition and most of the party electorate differ from him in the same direction (e.g., Democrats prefer Medicare for All over keeping Obamacare by a 2:1 margin.)
As the set of candidates narrows (and it will considerably before the first primary votes are cast), that doesn't work in Biden’s favor.
> I don't think the Democrats need a presidential candidate at the moment.
They actually do, Biden has one big con; age. He will be 81 in 2024. He already has very low approval rating and with recession looking more realistic, they're going to need to have contingencies.
Democrats are horrible at planning things in advance, this is where Republicans beat them.
> I'm also thinking of what happens if Biden is elected but incapacitated before the inauguration. My guess is the VP would take his slot since they were already elected
Hypothetical: Biden-Harris wins the 2024 popular vote and electoral college vote, but the GOP retains control of the House. However, days before Congress meets to count the electoral votes, Biden unexpectedly passes away. What happens if the GOP-controlled House decides they will refuse to accept votes for a dead man? The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 says they aren’t allowed to do that, but it isn’t clear if the Act is legally enforceable-if the House votes to uphold an objection to votes for a deceased man, in violation of that Act, ultimately SCOTUS may have to decide whether that Act is binding on the House. There is no guarantee the conservative SCOTUS majority would decide that it is.
Biden also said at least once that he might not accept the result of the election if he lost. (Sorry, don't have a reference handy, but I saw it.) I believe that his point was that he would also have to look at fraud. And he said it much less often than Trump did. Still it was rather scary to have both sides saying it.
If Biden wins, there will certainly be a Democratic House and maybe 50:50 odds right now on a Democratic Senate, so he'd likely be able to implement whatever priorities he sees fit.
Depending on what happens with the congress. There are still some semi-sane (concerning foreign policy) Republicans in the Senate of course they'll probably struggle a lot more with manipulating him/keeping him inline like in his first term.
But I guess it's not unlikely that the democrats will lose both the senate and the house if Biden manages to lose. So yeah...
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