2028 ELECTION THREAD

That was part of it, but it was mostly colossal ignorance.

Yup the colossal ignorance on picking Kamala

Just no.

like picking the 7th team QB to start the super bowl per James Carville

The USA is about 250 years old. But let's not go back that far. Let's talk about our lifetime. And some people around here are over 50 years old, so let's go with about the last 100 years.

Only 1 in 3 vice presidents in modern history have successfully been elected president. Since 1933, 15 of 18 vice presidents have launched their own presidential campaigns. Only five succeeded: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden.

The re-match presidential debate between Biden and Trump in June 2024 mostly told the world that frail and exhausted looking Joe Biden should not have ran for re-election. At least then Kamala Harris would have had a traditional election cycle to run for president. Harris, or any democrat that could have beat her, did not participate in the primaries. Harris' was also the shortest general election presidential campaign in history, lasting only 107 days.

Truman and Johnson were experienced presidents.

Nixon won by virtue of white Southern backlash to the Civil Rights movement. Bush was the heir to a successful Reagan presidency. Biden was the beneficiary of the Trump / Covid backlash.

Exactly. Truman and Johnson became president with the deaths of FDR and Kennedy, respectively. So these two were running for president with advantage of being incumbents. My moonshot idea I floated on here was that if old man Biden did win a second term, he would resign half way and one day into his second term to let Harris take over as president, run as an incumbent and not lose her eligibility to run for her own two full terms.

Exactly again.

---

So besides these five former vice presidents that had extra benefits going for them, running for president as a former vice president is no where near a lock. And any pearl clutching by democratic leadership now is going too far. But I think history will be kinder to Harris as time passes. Right now the Nate Silvers of the world who picked Harris (or said it would be close) now have to blame her and beat her like a dead horse to take attention away from themselves. The boring facts are Harris didn't have the benefit of a primary season and only 107 days a candidate, along with past vice presidents having only about a 1 in 3 chance in modern times of winning.

Nixon won 49 states

yeah, zero chance she wins a primary

^^^ Harris or any Dem did not benefit from Biden running for re-election. The 107 days would have been on any Dem. Harris is getting the most blame from certain circles like the Nate Silvers that picked her to win or be close. Nate Silver recent track record is a joke. The back pedaling he does post elections are funny.

But when the dust settles I think history puts the blame on Biden for running again.

So blame LBJ for screwing up 1968 because he dropped out too late?

If you don't like the candidate, primary him. Yet I heard none of that. Instead it was how brilliant and sharp Biden was and how the dems convinced themselves he would defeat Trump.

can't find the clip on youtubez but the daily show had a wonderful montage of all these people saying in interviews "behind closed doors biden is the sharpest man in the room"

You don't seem to know crap about 1968 or now. LBJ knew that the civil rights legislation he was passing would cost his party and he said so. Already mentioned several posts above by Nut Nut. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about in present times either.

LOL. You mean like GOP were saying alzhiemer Ronald Reagan was the sharpest man in the room?

Not when he was running as the sitting VP.

i'm very much on record that the people in reagan's administration that hid his condition from the public should have been tried for treason

again, people seem to oddly think i'm only against dementia in leadership if they are of a certain party

i'm also not happy at all about trump's age and wish we'd have a maximum age rule for the presidency

Beautiful non sequitur.

FWIW there was a lot more to 1968 than a singular issue. And it doesn't matter anyway, LBJ withdrawing during the primary season was because he barely beat Eugene McCarthy in NH.

Of course the nomination process was quite a bit different than it is now. But it became apparent the party would never be able to push LBJ past the finish line.

The parallel to now is that the party tried to sell Biden off as a candidate capable of winning. But we all know that cannot be held as true.

You do a hell of a lot of ****ing projecting.

In the 2020 election Joe Biden got what is consider the gold standard of over 300 electoral college (306). Biden got the gold standard of over 51% of the vote. And Biden won by over 7,000,000 votes...

That is the triple ****ing crown.

Your "the party" line is foolish. "The party" doesn't tell a guy that just accomplished that and still has eligibility to run again whether he can run again. The party prays he has enough gas left in tank at his age to get the job done or is man enough to be one and done.

This crap is squarely on Joe Biden for running for a second term.

I'm still shaking my head at you trying to compared 1968 to 2024.

1968 is a cluster **** for LBJ of unpopular civil right legislation, Vietnam War, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, critic of the war and the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, entering the primary race after LBJ looked vulnerable, etc., etc.

2024 crickets other than a very old man running for re-election.

Yeah those two years are a lot alike.

Pretty much this. People imagine that the national parties in the United States are highly organized, military-style groups that are managed from the top down by a group of all-powerful party generals. In fact, the parties are loosely aligned groups of people who are more concerned about their personal objectives than they are about broad party objectives.

I understand that it is easier to come up with hot takes if you imagine that the parties are the former. But in fact they are the latter.

That IS odd. Probably just a coincidence. Don't worry about it.

Anyway, yeah, obviously it was dumb for the Democrats to just coronate Harris, the same Harris that went from "one of the favorites" to "dropped out of the Dem primary before any votes were cast!" back in 2020. I said this at the time.

I also had a fix to this election. All Democrats needed to do was create a 15-deep list of America's most loved celebrities and ask/bribe your way down the list until somebody bites. Denzel, The Rock, Brad Pitt... what normie wouldn't vote for one of our beloved movie stars over Donald Trump? Just pick one that the right doesn't already regard as some far-left Hollywood sicko (Tom Hanks, Matt Damon)...

But, of course, the Democratic Party is not really interested in attaining power, most of them are perfectly content to act as some soft-resistance pseudo-opposition and fundraise off of all the horrors the GOP unleashes (Dobbs, for instance).

Do you really think the result with Harris would have been much different had she been anointed a few months prior to when she was? I mean, granted, people were understandably turned off by the degree by which the party hid Biden's, um, neurological issues, but given the vast universe of possible reasons why Trump won, it's hard to imagine that that particular one moves the needle by nearly enough to change the result.

I don't think any of these centrist, party-favorite clowns had much chance to beat back the overwhelming wave of right and white resentment that was building up over the Biden term. Pete the Rat? Amy Klobuchar?

lol. Trump would have won 40 states against these nobodies. This is a popularity contest. If you want to win a contest of popularity, I suggest choosing someone who is... popular. Crazy, I know.

A butterfly flapping it's wings causing a hurricane. The primaries are a time honored tradition. California Gov. Newson might be president right now. For the third time now, I wrote, "Harris or any democrat that could have beat her had there been a primary season."

Ticket of Newsom-Whitmer/Evers/Shapiro probably better, but definitely no worse than Harris-Walz at saving the blue wall.

Or just winning the house barely even if losing the presidency by very little, would have made a world of difference for the next 2 years.

Harris-tampontim dragged down the democratic candidates in some key house races.

I can't see any way that Gavin Newsom would have won the Rust Belt states that are key to winning the Presidency. He would have been another "California liberal" that would have been skewered in the same type of ads Harris was.

I am not saying this because I am fan of Trump, but I don't think any Democrat was going to beat him in 2024. The Democrats were so tied to inflation that polls showed was the main issue for voters.