A Democratic Perspective on the Biden Concession: The Case for a Patriotic Democracy in the Era of the 21st Century, According to Meacham
In an era where so many of us are comfortable with power over principle, only a very few people do this, according to historian Jon Meacham, who helped writing speeches for Biden.
Democrats are calling Biden’s concession patriotic and in part an attempt to draw a contrast with Trump. For anyone who’s been around for a long time, this would be a difficult decision.
President Biden made an historic announcement on Sunday that he wasn’t going to run for reelection. He threw his support behind his vice president.
All politicians want to be the top dog, but the numbers can move things — whether it’s polls or money. And both combined to exert a huge amount of pressure on Biden to reconsider. After his disastrous June 27 debate, money had begun to dry up and he was sliding in swing states.
Biden said in the interview that only the “Lord Almighty” polls would get him to step.
Pelosi, one of the most savvy political operators in the Democratic Party, appeared to lead the charge. She pays very close attention to the polls and she listens to the swing-state Democrats who had seen a cratering in the numbers in their states and districts. Biden eventually got past his denial and accepted.
This is the worst three-and-a-half weeks of a presidential campaign, from the debate to Biden contracting carbon dioxide.
Since the debate, Democrats seem to have been more positive, and this announcement seems to have them that way. They have a lot of enthusiasm and money, but this does not mean they will win the race. Democrats donated nearly 50 million dollars through ActBlue, the largest site, in the hours after Biden left office. It’s the biggest single day of Democratic donations since the 2020 election.
This is going to be a hyper-compressed and closely watched campaign. It will be crucial how Harris deals with the spotlight, not just because of the shortened amount of time, but also because she has to prove she’s a better messenger than Biden and reassure Democrats they’re making the right choice before next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
They’ve charged that Biden was too old, might not know where he is, wasn’t qualified to run the country and he and his son are likely corrupt and have enriched themselves.
If Harris becomes the Democratic Party’s nominee, the Republicans will go up against a much younger candidate, who is sure to draw on her experience to contrast herself with the convicted felon, and potentially be the first woman to be president.
It’s not often that Democrats get to troll Republicans, but soon after Biden’s announcement, many were trying to flip the script, saying the country can’t have a president who would be 83 at the end of his term.
Kala Harris – the next president of the United States? The case for a candidate competing with the Republican presidential nominee Kamala Harris
If someone wants to challenge Harris at the convention, they’ll need the signatures of at least 300 delegates. For context, Biden has some 3,900 delegates. Yes, it is certainly possible that someone challenges Harris.
Several of the large names that have been mentioned as a replacement for Biden have come out in support of Harris.
First, throw out the polls. We are starting from scratch. Harris and Biden were similar to each other before Sunday. In the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, Biden was up 50% to 48% over Trump. Harris was tied with Trump, 50% to 49%.
When people were thinking of her, she was a hypothetical candidate. Now that Harris will most likely be the nominee, he’s going to face a lot of scrutiny.
But on the flip side, she was not a very good candidate in 2019 when she ran for the Democratic nomination. She couldn’t convey her core values, instead stating that she was a problemsolver. She has been caricatured by the right as a California liberal, while also facing criticism from the left as being too tough on crime as the state’s attorney general. She’s struggled with messaging at times as vice president, including on immigration, one of the areas Biden put her in charge of early on.
“Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States,” said Jamal Simmons, who was Harris’ communications director in the second year of the administration. She has a great position on the most important issue to the Democrats and the Americans who are anti-MAGA, and she is a better candidate than she was.
She could change the electoral map. There are risks and rewards with each of these candidates, but some of the names floated include lots of white, male moderates like Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, as well as Whitmer, a swing-state governor.
He is a popular pick in the Democratic party because he is well-liked, has dealt with difficult issues, and is from Pennsylvania. The state of Pennsylvania has seen more ad money than any other state. The Trump campaign knows it has to take one of the blocks out of the Blue Wall — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They’ve targeted Pennsylvania more than any other swing state, and, as of Sunday morning, were holding onto a narrow lead there in an average of the polls.
Beshear, 46, is a popular Democrat. He has worked with both parties, but he is in a Republican state.
Kelly, 60, is also from a swing state. He’s an astronaut married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in 2011 at a constituent event; he’s shown he can raise a lot of money for Democrats, and he could help, to a degree, blunt Republicans’ immigration attacks since he is from a border state and has separated himself some from Biden on border policy. He isn’t from a swing state with the same number of delegates.
Biden has been in public life since 1972, when he won election to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old. He wasn’t even old enough to serve in the Senate at the time. He was 30 at the time of his election.
He has always wanted to be president and has been told by plenty of people in his life that he couldn’t do a lot of things. In 2020, he defeated Trump, and Democrats say he saved democracy. The path forward was narrowing as a result of reality setting in.
During Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential primary campaign in 2019, she developed a reputation she has been unable to shake — that she’s a messenger in search of a message. She has been characterized as vice president and some Democrats worry that she may replace Biden at the top of the ticket. But it is outdated.
When Ms. Harris began her primary campaign in January 2019, she had served just two years as a senator; the rest of her career had been spent as a state and local prosecutor. While this background had traditionally been a reliable path to political office on the right and the left, the politics changed during Ms. Harris’s career. The so-called progressive prosecutors had been elected in cities across the country by the time she was packaging herself for a national audience. These prosecutors promised to divert or decriminalize drug-related offenses, reform cash bail, decline to prosecute cases involving police misconduct and otherwise minimize the prosecutorial role.
