I imagine the large donors retaliated, and the press ganged up on him largely in response to his dedication to that agenda.

I tend to agree with the president on this...

Whenever she was asked about any policy differences, her answer was that she couldn't think of any.

Was how he benefitted workers and unions. I truly think this terrified the large donor base. Regardless of what she said, her campaign was very different from the one he had started.

I think if she kept his entire campaign message, she would have won.

I think she was very different on Gaza, but refusing to say any differences turned a lot of voters off who didn't approve of Biden.

When what was probably needed was somebody who didn't really care about what people thought about her...

Like how hard would it be to say "this admin is wrong on Gaza and right about workers rights?" And then run non stop on both issues.

But there are other ways to do it. She should have had a talk with Biden, saying "don't take any policy differences personal, we're in danger of losing and this is my only hope. Love ya, Joe!"

💯

She was her own candidate.

Anyone can babble any counterfactuals that strike their fancy. To be believed requires some persuasive evidence.

yes, I know "polls are meaningless, blah blah blah", and yet, Harris was even or slightly ahead in most polls during her short campaign.

He wouldn't have dropped out if he thought this was true.

But there's a reason he was being kept out of the public eye to begin with...

His condition was becoming known by too much of the public. Something had to be done and it's why other party members stepped in.

and, as Forrest Gump often said: "That's all I have to say about that."

I'm going with this election was baked in the cake long before summer 2024.
There are other considerations but they would attract lightning on this forum.
It's possible he could've done better in PA - but enough to win it?
Otherwise, probably worse.

I think, basically, we got outsmarted because of the tactics they used like the trans/prisoners/students lie. Trump has always been a Col. Parker (sorry, Elvis fans) showman. It didn't work in 2020. It shouldn't have, but did this time.

Agree or disagree, what you say doesn't seem relevant to anything I said.
If anything, they support it.

I think Kamala initially started out on the road to victory. But I think the GOP made it happen with the lies and propaganda. As I said, Trump has always been a Col. Parker kind of guy. (You might want to watch either the recent Elvis movie or the Sun Records miniseries (my preference) for portraits of Parker. He was a carnival con man, just like Trump is.

As the old saying goes…you can wish in one hand and $#it the other and see which one fills up faster. Unfortunately…..

It's something he has the right to feel, but not what needs to be said publicly. Especially considering all the voter suppression and election irregularities that seem to be neglected.

Feeling like that is one thing, but saying it publicly is a mistake

And quite frankly might have done a little worse

Hindsight says our only shot was someone completely outside the administration who felt freer to present themselves as a change agent.

Smart or not, right or wrong, people wanted change. Of course, Americans seemingly always want change so that's not new.

Harris lost because she didn't present a sliver of difference with Biden and people wanted a difference. She was in an exceedingly difficult spot so hard to blame her at all.

misogyny and racism that still exist in this country. A shame.

I also believe that Biden's poll numbers would have recovered after the debate had democrats and the media not attacked him so mercilessly. The media was positively gleeful in their criticism while completely ignoring 45's alarming performances at his rallies. Shame indeed.

Everybody would have forgotten about this debate, if media has not attacked Biden relentlessly, and democrats didn't join in these attacks. Americans have short memory spans.

Forget blame.
Altho, as I said, I think the election was baked in the cake.
However, it's her decisions ultimately that got the results they did.

It would be interesting to hear what she says about it if she chooses to do so (forget those immediate post-election talks).
I have a feeling we won't get that and it will be up to others to do a dispassionate PM. I have a very large bank of mistrust built up for any "others", at least the ones I can think of.

There certainly is! The MSM did not cover any of 45's outrageous rally performances which by themselves should have set everybody's hair on fire. And there were some democrats who took completely unnecessary pains to amplify the ageism and debate criticisms the media was nonstop proliferating. Although there was almost nonstop media coverage of the 'assassination' attempt, presumably to secure sympathy for their preferred candidate.

Harris deserves no blame for this.

At first I thought that there wasn’t anyone who would benefit from the reelection of a mercurial, capricious, illiterate conman and then I read an article today in Sierra Magazine about LNG terminals. Biden had a moratorium in place on new terminals. I’m not saying that this one action was enough to put a target on his campaign but in summation I think the corporations and their servants in government and media was enough to ensure that Trump would somehow win. I don’t believe it was the fault of either candidate or campaign.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/authors/delaney-nolan

But ultimately people blamed Biden for prices and by extension her.

I don't think his numbers would have recovered.
His numbers were low before the debate even.

They went up a little after the state of the union address but they would have taken a hit after every little gaffe. The debate baked the perception in. There wasn't anything Biden could do to unbake it.

she never went after Trump in her ads. She never aired any of the J6 footage in her ads, she never tied Stump to Jeffery Epstein, she never had an ad that mentioned the classified documents or his felony convictions, at least I never saw those ads? She lost because she took the "high road" against a man who effectively tied her to federally funded gender change for prisoners and never bothered to fight back giving voters the green light to believe Trumps bullshit.

A slim majority of voters have proven they simply aren't moved by that stuff.
They will vote for him anyways.

We've spent three elections warning about his character and democracy etc and the only time we've beat him was when the economy was struggling during Covid and even then just barely.

three elections talking about J6, classified documents, 34 felony convictions those things had not happened yet? If you think Harris was right not to mention those things then just say so. I think it was campaign malpractice.

Now it may not have been enough to satisfy you personally but it was absolutely talked about

many times. As did the media. Too many people just didn't care or believed his BS about all political charges.

The whole election was insane making; I'm not sure Harris could have done anything to overcome the forces against her.

He would have shut up his critics and won
the presidency

not mentally, but physically. I have to wonder if he could have stood the rigors of travel that a presidential
campaign requires. This a my non medical opine only.

IMO as I didn't even recall it. And by July, 2024 many people contracted covid but with effective medication and procedures to follow, it was nowhere near a virtual death sentence as it was back in 2020.

Now it's well understood that is not a big deal anymore.

I suspect we wouldn't have heard about it at all if the wheels were not already in motion, which they were. It played out exactly as everyone expected because everyone saw it happening.

After the debate the press and other Dems too were on him like piranhas to withdraw, and he did soon.

VP Harris ran a great campaign after that but she didn't have enough time for voters to get to know her.

She lost (I still believe there was rethug cheating as no way she lost every swing state), we'll always wonder in Joe had decided early to just do one term and Harris was the nominee, would she have beaten the lying criminal? I think she would've wiped the floor with him as her Gaza policy would've been different and her pro worker views also would've helped.

Harris cleaned Trumps clock in their one and only debate but she still lost. She lost because her campaign never went after Trump. He was the most damaged candidate in history, yet her campaign never really went after that in ads, too much turning the page and not enough reminding the public what a horrible person he is and even worse president he was.

online and on MSM outlets. The whole nation and even people in foreign countries were buzzing about it.

You couldn't be more wrong IMO.

But there was no constant media coverage, as there was with Biden. The media also stopped the whole "age" issue once Biden dropped out, which proves they didn't care about Biden's age as much as they wanted a click-bait narrative.

My biggest concern for the 2022 election was the MAGA's desperate need for revenge after Trump lost in 2020. They treated the election like a rival football game and were completely blind to anything else. I honestly don't know if any Democrat could have won against Trump due to the MAGA need for relevance.

A lot of MAGA were those who felt the world was passing them by, they longed for the idea they were supreme over others. Sort of along the lines of President Johnson's quote: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best-colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Although with MAGA the "best-colored man" can be expanded to anyone not like them (LGBTQ, Brown, Black, etc)

The media absolutely covered the debate. How many weeks did we have to hear his asshole voice say "They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs..."

Ok, then imagine the debates reversed. Let's say Trump's debate with Kamala was similar to how Biden performed against Trump. And in Biden's debate with Trump, Biden said something as crazy as "they are eating the cats and dogs". Do you truly believe it would have made a difference to voters? Biden was always held to a much higher standard than Trump by the media. They conditioned everyone to do the same.

What about Trump's rally where he bizarrely stood there for over 30 minutes and swayed to music, from YMCA to Ava Maria? Do you honestly believe if that had been Biden it would have been shrugged off like it was for Trump?

I go back to the whole "age" concern which completely disappeared after Biden stepped down despite obvious signs of Trump's age showing, particularly cognitive issues (slurring words, confusing who he was running against, confusing Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley).

Biden could have had an amazing debate and it wouldn't have mattered. The media already baked in the cake.

I think had Biden decisively won the debate, he'd have made it more competitive. But he couldn't have and let me try to articulate why...

Biden ran in 2020 with urgency for the soul of the nation, etc. etc. If it were really about that, and not personal investment, it didn't need to be him...

I've said it before. Had he not decided to run for reelection, he'd still get invited to all the same parties. His legacy would be remembered fondly. He'd be the hero of covid.

But he chose to be on the stage, and so it highlighted the fact that he was running on an inconsistent strategy -- it has to be him, only him. Yet also, we must beat the other guy at all costs.

None of can know if another Democrat could have won the Presidency if Biden stepped down earlier, we can only speculate.

That being said I will always remember Joe Biden fondly. Particularly after losing my son to suicide, writing to the White House to scream out my pain, sort of like screaming into the wind, and shockingly getting a call back from a White House staffer who talked to me for almost an hour. Never once mentioned politics, just let me talk about my son. That, I strongly believe, is a reflection of Joe Biden's influence.

To say Joe Biden made his choice to run again so he could "be on stage" is to assume a motivation none of us can possibly know. It could quite likely be that Joe Biden truly felt he was the best chance to win the Presidency in 2024. He had an amazing record after all.

For all we know, he could have been right.

Thank you for discussing this with me

And condolences from me.

because they were that bad.

He exuded everything the Republicans wanted to see. I felt like a fool having supported him to my friends prior to the debate.

was not good I just don't think it would have been decisive, like I said Harris made Stump look like a fool in the debate and still lost. The campaign is what wins or loses elections.

Could've blown the top of your ear off

Because Joe Biden pooped on stage. He didn't need to do that. His campaign had hyped his performance, talked about his prep, then he went on stage and from second 1 you knew it was all a lie.

It is hard to envision Biden having any chance if he had to spend money in NY.

and say whatever you want, your lifetime of service afford you that privilege. The usual parsing that is the hallmark of DU are simply opinions about your claim.

wonders if he could have done better, both regarding the election and Garland. None of us are perfect, but good people recognize that and Joe is absolutely a good person -- so I'm sure he is hard on himself because he expects the best from himself all the time. I would guess it's more that than haunting regrets. If anything, he is disappointed like all of us here at DU with the fact that Trump will be in the WH again.

I wish there was a way we could all collectively message him it isn't his fault. He did his best and we know, appreciate and are grateful for that.

and the continual effort to get Joe's son convicted. Garland was just the worst appointment Joe made. A more assertive AG would've gotten orange turd, convicted criminal trump jailed long before election season, as well as before the corrupt SCOTUS 6 got involved with the corrupt immunity ruling.

Garland. Mistakes were made.

yes he does. If he doesn't have regrets, he is inauthentic and this was never a fight for democracy. If he does have regrets, he should look in the mirror about some of his prep and choices.

He can be a good person and arrogant at the same time.

'Reportedly?

I don't wanna see/hear any such.

could have won. The media was all in on the "senile Joe" stuff, all the while giving a pass to the Hannibal Lecter fanboy. This whole election seriously sucked, especially since I had become convinced Kamala would win. I still don't believe things were on the up and up. That bullet ballot business really bothers me.

....a year earlier. There should have been a proper primary with Democratic debates.

Appointing Merrick Garland was a mistake. The idea that Joe would have defeated Trump is a total fantasy.

If the Media had taken the same hard-edged treatment to Trump instead, Biden would likely be facing a second term, Trump would be facing prosecution, and MAGA would be in full-blown collapse and chaos.

Fuck them all to hell. ABC, CNN, Fox, NBC, the NYTimes and WaPo papers, the whole lot of them. They all caused this shit. All for ratings and stupid ass corporate greed. Fuck them all.

Absolutely. To everyone blaming Biden's bad debate performance I say they imagine if that had been Trump instead? Would it have mattered? NO. The media always held Biden to a much higher standard and just shrugged at Trump's behavior. What if Biden had swayed to music for 30 minutes at a rally? Or confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi? NO WAY would Biden have survived any of that. The media had already conditioned everyone to ignore Trump's bizarre behavior and obvious signs of cognitive decline as not newsworthy.

Dems screamed it from the rooftops but I think many of us, including myself, knew it wouldn't matter. The majority of voters just didn't seem to care, and the media is absolutely complicit in that.

Last edited Sat Dec 28, 2024, 04:57 PM - Edit history (1)

I know he wants to hold the torch for the future, but I worry about what the inauguration will cost his heart. For my part, I’m skipping it.

I believe he ruined his legacy by deciding to run again.

Had we won, I'd obviously have higher valance for his feelings.

...and honestly, I'm not sure we had a campaign-ready Dem who would win. I think the right did a much better job of making sure everyone forgot about how shitty a president Trump was, and pegged all that negativity on the Dems, than we did reminding everyone how crappy things were when Biden took office and how many great things he accomplished.

Garland, but if he had decided not to run again at all, there would have been time to find a stronger Dem leader in a primary battle since America had already shown that it does not want a female president.

another four years. I wish that wasn't the case but it was obvious.

that he wasn't all there in the first place. Which only made the weakness he displayed at the debate more problematic.

In the lead up to the debate, all we heard about was how prepared Biden was going to be to defend his record and put Trump in his place. That obviously didn't happen. Plenty of folks here tried to minimize Biden's disastrous performance, but it was obvious that rightly or wrongly, to the average viewer, Biden's performance was the nail in his political coffin.

would have dropped out sooner and we had a primary Kamala may not have our candidate. It is
sad but a women of color has two strikes against her to start.

Have a great rest of your life President Joe Biden.

Yes, it is hard to say, but all the tea leaves pointed to a disastrous outcome. You have to know that Musk was set to spend whatever it takes to get Trump back in office. As it was Musk spent $235 million. The outcome shows why we have guard rails on elections - to rein in the excesses witnessed in 2024.

At one point, Harris was either tied or ahead in all of the battleground states, and then Musk stepped in big. His money was the entire difference. Trump took one of the worst drubbings in the Harris debate ever, and while that led to some movement, Musk's money was the perfect antidote.

half of this country is fucked up. Because they voted for trump or did not vote at all. I think it's the same thought out the world. For many reasons people just can't get along and never will. Half are kind and thoughtful and the rest are selfish and hateful. Have a good day.

That he was transitional one term to get Drumph out. Which he did do the kick out but not the transition.

Had Pres Biden not run in the 2024 primaries we might have won with a strong candidate emerging. Giving Harris 90 days to win as a woman for the first time in American history was probably doomed from the start.

Oh well. So much for regrets

imho, he should have stepped down earlier.

I'm inclined to agree with him about Merrick, though.

We have to leave fantasyland. Trump is demented, but Joe appears feeble.

Some of us were hung for expressing the exact sentiments from above at the time.

Well, I guess we can never know can we.

Same people railroad Al Franken.

Eat your own.

Is he was an incumbent President and incumbents rarely lose reelection even when they’re not that popular (see George W 2004). When he dropped out, I thought the Democrats were committing political suicide by ceding the incumbent advantage but I hoped I’d be proven wrong.

Maybe he still would’ve lost but I’ll always have a bad taste in my mouth for the Democratic leadership and the way they stabbed him the back.

It was the next year, 2005, when his numbers began going down. After that, they kept dropping every year of his second term, until he left office.

Biden was around 39%.

The only two presidents who had worse approval than Biden were Carter and H.W. Bush ... and both lost.

I fully believed Biden would win in 2022. But by the start of 2024, it became apparent he was at a significant disadvantage. He rarely led in any national polls for a solid year vs Trump and in the swing states, it was much worse. The hope was that as people accepted that Biden would be the nominee, he would open a lead against Trump. In fact, that's exactly what Biden's team expected to happen. They thought that a big reason they were polling so poorly in 2023 and early 2024 was that people just didn't believe Trump or Biden would be the nominees of their party. But that when it became clear both would be, they'd 'resign' themselves into supporting Biden.

It never happened. Biden saw zero poll movement.

In fact, I started worrying about his chances when I felt the campaign didn't capitalize on his State of the Union. That was a reset for the campaign. He delivered a very well-received speech and had all the attention of the campaign on him ... and then he went radio silent for a couple months. It created a narrative that he was being hidden or didn't have the stamina to actually run for reelection.

In all honesty, Biden and his team should have used the SOTU as a launching pad for their reelection campaign and sent him on a month-long campaign tour in the swing states hammering home his message from the SOTU.

But he didn't.

Biden was not only going to lose - he was going to lose big.

He was treated like shit by the so-called liberal media, while meanwhile the convicted felon/rapist/criminal basically got 100% free campaign airtime courtesy of ABCNNBCBS….

Of course we will never know. But I think this will be fodder for historians for some time to come.

Propaganda, lies, bigotry and stupidity reign.

90's Clinton ran amazing campaigns.

The failure to deliver on STUDENT LOAN relief for millions of hard-working, LAW-ABIDING, Americans of both parties was a huge mistake while conversely commuting the sentences of death row inmates, on top of Garland, Wray, Dejoy, Clarence Thomas (Biden's past mistake), foot dragging (literally and figuratively) on F-16s etc. to Ukraine, Ron Klain as Chief of Staff, agreeing to "debate" Trash, keeping trickle down going (yes, he did, $80 million to Intel is just one example - the child care tax cut was not enough to sell us "he is the new FDR" ), his failure to communicate his achievements, his failure to positively impact the everyday reality of voter's like myself when so many Americans are hurting and righteously angry, and his failure to deliver for the American people these last 75ish remaining days.

It has been another election where Dems willingly clean up after Republicans make their mess and then hand it right back to the Fascist anti-American criminals so they can keep hacking away at tearing down America and the U.S. Government.

Yell at me all you want.

I'm on the ground, listening to real people, facing real hardship, in rural, suburban, and urban areas everyday that ends in Y.

He could have conceivably won Pennsylvania because he's an old white person and so are most voters in this state. He'd have probably gotten more votes from union members and in NW Pennsylvania coal country. No matter his poll numbers, I believe committed Dems were going to go to the polls and vote for him regardless. Knew a few Dems who were freaked out after the debate, but none of them were going to stay home and not vote straight Dem. Really no different from Rs who didn't like Trump but grudgingly went out and voted for him.

I do think Fetterman is correct to note that the failed assassination attempt re-energized Trump's base and that was a bigger reason for Trump's win than Biden's debate performance.

I think strategically, Biden should have had closely guarded private discussions after he decided to run for a second term about stepping down halfway through it and letting Harris take over. Harris could've hired Biden as Sec of State and kept his expertise and counsel around, then selected someone like Buttigieg as VP to fill that vacancy. I think that would have calmed "insider" nerves and stopped the post-debate sniping.

And yes, Garland was a HUUUGE mistake, as many of us said at the time.

But expecting the main stream media to protect democracy, instead of their paychecks paid by oligarchic owners, is deeply naive, democrats.

Say it with me: the mainstream media is not our friend, and they don’t set the media agenda any more.

The social media whining about the press comes from a lack of knowledge of what they really do. It's not what you read on Twitter or Facebook.

It wasn't a fair fight, and - knowing what we know now - it would have ended exactly the same.

I wish things were different, but they're not.

Fair or not, the media will circle candidates who don't play by their game. Trump loved playing by the media's game and they went along with it every step of the way. He was all-access a lot of the time. He held press conferences all the time. Obama was very similar. Clinton too.

Biden didn't do many press conferences. I think I read he did fewer press conferences than the last six presidents. He didn't do many one-on-one interviews, either, and the media took note. They brought into question his competency and whether he was being shielded by his staff. It was very similar to questions raised with Reagan in the 1980s.

The big difference is that Biden only reinforced those concerns with his debate performance. Had Biden gone out and looked like he did in 2020, the narrative would have likely collapsed. Maybe he still doesn't win but he's much more competitive.

But that debate made him look completely out of it. It was terrible and only supported the narrative that he was not up for another term.

They reported the developments as they occurred. There was no plot by the press. That's total hogwash.

And "knowing what we know now?" What fantastic revelations do we have here?

Come on. Joe you can't talk anymore the cenaps are not firing. thats how we lost ,and oh yea maybe they fixed the process.

In the first place. Had he not sought reelection, we could have had an open primary and perhaps stood a chance. Even if Kamala would have won the primary, she would have had months rather than weeks to mount a campaign.