• kreskin@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      he had the lowest poll ratings of any incumbent on 80 years. Nixon had higher polls than Biden. He had zero chance of being reelected, even before he talked about beating medicare. Even against an idiot like Trump. Harris’s hole challenge was to climb out of the giant approval hole Biden had dug himself with his own stupidity.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      22 hours ago

      Considering Harris’ campaign was basically “I’m Biden 2.0, except I’m gonna capitulate even harder to Republicans,” I really, really doubt that. Biden won the 2020 election entirely off a platform of “I’m not Donald Trump.” It was foolish and belittiling of the DNC to think they could pull the same trick four years later.

    • Sconrad122@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      How do you figure? He was looking at potentially losing Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia when he dropped out, and showing no signs of being able to campaign his way out of that hole. One of the Harris campaign’s “gaffes” in the late run was when he went and called Trump supporters garbage (or at least, said words that sounded like that) after the Puerto Rico thing at MSG). Maybe 2020 Biden could have pulled it out, but 2024 Biden, both in the sense of his current mental and social capabilities and in the sense of the baggage he had as the incumbent president, didn’t have a lot going for him

      • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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        1 day ago

        Maybe I’m wrong, but I was thinking more in the sense that a lot of people stayed home instead of going out to vote for Harris.

        • Sconrad122@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Fair, I just think jumping to the conclusion that those folks would have come out to vote for Biden is a stretch when you look at how well his campaign was going. Worth remembering that Harris way outperformed Biden in terms of approval rating, which is a very imperfect metric, but the best one we have for guessing if folks would have come out to vote for Biden but stay home for Harris. In 2020, Biden was a challenger to an incumbent who was botching Covid from both a health and economy perspective. In 2024, he was an incumbent struggling to get out of the shadow of the global post-covid recession and some very unpopular decisions in foreign policy regarding the Middle East. Assuming he would have received 2020 levels of votes is not congruent with those facts

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        There were people googling “did Biden drop out” on election day. His name on the ballot might have been enough.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 day ago

          Because he hid in a closet for four years, so him dropping out and not campaigning any more wasn’t a noticable difference.

          Seriously, he did a tiny fraction of public appearances, press conferences, anything, that any other president in the modern era.

          The only times we really heard from when he was shuffling from a vehicle into a building, a building into a vehicle, or rare occurrences of one vehicle to another

          That’s not an opinion, it’s quantifiable fact.

          And as we’ve found out in the last week, that was because his age had been an issue for a long time, and he just couldn’t handle stuff like that.