Biden has now officially withdrawn as the Democratic Party 2024 candidate, but intrigue is very much in play. Since Lambert will have much to say on this topic (and given the Sunday announcement, a lot more backstory and analysis is sure to emerge). So for now we will focus on one proof that the party is still in considerable internal disarray: that there are visible splits on whether Kamala Harris should, invoking the new cliche, be the one to carry the torch.
Biden endorsed Harris in a tweet after he posted his resignation letter:
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
The Clintons endorsed Harris:
Statement from President Clinton and Secretary Clinton pic.twitter.com/R7tYMFWbsu
— Bill Clinton (@BillClinton) July 21, 2024
By contrast, Obama, who unlike the Clintons was a lead Biden defenestrater, has not. His statement, courtesy CBS:
We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.
Aiee!
Obama does not take positions like this casually, so I assume he will not be easily moved.
Pelosi has not yet endorsed Harris, and neither have Newsom, Prizker, Whitmer, or Shapiro. The Twitterverse shows all have made approving noises about Biden withdrawing but have not backed Harris.
On the one hand, donations on Act Blue shot up after the Biden resignation. Readers can correct me, but I assume this represents primarily small donors. I assume we will hear soon about what the big moneybags are doing.
*Updated*
Here is the exact timing & impact of Biden’s announcement on ActBlue donations today: pic.twitter.com/6qijoq1A8k— Michael McDonough (@M_McDonough) July 22, 2024
On the other hand, Rajiv Sethi explains below how a fight over the candidacy (assuming Harris is not able to demonstrate quickly that she is by far the leading contender) will burn a lot of donor money.
By Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College. Originally published at his website
There’s an all-pay auction unfolding before our eyes, and the bidders are factions within the Democratic party.
All-pay auctions are like conventional auctions in that the highest bidder gets the prize and pays the winning bid, but with one important difference—even the losing bidders, who get no prize, must pay their respective bids.
You won’t see such auctions at Christie’s or Sotheby’s but they are arguably more important in economic and political life than conventional auctions. When parties with opposing interests lobby for or against a piece of legislation, the losing party cannot recover the money paid to lobbyists. When multiple pharmaceutical companies race to develop a lucrative drug, the one to get there first captures the market but the others don’t get their investments back. When two countries go to war, it is not just the winner who pays in lives and treasure. And so on.
To get a sense of how the structure of all-pay auctions can lead to some terribly self-defeating behavior, consider the following simple experiment. Standing before a fairly large audience, you take out a crisp twenty dollar bill and announce that it will be sold to the highest bidder, but that all bidders will have to pay what they bid. Initial bids are typically small, just a few pennies. But as the bidding proceeds, you get to a point where the sum of all bids exceeds the value of the prize. For example, if the top two bids are $11 and $10 respectively, one bidder stands to gain nine and the other to lose ten. The lower bidder thus has an incentive to keep going, bidding $12 for example, switching from a loss of ten to a gain of eight. But the one now pushed into second place (losing eleven) can counter by bidding $13, switching to a gain of seven. And so the contest continues, until all but one person has accepted their losses and given up.
It is not unusual in such experiments for the highest bid (and even some that are not the highest) to vastly exceed the value of the prize.
The struggle to replace or retain Joe Biden as the official nominee of the Democratic party has a similar flavor. As long as each faction believes that a bit more effort will cause the others to give up, the expenditure seems worthwhile. But unlike the textbook all-pay auction in which only the contestants make payments, the costs of this competition are being paid by the party membership as a whole, and others who would like to see it prevail in November. If the president succeeds in remaining at the top of the ticket, he will do so bloodied and bruised, with little prospect of success. And if he succumbs to the pressure to step aside, whoever replaces him will have to contend with his anger and resentment, and that of his most loyal supporters.
The tug-of-war is taking place in full view of the public, with every lurch documented on social media and reflected in prediction market prices. The chart below shows prices for contracts that pay a dollar if Biden is the eventual nominee, and nothing otherwise. You can see that well over a million contracts were traded a couple of days ago, and more than half a million on days with significant movements, including the day of the debate. Every confident assertion that the matter is closed has led to a discernible rise in the implied probability of the event, only to be reversed in short order:
I am not an expert on such matters by any means, but it seems to me that if the party is to have any hope of success, the president has to take the initiative, throw his weight behind his vice-president (or some other process for selecting a nominee), lead the transition, play a starring role at the convention, and be given the dignity and respect that he feels is his due. Someone in whom he retains trust and confidence has to guide and assist him in this; Senator Coons comes to mind. And the negotiations with other party leaders have to be conducted outside the glare of media scrutiny.
Responding to reports of Biden’s anger and frustration, Josh Marshall had this to say:
I think it’s the best thing now for his party, his country and his legacy to step aside. But many who he stood by and was loyal to have acted like hyenas toward him in return. And others who never liked him mauled him when he was down. No point denying that.
Marshall’s comment explains Biden’s psychological state, and his refusal to comply with the avalanche of demands to step aside. But at some point one side or the other has to accept an outcome they would prefer to avoid, and the longer it takes for the process to end, the more damage will be left in its wake.
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“ was a lead Biden defenestrater,”
I momentarily misread this as “has a lead Biden defenestrator” , and visualized Obama knocking Biden out the window with a gray metal pipe. My subconscious is more imaginative than the rest of me.
Years ago I had that done surgically to several large cysts in my liver…….. it is more than draining the cyst, it removed a part of the cyst material so the cyst would not fill again.
This is a Twitter link so everyone knows. Obama and Biden. Funny stuff.
Obama throws Biden in the pond
Many thanks for this illuminating article. Rajiv Sethi is pointing out that all pay means the populace loses. This theme calls for further development.
Obama’s desperate attempt at being oracular is the usual bloviating. As we see in his appointment of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Obama is the stereotipical bad manager who won’t appoint a competent successor so as not to be shown up as a gasbag.
Exhibit: Joe Biden.
And Sethi makes an insightful observation. Just what will Biden do at the Convention? Make sno-cones for Pelosi?
Let’s keep an eye on the Eve Harrington of the Democratic Party, Peter Buttigieg.
All of these whizbang charts about donations and bets going up and down ignore a couple of things: correlation isn’t causation. Coincidence isn’t proof.
We are seeing all kinds of datapoints: and we don’t know what we are witnessing.
O’Rourke was his guy early in the primary season.
Clinton came in as the Kennedy generation was retiring/dying and oversaw a wipe out instead of a new cycle. His people flooded DC, but Obama came in and really just gave out promotions to the same old trash, not new people. He didn’t bring in new people given the wipeout in 2010 and the thousand lost seats. Then there is a reason no one is listing his accomplishments.
If he doesn’t have a hand now, I think he will become a non-entity very quickly.
At the risk of making shit up because this is surmise rather than evidence…
I believe that Hillary cut a deal with Obama in 2008 where she got Secretary of State and Obama’s endorsement in 2016 in return for not staging a contested convention and campaigning for him.
(If memory serves at that point Obama had won the delegate count but Hillary had won the popular vote so she had a fig leaf justification for a contested convention.)
I’m starting to view Centrist Democrats through the eyes of Elrich, where they keep making expedient choices that doom them to have to make worse expedient choices down the road to the apocalypse.
For those interested, origin of the Dollar Auction is the same as the Prisoners’ Dilemma: the game theorists at RAND in the 1950s, and specifically this guy —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shubik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
The reason the experts in mathematical psychology laugh at these economists is because there is a key, but unstated assumption: that the humans are deterministic.
60+ years of experiments by math psych people, then (in)famously proven true by McFadden in getting the not-really-Nobel prize in Economics for predicting demand for the not-yet-built-BART system in California, shows that in a huge proportion of decisions, humans are probabilistic. It is how the “error” term in the logit/probit model arises. FYI economists who are hard-core neoclassicals will state that the error term represents “outside factors the analyst can’t observe” in a vain attempt to preserve their precious “laws” like transitivity.
I’m not criticising you for bringing up that example – it definitely illustrates some quirks of human incentives. However, there are 60 years of studies showing that probabalistic behaviour by humans (just being random, being “psyched out” or whatever) mean these cosy proofs are merely interesting thought experiments. The cleverer economists like McFadden internalised what the math psych people had shown and used it to make $$$. What makes things very difficult is that the “math psych” model of decision making and the “economics” model of decision making cannot be distinguished empirically in loads of cases. Thus the nonsense model of human decision-making that neoclassicals keep teaching in econ 101 is allowed to continue.
TL;DR If you are open to the fact that humans are inconsistent (via mistakes/boredom/whatever) then all the problems economists spent years and loads of public money to try to explain, just go away via eminently unobjectionable explanations.
Thanks for this comment. I would love to hear more, and if you have any suggested articles on this, please feel free to throw out titles.
Maybe I’m drawing too broad an analogy, but your description of these economists rather reminds me of the “cognitive turn” in philosophy (and I have read of “cognitive economics” as well), which seems to strongly presuppose “the rational agent” as the prime mover in human decision-making, blithely sweeping away all the evidence that humans very often do not act “rationally”.
Many thanks. Perhaps a starting point is (surprise surprise) the wiki on choice modelling. Declaration of interest: this has been edited a lot but some of the stuff came from me in bygone years. I’m wary of self-promoting and breaking NC rules and Lambert was kind yesterday in asking for my blog piece describing something on voting theory. Substack stats show quite a few NC people clicked through to it.
But I stand on the shoulders of giants: my dear friend/former colleague/mentor was part of the UK group of geniuses who got head-hunted by UPenn etc to work directly under people who did the serious math for the Manhatten Project.
I don’t pay much attention to my citations these days but I recently discovered (after Google scholar kept pestering me) that an open access article by me explaining why corporate interests muddied the waters regarding this field has rapidly gone up the rankings and is about to become my most cited publication, surpassing even my “definitive” textbook (Which CUP charges approx EUR50 for). I get £80 royalties per annum which just about covers what my accountant charges p.a. for doing my tax return – Ha!
I’m glad you did post a link to your new substack! It looks very interesting, I hope you can use it to elaborate on many of your posts here.
I obviously can’t speak for our hosts here, but I think it would be very useful for those of us interested in your technical contributions if we could have a quick link to more detailed elaboration of the arguments you’ve made here based on your background knowledge.
I wouldn’t mind if someone provides the link as a reply. I like that “humans are inconsistent” that T.F. wrote in his reply and would like to explore it.
I won’t risk a permaban and link to the post…..it was more about a voting system than the psychophysics of how humans are inconsistent. If someone more senior sees fit to link then fine.
The issue of “human inconsistency” has been around since the 1920s and drove the development of the logit and probit functions – i.e. how a [0,1] outcome could be (in concert with other responses) interpreted as a continuous number on some latent (unobserved) scale – be it “utility” or “life force” or whatever.
“N-of-1” triallists were foremost in medicine in noting that a given patient might, in 16 cycles (8 with the active treatment, 8 with placebo, but blinded) respond in anything from 1 to 8 “active” cycles. Plus it became doubly problematic that certain types of patient ALWAYS responded whilst others showed “occasional responses”. What gives?
A similar phenomenon had been noted in academic marketing and transport: a given human might “on average” respond but not every time. Which becomes a problem when you only observe ONE occasion (like the patient in the traditional RCT).
My boss was expert at designing experiments where he messed around with factors that he thought could affect “how consistently the human guinea pig might respond”. Famously (according to him anyway) he got McFadden to admit that the “variance” (how consistently a person responds) could vary….and be very different across people. This creates a fundamental problem for ALL regressions using logit/probit (like RCTs).
These days ALL the bigwigs working with these “discrete choice models” acknowledge that that there are inter-personal differences in consistency of response. This creates FUNDAMENTAL problems for logit/probit regressions (as noted in the reference notes in manuals for stats programs like Stata).
Interpreting discrete choice data is therefore just as much an art as a science: I always had to talk to clinicians in a given area to make educated guesses as to whether a high number of “treatment responses” was due to “a fixed number of people who always respond” or was “a lower tendency to respond but a high enough proportion of people – a “flat distribution” – who were “up there” so that the treatment looked good. Biiiiig difference depending on which is correct. Maybe this will help me write a Substack piece that people will actually “get” ;-)
You’re incredibly kind. Part of the issue is that the “mean-variance confound” is incredibly hard to describe without hard-core maths. I have published, then made private, numerous posts on my existing “own” blog because I realised “nobody without advanced stats knowledge is gonna get this”.
Substack has provided me (pretty much by accident) a vehicle to write stuff that the average NC reader can “get”. I still haven’t solved the issue of how to explain just why every political poll or RCT could be radically wrong and why a lot of “correct predictions” were correct by chance.
I will continue to write stuff on my blog, maybe hide it when I feel able to edit and improve it, but I’d like my Substack to be my “final iteration” of stuff I write. I am very thankful to Lambert for asking for a link to the piece I wrote. I’m going to be very careful about what I write in future so as not to “blot my copybook” as we say around here.
It would be great if you could use your substack for that. I’m quite certain the maths you use is well beyond me, so some explanations that go beyond a simplistic ‘idiots guide’ without going into the hard core maths would be very welcome for many of us I’m sure.
Many thanks. All of the top choice modellers (except McFadden) got together to teach a course in Italy around 2013/14.
Our Sydney unit Director of Ops kept track of scores from participants. I got the best participant feedback score (yay). However I still knew that there were certain people *cough*economists*cough* who just refused to accept the evidence. I had no time for them and tended to disengage with them pronto. To this day I have a “takes no prisoners” reputation also.
Sorry, if you’re a neoclassical economist I will be rude. Life’s too short.
Your rudeness to neoclassical economists, while necessary, is insufficient — there will never be enough scorn and opprobrium heaped upon them.
Terry Flynn: If you are open to the fact that humans are inconsistent (via mistakes/boredom/whatever)
Oh, I am. I just find the whole effort that got under way with von Neumann and RAND to render as mathematical equations matters like nuclear deterrence and economic behavior interesting.
Of course, note that when the RAND folks originally worked out the maths for the Prisoners’ Dilemma in the early 1950s they all got really depressed because they concluded from that that nuclear war was inevitable (i.e. von Neumann: “If you say tomorrow, I say why not today.”)
But yes: in reality most Prisoners’ Dilemmas are iterated and people mostly act probabilistically on that basis.
I talked to Shubik before he died, not incidentally (around 2008). He was very pessimistic about global nuclear weapons proliferation because — to be a little reductive — all the Cold War deterrence modeling was based on two-players games, whereas game theory says that as the number of players and nukes rises arithmetically, the risk increases exponentially. (And the world is now in a multi-player nuclear game.)
We shall see. Or not (in the sense that we’ll be blown off the planet).
Thanks for the clarification and I kinda thought I must have misinterpreted you because you’ve said stuff that suggested you “think probabilistically or using more complex models”.
As you say, it doesn’t change the fact we may well be using probabilities and dumb models that will wipe us out :-/
I’m not sure these guys at RAND were correct. Humans (and lifeforms generally) are not machines or logical circuits. This kind of thing seems like a complete oversimplification.
What does the Democratic Party even run on at this point? Transgender rights, inflation, pro-illegal immigrantion, and gaslighting the American public about Biden’s brain, saving democracy, and Russia-gate with a background of a big “whoopsie, who could have known” presidential candidate attempted assassination. Vote Democrat for Chaos.
Heh. Don’t forget also that they’re the party of censorship, COVID crisis mismanagement, brain-damaged energy policy, and “unequal protection under the law”.
More seriously, though, I suspect their main focus will be to say yet again, “We’re not Donald Trump!” And this carries some weight, as Trump is an egotistical blowhard who would do very few truly useful things while in the Oval Office. But if people are asked that classic question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”, I don’t think Democrats will like the answers they hear. It’s going to be tougher sell this time unless they can offer a serious change of direction.
To the bold; while I agree with you, many do not. I know many who think Biden was great at managing COVID. They claim he slayed the pandemic, and Trump killed everyone because of his policies.
That’s how they roll about everything team blue. They can do no wrong, ever. And whatever you do, don’t say if Joe can’t campaign, he shouldn’t in office. They go totally nuts over that one – how dare you even say that. He only has a stutter.
This election will be about the undecideds. I think MAGA and blueMAGA are pretty dug in at this point. This might be a time for 3rd parties but to rigged for them to matter.
What we do know, it will be interesting, entertaining, and an epic **** show.
Like a turd that keeps surfacing, Trump floats on despite everything Ds could throw in his way. Now, he has chosen a young, handsome, wealthy, celebrated–if of dubious character–successor. Vance will likely draw in independent PMCs. And no-party voters will make the difference in this election, too.
Doctorow seems pretty positive about Vance
Is Trump/JD Vance Going to Transform the US Foreign Policy? Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on ‘Dialogue Works
I have my doubts. Though they might end the Ukraine war somehow, I’m still wondering about their approach to China.
I saw that video and I thought Doctrow was being pretty naive. It is a speech and a convention speech at that. I thought after Obama’s epic speechifying and do nothing recipe at least people like Doctrow would have learnt some cynicism about mere words. Even if one takes the speech at face value we need to wait till Trump chooses his Chief of Staff and other close crew. I read both books on Trump by Woodward and according to him every Chief of Staff Trump chose was in the pay of Wall Street or the Blob or both and they had a pretty easy time distracting him from acting on his many campaign promises. They threw a ring around him and made sure people like Peter Navarro never got a chance to be alone with him. In many of his good instincts Trump was alone the last time and it seems that might be the case again considering the Heritage project to staff his team this time. Yes the Ukraine travesty might end but as Scott Ritter never tires of pointing out, Trump bombed Syria (or was it Libya?) and as Mearsheimer also points out, it was under Trump that the arming of Ukraine began.
They have been unalterably good for the MIC, and war, and NATO….. foreign entanglements and massive wart spending are democratic party traits. While they revive and support Qaeda lite and its control of parts of Mesopatamia…..
Trump would say the “Swamp’s” choisen.
“wart” spending… even if a typo, that’s a keeper. I like it!
Don’t forget keeping Silicon valley happy by stymying right to repair and a whole lot of other tech stuff that aims to keep us happy with bread and circuses. (Though to be fair, I’m not sure Trump is exactly gonna veto all that stuff).
Thiel and his Tech Bros have worked extra hard to foist Vance on him and they will expect top returns for that.
May he be as disappointed as so many of Trump’s investors in the past. Remember this is it for Trump, he has little reason to keep them happy as he won’t be on the ballot in 2028.
The top comment on Sethi’s article (at Substack) raises the question of legal challenges, which Lambert was also discussing yesterday. Where there’s a will there’s a way…?
P.S. Am I bad for smirking at the incoming anger and resentment of all those small Act Blue donors who have been hoodwinked by the Party?
One of the reporters on Al Jazeera yesterday said that Marc Elias, who I guess is a lawyer who has been successful in electoral law cases, told him that there will be no real legal impediment to this switch. Let’s see what happens, if he’s just posturing or providing a valid legal opinion.
I also just saw a post on Mastodon saying that the GA secretary of state stated there will be no legal issue in GA or any other state. He said that the deadlines that have passed are for third-parties / independents to be on the ballot. They wait for the major parties conventions to tell them who the nominee is to be on the ballot.
I don’t see how GA can opine for other states. I seem to recall some R state officials (not sure if secretaries of state or AGs) muttering otherwise depending on what the Dems plan to do.
That’s a good point and I agree. I was just relaying another relevant opinion that seemed to confirm the first opinion. On the surface it seems to make sense, since the nominees of each party are not officially named until their respective conventions, but who knows what kind of devil is in the details of each states’ laws.
I found this article linked on social media that provides further background on this issue. Sorry it’s MSNBC, but they do link to a couple experts (I’m also linking the experts directly if you want to skip the MSNBC article, which is actually not bad – both opinions were also written well before yesterday’s announcement): https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/biden-replacement-ballot-access-democrats-rcna162815
https://ballot-access.org/2024/07/03/gullible-news-media-give-credence-to-heritage-foundation-analysis-that-says-it-would-be-difficult-for-democrats-to-nominate-someone-other-than-president-biden/
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=144086
Hyenas? Josh Marshall is shocked shocked that Obama is a person dedicated to ruthless practicality when it comes to the interests of his class and the money bags who really control it. Biden was always a stooge and psychologically speaking that’s probably why he was always trying to assert his authority with his vaccine mandates and Constitutional run arounds and now the attempt to himself pick the nominee in Kamala. Given how cynical our politics have become why wouldn’t the party poohbahs want to pick their own Trump slayer?
Personally I hope that Kamala stays around and then inevitably loses because the Dems are truly due the comeuppance they are unwilling to accept. And Biden is due a comeuppance too given all the bad things he has done and that Josh Marshall probably doesn’t think are bad. A plague on all of them.
I thought the same thing in 2016- Trump wins and the humiliated Dems will have to clean house due to the magnitude of the failure. Not only was there zero housecleaning, but they doubled down. The only way these Dems change is slowly, one funeral at a time. Hopefully the biggest funeral is for the party itself as it sinks into the abyss like the Whigs with all the Clinton cronies onboard clinging to their ornate deck chairs chanting “now is not the time!”
Some say the Dem Third Way trend started with Carter and his funder David Rockefeller. Before that they took down Nixon but definitely didn’t want another McGovern (an honorable man who flew bombers in WW2–not a Chickenhawk like the Dems now). When Reagan captured part of their base there was a meme that the Dems would never again get the presidency even if they had been dominating the House for many years. This became the excuse for the Clintons and the turn away from the working class. They lost the House and got Slick Willie instead. Now he and his wife, with their checkered history, are party elders.
In other words there was once a bit of an ideological and class split between the parties that has now been erased. A viable Third Party could change the picture but only having two is part of our “orderly” democracy. It’s not so orderly any more but when Biden and the others prate about democracy it’s that order they crave, not democracy.
Josh Marshall is a creature of the swamp just like the rest of the swamp ecosystem. I was one of the earliest subscribers to his TPM news letter.
Given the subject, it must be pointed out again that the American campaign finance system can be said to be the fundamental cause of this mess, including the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision. In the 21st century, our political system cannot be fixed without some form of real and controlling public campaign financing.
Campaign financing is overrated as an evil. At this point, how many people can really be moved by a political ad or even someone coming to your door?
Campaign finance affects who is able to get their message– or even their name– out to the public. People rarely vote for candidates they’ve never heard of. It also affects whose name is on the ballot. Ballot access for third party/independent candidates is very expensive, especially when those parties have to fight legal challenges from so-called “legacy parties” in every state, even after meeting the ballot access requirements (as the Greens are having to do right now, against challenges from the Democratic Party). Candidates who are not on the ballot don’t get votes, and even if they are written in, those votes are almost never counted.
I agree with you if you mean to say that the effect of unlimited campaign financing is not at all overstated. In any case, I agree with your points. Although I don’t have the information to compare present campaigning with the past, huge money interests at this time severely restrict our choices in candidates. To over-simplify maybe, a little, they themselves, through huge donations, bring just a couple, of their choice, into public view. The greater number of would be candidates, who are not chosen by those few who make huge donations, remain in obscurity. The corruption implied by this system is obvious.
I don’t think that the
bribescontributions are overrated in their adverse affect on the state of things.The primary issue in the current campaign financing system is that elected politicians as well as those running for office have to spend so much time raising money rather than being elected representatives. Second is that they tend to learn to value big donors above all others. According to reports, elected politicians are told that they have been elected to represent their parties and that their most important job is to raise the money for their parties rather than to represent their district and the voters. Look at the results of this system, it’s a mess and a failure.
Political propaganda spending is more than just campaign spending. It is also the 24/7 full-immersion sensurround matrix forcefield of ” issue ads” and other such things designed to shape mass popular opinion and disinform it.
” Call Senator Claghorn’s office and tell Senator Claghorn to stop beating his wife and children today!”
RE: increase in contributions coming in from Act Blue.
I have pretty much purged any money-seeking Dems from my email, but yesterday received a looong text from Act Blue asking for a donation …. NOW! Fast work, Kammie!
Swivel-necks gonna swivel. Pee pads to knee pads, etc.
OMG – pee pads to knee pads! Brilliant!
I received one text asking for money at 4:30 yesterday afternoon and another about 2 hours later. I always block the numbers of the dunning texts, but Act Blue and the Democratic Party seem to have unlimited access to alternative phone numbers. The Act Blue harassment appears to be my ongoing penance for contributing to Sanders’ campaigns, as that is how they got my contact information.
I’ve noticed that too (the Sander’s connection) … I always send the STOP message in the vain hope they will honor it.
I got one from Harris today – asking for at least 40 bucks. I have no idea how they got my number.
Actually $47. Email from Democrats Abroad.
Same here
Hilarious. Pass the popcorn! I had decided not to fritter away any time watching these machinations inside the Dem party, but they may just prove irresistible…..such crashing together of intersecting identity and interest silos oh my! Newsome endorsed Harris, it appears. Maybe angling for VP?
Two Californians can’t run together. VP must be from a different state
…and the perks as CA Gov far exceeds being VP. (If you’re interested in the Top Spot.) Harris and Newsome on the same ticket is nothing but Helium in motion.
Please note that both Newsom and Shapiro have endorsed Harris.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/22/us/politics/kamala-harris-democrats-endorsement-list.html
And now Whitmer has endorsed Harris, too:
https://www.clickondetroit.com/decision-2024/2024/07/22/michigan-gov-whitmer-endorses-kamala-harris-heres-her-full-statement/
The Democrats have an Emperor Has No Clothes problem, part 2. The first part was when no one could say the obvious that Biden was too old and losing it. Now, the second part will be to admit that Harris is just a bad candidate (bad speaker, generally unlikeable, a bit goofy). No one wants to be the “bad person” to say that she’s not it except Obama who “says it” by omission.
Dems are going to get spanked and embarrassed in the process.
Yes absolutely. Kamala is just too awful for words. She has no polish or charisma and she cannot speak for nuts. I keep watching her and thinking, how exactly did this lady achieve so much success in California? If there is any talent then it is definitely not usable on the stump. That wild hacking laugh, the cringe inducing personal stories (coconut tree? OMG!) and the complete lack of the Clinton-Obama, ‘I feel your pain’ affected empathy will definitely be a handicap. We are going to see a reverse UK election here I think. The only thing I feel totally sad about is losing Lina Khan.
I can’t imagine who Obama thinks he is going to install who has any chance to win 14 weeks from now.
Most of those governors are happy to let Kamala run and eliminate herself as a possibility for 2028.
NYT:
How These 10 Democrats Would Fare Against Trump, Rated by Our Columnists and Writers
In their list Whitmer is the most exciting, Josh Shapiro the most electable. By their metrics, but it is the NYT cabal, so…
I find Claudia de la Cruz the most exciting, but that’s just me, and maybe two hundred other people in the country.
The Al Jazeera DC reporter, Kimberly Halkett, who seems to usually have pretty good analysis of her beat, yesterday provided a theory for why Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer have not endorsed Kamala out of the gate. She said it took her a couple hours to figure it out, but her theory (she didn’t use that word, stated it more matter-of-factly) was that because those three were so central to getting Biden to drop out, they didn’t want to be seen as coronating Kamala. Further, they didn’t want to feed into criticisms that she was given the nomination on a silver platter. What’s the term that’s often used here? Over-egging the pudding?
I happen to think that this seems like a reasonable explanation for why the three top party grandees who got Biden to drop have not endorsed her while everyone else aside from them seems to be falling in line.
PS: I also heard on TV news, probably AJ again, that the donation intake yesterday since the announcement was more like $75 million.
Maybe because a Harris administration looks to be a disaster in the making. Obama is being cagey. He doesn’t want part of his legacy to be that he bore some responsibility for the Harris administration.
Could be. For my part, I’m just glad that Biden is out. I know it’s not a popular opinion around here, but at least for now I’m feeling positive about Kamala’s candidacy, even with all her negatives. However, I won’t cry if Trump wins. I think that he will further undermine the position of the US in the world, and that that is something that needs to happen, for the world’s sake.
Of course if Trump wins, the TrumpAdmin will try turning Trump’s desire for “drill baby drill” and ” make America not just energy independent, but energy dominant” into policy and that will mean a further speedup in carbon skyflooding from within America. That would not be good for the world’s sake.
That’s a good point too! I was speaking from a politics/geopolitics angle, but yes, environmentally it would be terrible. And I realize that the environment would/will/is affect(ing) geopolitics.
If we affect the environment badly enough, politics and geopolitics will come to a stop when all the people die.
If we affect it badly enough.
Ignore that figure I posted. I see that the Harris campaign itself is stating an intake of $49.6 million yesterday.
I have heard it said that Harris does not have the same strong relationships with big-money donors as Biden and Obama did.
Haven’t yet read Halkett’s piece, but this was exactly my thought. Obama and Pelosi were clearly Harris boosters during Biden’s drawn-out and much deserved defenestration. Why give the Trump camp a free kick by making her their beholden puppet?
This is all an interesting development. As a bi-racial Berkeley native Harris has expressed more compassionate views on the occupation of Palestine than the current and former occupants of the WH. She’s scheduled to meet with Nut’n Yahoo this week; his reaction will be an interesting “tell.”
She’ll likely throw a bone to the Military-Finance Complex on “Ukraine” but as Yves noted the Russian leadership appear to have given up on any NATO leader negotiating in good faith. Russia will continue grinding toward the collapse of the Kiev regime while exposing the West’s lack of industrial capacity to back their rhetoric.
I do expect Harris to share her fellow-Californian Newsom’s more “evolved” stance on cordial relations with Xi Jinping and China — after the campaign rhetoric fades. Much current anti-China sentiment is based on a racism that doesn’t exist in Harris’ native Bay Area, where assimilated Chinese have been prominent for 150 years .
Domestic policy will be dictated to her by Pelosi and Schumer, depending on what happens with their majorities in congress.
Newsom, Buttegig, et al. are falling into line and bending the knee. I’m somewhat likely to switch my support from Stein (not yet qualified for my state’s ballot) to Harris — even though through personal connections I’m quite aware of her blemishes…
Very interesting points, thank you. That’s an especially interesting point about China, and I agree.
Regarding Israel, I wonder if there is any room for her to skip meeting with Nut’n’Yahoo (thanks for that one), to distance herself from the “Genocide Joe” (valid) criticism.
Regarding Ukraine, I also wonder whether, were she to become president, she would be inclined to and would see enough room to wash her hands of the whole thing (“not my war”), by, if not very publicly, at least quietly winding down the support for the war and perhaps working back-channels to push for a negotiated settlement (as difficult as that would be, considering Russia’s well-founded unwillingness). Her position on this over the next months will be interesting to watch. Her picks for foreign/security positions would also be an immediate tell, as Biden’s were.
Finally, I agree with your last point. I voted Green Party in 2016 and 2020 and was probably going to do the same this year if Biden were the dem candidate, but now I’m reconsidering, even though I’m far from a Kamala fan. Despite the negatives I see in her, my overall opinion of her is still significantly less negative than my opinions of either Hillary or Biden were.
PS: I don’t know if Halkett writes for AJ’s site. Her opinion on this was provided live on TV yesterday. She is their (main?) TV reporter in DC.
The Speaker would start preemptive impeachment investigation of the future President Harris if she dare to skip meeting Nut’n’Yahoo.
I wonder if Newsom’s ‘studied’ stance on China is because of the large number of hi-tech firms that have all their fingers in their China pie. Too many hi-tech products are now being manufactured in China and the anti-China trend that Biden started was beginning to feel like a zero sum game where gains in manufacturing (even long term) were going to be heading into flyover land instead of California. Any CEO looking to bring manufacturing jobs back would have to be insane to be locating any manufacturing in the Bay area or thereabouts ergo Newsom taking this ‘let them be where they are’ approach I think.
Obama does not want Harris to be the nominee.
My guess is that he perceives her to be too liberal, or that she will overshadow his “Firsts”, or that she might replace Obamacare with something that works.
Of course, I am assuming that Obama is a toxic narcissist, but opinions might differ.
Biden still holds some cards, one of them is $250,000,000 in campaign funds and one of them is the Presidency.
If Joe resigns before the convention he hands Harris the Presidency, control over $250MM and the opportunity to appoint a VP, which would give that VP a leg up in ’28.
The Biden’s need Pardons and $, Joe can Pardon Jim and Hunter, however the optics would be bad, and Hunter needs $6.5MM to pay off Morris, more for the IRS and more for legal fees.
Jill would probably be happy with $ and becoming one of of the ladies of “The View”…
Joe, well, he has full blown Dementia, which keeps the Family dynamic interesting.
It’s a shitshow for the ages and it is going to get very weird indeed.
Some of the news/commentary I heard on international news channels this morning (most likely France 24) was that Harris automatically gets the Biden campaign funds since she was already on the ticket with him.
It’s possible he might completely disappear from sight after January, the way Reagan did as soon as his presidency ended, thereby somewhat limiting the embarrassment to these immediate chaotic developments. Of course Reagan had Queen Nancy, her astrologers, and a staff that, quite competently, yes, shielded him from this kind of humiliation. Biden seems to lack those advantages.
Nevermind January. Where is Joe Biden now? Covid is a convenient excuse, but that he hasn’t shown his face yet while dropping out of the race (he only “called in” via phone today to a news conference held by Harris.)
Curious what someone who was in Moscow, circa August, 1991, might be thinking now wrt the current unfolding events…. (I’m guessing that’s before Taibbi’s Russia period?)
Harris is a joke candidate who will get thrashed in November, although she may do better than Biden would have if he’d stayed in. But the Dems’ biggest worry at this point is getting wiped out in both houses of Congress, so they need some way to redirect money down-ballot to salvage at least one of those houses. Whether Obama shares that worry or has some other angle he’s playing is hard to guess. Maybe he thinks a better candidate for the top job would motivate more voters to come out and cast Blue Team ballots. Or maybe he’s trying to set the table for 2028. Either way, the basic problem is that there is no one on the Democrats’ bench that is capable of stepping in and, at this point, even winning the popular vote, much less the Electoral College. They have purged the party of anyone that might be able to compete on a populist platform, after years of non-performance on all their talk of “fighting for” things that people actually want (as opposed to “more war” and “woke” cultural fashion posturing).
Alexander Mercouris at the Duran yesterday made the point that the Democratic Party, the party of Theodore Roosevelt and JFK is no longer the party of the people and of labor. In fact, it has devolved into competing family/factions, the Clintons, Bidens and Obamas who literally hate each other and are in constant conflict.
Mercouris notes that we have entered a very dangerous time with an angry, old man in the presidency who is furious with all those who have, in effect, staged a coup to force him out against his will. Thus, without the stabilizing prospect of another term, what might he do?
Far better, he argues, that having “decided” not to run (what is his reason?), that Biden should resign the presidency now as well.
A very good but disturbing conversation with Harris just a sidelight in all this.
the party of theodore roosevelt?
Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican but after he failed to gain the nomination against his earlier successor Taft at the 1912 R convention, he formed the Bull Moose Party and ran in a three way race. He came in second, while Wilson was first.
Sorry about that. I was relating it from memory. I am sure that Mercouris mentioned Roosevelt. He must have been referring to FDR. My fault.
And on 22/7 The Duran had a pretty good take interpreting it all as the surface of a power struggle over the Democratic Party between Obama and Clintons.
Obama laying out a trap for the Clintons who now defended the losing guy Biden officially while Obama hasn´t endorsed anybody on the record. Which might give him leverage when rebuilding a Democratic Party after a possible wipe-out election defeat.
“Democratic Party factional war”
https://theduran.com/democratic-party-factional-war/
FWIW, it’s telling that Pelosi has not endorsed Kamala. They’re both northern California politicians but from rival political clubs: Pelosi was ‘adopted’ by the Burton brothers, Phil and Dan, and when Phil’s widow Salla was retiring she encouraged Pelosi to move from fundraiser extraordinaire to politician extraordinaire (I’m a fan of her for the ACA). Kamala, otoh, was a ‘protege’ (is that what they’re going to call it?) to Willy Brown when he was Speaker of the California House and the most powerful politician in the state, more than the governors for years. Pelosi didn’t stop Barbara Boxer from handing her Senate seat to Kamala when she retired but Pelosi clearly is not Team Kamala.
No – Pelosi has now endorsed – this is just a way to extend the news cycle – expect Obama to endorse momentarily.
My we all survive interesting times.
Given Democrat support of a cognitively challenged Biden, its not surprising the support for Harris. Will Harris be able to 1) get discontented democrats out to vote, and 2) swing independent voters who are moving to Trump, any more than Biden was? Harris will need every dollar of donor funds to get across the line but her popular pro-Gaza support with young Democrats maybe more than offset by some significant pro-Israel donors holding back.
Trump is running on being the “peace president” who will fix the US border problem. Biden was the antithesis driving many independent voters to Trump even though they dislike Trump’s domestic policies.
Harris can easily kneecap Trump by supporting peace and fixing the border, while having a much more acceptable domestic agenda for independents.
The only hitch is she already screwed up on the border….
Yep. Coulda woulda shoulda… but Harris was AWOL, apparently thinking she was “above” being the border czar.
On that issue, she is toast.
No President or Czar or anyone can fix the border. It would take Congressional BillPassing to even set the stage for fixing the border.
Enough DemSens and RepSens came together in the Senate to pass a very Republican-friendly border-fixit bill. If they had passed it Biden said he was going to sign it.
The RepSens came out against their own bill when Trump instructed them to come out against it.
He even baldly state why— the reason being that he ( and Republicans) would need a broken border as an issue to run on, and if the border got “fixed”, then it wouldn’t be available as an issue to run on.
But that takes some long and leisurely sound cud-chews to explain and is that even possible to do in today’s micro-soundbite world?