Quick Reminder: Don't Compare the Final 2020 Popular Vote Totals with Non-Final 2024 Vote Totals

My quick glance at the posted vote totals suggests that there are about 16 million votes not yet counted.

Right now, Harris is at about 67M (N.Y. Times data), but about 45% of California votes aren't yet included in that tally, plus 30% of Oregon votes, 35% of Washington votes, 35% of Arizona votes, and some more in other states. Given that so far the 54% of California votes that have been counted are split 5.6M for Harris to 3.9M for Trump, that suggests the remaining 46% will add roughly 4.8M to Harris's tally and roughly 3.3M to Trump's.

I went through the N.Y. Times map and entered the data from the states which weren't listed as >95% reporting, and projecting from current totals, it seems like Harris is likely to get probably about 9M more, for a total of about 76M. Trump's popular vote will likewise grow considerably beyond his current 72M, to about 79M. That expected split (76M to 79M) might be compared to the 2020 final results, which favored Biden by 81M to 74M; it thus appears that we will ultimately see a likely swing of about 5M votes, give or take a million or so, I'd guess.

I mention this because I've been seeing people suggesting that the decline from Biden's 81M to Harris's 67M is highly suspicious. But, again, that doesn't make much sense, because that's comparing final 2020 totals to far-from-final 2024 totals.

Of course, I'd love to see more reliable estimates than my quite rough calculations. UPDATE: The University of Florida Election Lab estimates that 158.5M ballots were counted, which suggests that there are 19.5M ballots left to count; that's higher than my estimate of 16M left over, but still consistent with the broad point that the current totals are far from final.

Comments

[Syd Henderson]

Thanks, Eugene, I got the impression there might be a lower turnout this time, so Trump might win with fewer votes than he had last election, but I guess not.

[Krayt]

I've seen the meme floating around, omg Dems lost 15 million somewhere! And Trump 3 million! Sus, yo!

I can see full total of votes going down as, despite all the hot air, this was a less angry election, and therefore I'd expect fewer voters to get out.

Good observation many votes still to tally, even if no net effect on the winner.

[myself]

I also saw the meme floating around, specifically on a left wing subreddit.

Of course, the commenters overwhelmingly shot it down as a conspiracy theory with no evidence.

Contrast that the 2020 right wing election conspiracies that are pretty much a required belief at this point.

In fact, I remember the last time I saw a good left wing election conspiracy theory. It was back in 2004 basically predicting Bush's relection was going to be overturned in a few months. And I remember the author, it was RFJ Jr.. I wonder what ever happened to him?

That's actually a pattern I've noticed, the particularly nutty people on the left, RJF Jr., Tusli Gabbard, Elon Musk, often end up on the right.

[AmosArch]

I'm seeing plenty of conspiracy theories on leftwing reddit. They probably won't do anything because they were BTFO compared to 2020 and they don't have anything. That and they are terminally online weirdos with the strength of a cream puff. But make no mistake. The left would would have rioted 100x worse than the Jan 6th picnic if the mysterious if the last minute mysterious shift toward Biden happened the other way around in the much tighter 2020 race with the specter of covid lockdowns driving people crazy. So spare me all the false nobility with this forced transition.

[myself]

2020 was never that close, or in doubt.

Remember Bush v. Gore?

Now that was a close election, an election that for many reasons (voters wrongly de-registered, bad ballot design switching votes, different standard for different districts) Gore actually should have won.

If Conservatives had a controversy as legitimate as that I can't imagine how much hell they would have raised.

[JasonT20]

Someone posted the opposite meme on Twitter as proof of why 2020 was so suspicious. Showing vote totals for 2012, 2016, 2020 and the votes counted at the time for 2024, 2020 looked much higher than any other election. (The graph also used 50M votes as the baseline rather than zero, further exaggerating the differences.)

I've been hearing for 4 years that, "There's no way Biden got 81M votes!" So, will they stop with that if Trump gets close to that many this time?

[David Nieporent]

I’ve been hearing for 4 years that, “There’s no way Biden got 81M votes!” So, will they stop with that if Trump gets close to that many this time?

They will, of course, not, because their bullshit wasn't that it was impossible to get that many votes, but that it was impossible for anyone to get that many votes while running against their Dear Leader.

[VinniUSMC (Banana Republic Day 5/30/24)]

Broken Dave.

[Brett Bellmore]

Biden didn't get 81M votes. "Not Trump!" got 81M votes.

[JasonT20]

Sure, some of the votes for Biden were "not Trump" votes. But then, some of the votes for Trump have always been "not a Democrat" votes, or specifically, "Not Hillary!", "Not Biden!", or "Not Kamala!" votes. And a further some of the Trump votes this time around were, "My life sucks right now!" votes, just like always happens when the mood of country is poor. Some of the Biden votes in 2020 were the same. Incumbent parties usually do get hit hard when times aren't good.

But the only thing that matters is whose name was on the ballot and which circle the voters filled in. Their motivations don't determine who gets elected or affect the legitimacy of the result.

[Frank Drackman]

Thanks for showing why the Electrical College is so great, and I know Californians are laid back and smoking pot, but C'mon Man! Florida had their state counted before midnight.

[AmosArch]

Somin on suicide watch. Don't do it Ilya! Your gardener, the local narcos and coyotes, and the power companies of america who benefit from all the extra time people have to spend scrolling through your posts, love you (your money) .

[Commenter_XY]

Don't forget the 300K+ children the Fed gov't managed to lose track of and God knows what happened to them. They will never prey on Ilya the Lesser's conscience; perhaps they should.

Ilya the Lesser doesn't actually have blood on his hands, he only holds the towel for the bloody-handed one and asks if they need it, incessantly = his immigration and open borders policy advocacy

[IANNAL]

Ironic that Shapiro actually made the "lesser" comment?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

I had some undergrad and grad classes with Dr. Gilbert whose part of that lab when he was at Auburn. An absolutely amazing man. One of my favorite professors. He just got appointed to the National Science Board too by Biden.

[Longtobefree]

"But, again, that doesn't make much sense, because that's comparing final 2020 totals to far-from-final 2024 totals."

Making sense is not a high democrat priority, especially when it interferes with "the narrative".

[Eugene Volokh]

To be precise, the comparisons that I saw came from supporters of Republicans, who seemed to be suggesting that the Biden 2020 vote was vastly higher than the Harris 2024 vote, and that this is evidence that the Biden 2020 vote stemmed in part from fraud.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, I saw that. Fraud wasn't my first thought, even before I realized there were more votes to be counted. I'm not terribly persuaded by claims that fraud is negligible, but I couldn't see how anybody would have been able to pull off THAT much fraud.

[Syd Henderson]

And actually if the votes this time are similar to last time, that indicates that last time the totals were probably legitimate.

[David Nieporent]

But if they're less, that still doesn't indicate fraud. "We were so successful at stealing an election with millions of fake votes without leaving any shred of evidence last time… that we decided not to do it this time!"

[Brett Bellmore]

My theory was actually that what happened in 2020 was that Democrats had succeeded in demonizing Trump to the point where Democrats would have turned out to vote for a literal department store manikin. But that the white hot fury necessary to accomplish that wasn't sustainable, and in this election Democrats were trying to motivate the cold ashes it had left behind.

I think there might have been some degree of that this time around, but it obviously was not the primary factor. The primary factor really IS the primary factor: That Harris didn't need to win any primaries to get the nomination, so her poor performance as a campaigner didn't get exposed until the general election, when it was too late to go with somebody else.

[myself]

Bwahahaha,

Even the left wing election conspiracies actually end up being right wing election conspiracies.

[Life of Brian]

Yeah, doing some really rough back of the napkin on this last night I figured by the time the dust settled she would land in the low-mid 70s. But given that so much of the uncounted vote is on the left coast, I wouldn't have thought Trump would have enough outstanding to land him in the upper 70s. I suppose the dribs and drabs in the rest of the states all add up -- we shall see.

[Brett Bellmore]

There does seem to be a weird correlation between time to finish counting an "blueness" of a jurisdiction. Apparently Democrats are just really bad at election administration.

Perhaps one of the goals of the second Trump administration should be to throw enough resources at election administration that every state can be called on election night. It's not as though it's impossible to do, most states manage it.

[David Nieporent]

No state has ever counted all of its ballots on Election Day. It's just that we usually have enough information to call the state without counting each and every vote first.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, I know, I said what I meant: Can be called on election night.

It's really pathological how long some jurisdictions are taking to finish, and it helps drive suspicions when they suddenly matter. We need to do something about that, and we need to put a major push into getting serious about election security, including just stopping using electronic voting machines.

They really are a mind blowing security risk, they've been proven insecure over and over, and the elections officials making the call always say, "We'll deal with it after this election", then don't. I suspect there may be some kickbacks involved.

[David Nieporent]

Electronic voting machines with a paper trail pose no security risk. When I was a kid, I remember that we used machines where we actually pulled physical levers on a machine for each vote we were casting. (When I was a kid, I was not voting, obv., but I would've been in the booth with my mother.) You cast your vote by pulling a big lever that recorded it and reset all the little levers. There was no record whatsoever of what had happened — just an internal tabulation. Now that was insecure. A machine that generates a physical piece of paper that you can review before submitting and that can be re-reviewed later is not a security risk.

[David Nieporent]

“Can be called on election night” is a function of how close the election is. Since the government cannot force an election to not be close, it cannot make all elections callable on election night.

[AmosArch]

The Sacramento LA and bay area really are almost as much a separate world from the rest of california as they are from the rest of the nation and world. And the bay area is a loony bin compared to even Sacramento and LA. The state really should be broken up (fairly) instead of having these asylums constantly disenfranchise everyone else each election. Same goes for the other states with overly dominant metros.

[EscherEnigma]

I mean, all you have to do for that is go to a national popular vote (for president) and multi-seat proportionatl districts (for House). (Federally speaking)

That said, as long as we're going with pipedreams, I'd like to bring up my idea of re-apportioning states on a regular basis similar to how we reapportion congressional districts every ten years. A lot of nuance to be worked out for sure, but it's a pipedream so meh.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think you could probably get bipartisan support for a simultaneous breakup of California and Texas, as the result would be a wash in terms of national politics. Hard to pull off constitutionally, given the constitutional requirement that states consent to being broken up. Then again, they violated that in the case of Virginia, so there's precedent.

The national popular vote would not have as much impact as Democrats like to think; The discrepancy between the popular vote and EC outcomes is mostly a consequence of California being a big one party state, where the Republican turnout is suppressed by the futility for Republicans of voting. (Since most of the time they're not even allowed the chance to vote for Republicans in the general election.)

Were your proposal implemented, I think you'd see that the outcome of a calculated EC vote would rarely be different from the popular vote.

I have long favored multi-member district PR. It's federally prohibited for Congress, as current incumbents don't fancy their chances under it. The version I favor would just have each candidate in the district who cleared some minimal vote getting to vote their own constituents' votes as proxies in the legislature, perhaps with only the top two vote getters actually getting a salary and floor privileges.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Then again, they violated that in the case of Virginia, so there’s precedent

The creation of West Virginia was approved by the legitimate government of Virginia, which replaced the incumbents who committed treason, rebelled against the United States, and thereby forfeited their offices.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, that was their story, and they stuck to it.

[ducksalad]

I guess one could use the following: Virginia seceded, therefore its officers were no longer the government of a US state, by their own declaration. However, we didn’t consent to them taking any land with them. A new election was held and only some counties sent in returns. Even though they called themselves by a new name, they were legally the government of the whole thing all the way From the River to the Sea. (Ohio River, that is.) In effect, Virginia was renamed West Virginia. Then, seven years later, they (the government in Charleston) consented to some part of their state being admitted to the union under the name Virginia, at least implicitly.

Of course there are some inconsistencies, e.g. Congress superfluously passing a bill to admit (West) Virginia in 1863 when under this theory it was Virginia all along. But the other explanations have some glitches of their own, for people who want to insist we’ve had unbroken constitutional continuity since 1789.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, I'm not one of those people: For the duration of the Civil war and a while after, we effectively didn't have a constitution anymore, it was being violated so casually.

[David Nieporent]

The state really should be broken up (fairly) instead of having these asylums constantly disenfranchise everyone else each election

"Outvote" and "disenfranchise" are two different words with two very different meanings.

[hobie]

Well, like Trump said until yesterday...it's a rigged election. I expect he'll be demanding a recount in Georgia, Penn, Michigan and Wisconsin. And if things don't go Trump's way we can assign fake electors. You know, I wish Trump well in the recount

[Bwaaah]

Sure you don’t want to adjust your shtick? You’re, like, soooo 2020.

The “hayseeds” won, bitch.

[loki13]

Yeah, Trump won.

Which is why all of the election fraud stuff is so much worse. That does real damage that lasts- and now that the genie is out of the bottle, we see it that it has metastasized to common discourse, down-ballot races, everywhere.

"Heads I win, tails you lose," might be entertaining in a bar, but it's not a great way to instill civic virtue or inculcate the value that we have regular elections, and if you lose one, you just regroup and do better next time.

Oh well. I feel like love for institutions, process, compromise and the belief that the country is stronger from hearing from all views is old-fashioned. Now it's all, "Don't look at your side, because the other guys? They suck so hard!"

[Bwaaah]

"Oh well. I feel like love for institutions, process, compromise and the belief that the country is stronger from hearing from all views is old-fashioned."

That's not old-fashioned. That's the voice of the cynics speaking. I think we're just re-learning what it means to actually be in touch with each other, in the age of ubiquitous communications (where Joe Anybody can publish anything to the world while incurring no significant cost).

Cynical voices have been getting almost all the views for years now. But the yearning for more honest, more hopeful voices hasn't dropped a bit. Those voices are slowly emerging...honest, sincere, trustworthy voices who do themselves, and conversations with others, and the differences between us. It's still a good time to act like, I dare say, "ladies and gentlemen."

Too many of today's voices do cynical, nasty stuff. That stuff is destined to lose ground against better, more precisely correct, indeed kinder, voices. We're figuring out how to filter out the messed up noise while letting the better voices still come through. (The communications channels now are technology-based, and evolution comes slowly as we figure out the meaning of improvement, by mistake, and wait for product adaptation to follow.)

We're learning how to be connected without having to live in streams of semantic sewage. Our own revulsion now propels us to emerge from the dreck. Pretend I'm right; that can be a pretense for hope.

[loki13]

"Pretend I’m right; that can be a pretense for hope."

I'll try. Like I've written before, I don't view voting for Trump as some deep moral failing- I know good people who voted for him. I just feel like, as you say, we are awash in semantic garbage, and too many people are unwilling to examine the streams that they choose to swim in.

But nothing is new under the sun, and I will pretend you are right, keep hoping I'm wrong, and see what happens.

[VinniUSMC (Banana Republic Day 5/30/24)]

Like I’ve written before, I don’t view voting for Trump as some deep moral failing

Unfortunately, from my personal experience, that makes you an outlier. Right now, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the 70+ million racist, sexist, women hating, Hitlers running around. 90% of that comes from 1 demographic, to be fair, who only really seems to care about abortion, and think that Trump's first objective is going to be to ban abortion nationally. Maybe you should speak to those people, and assure them that, no, they're just gullible. Lied to by Leftist scum like MSNBC, CNN, Vox, etc.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think that the internet has gotten too good at feeding people what they want to see, so most people live in bubbles that give them the impression, maybe just subliminal, that their own views represent overwhelming majority opinion. Even where they might be a minority, or the public is close to evenly divided. Everybody thinks they're in the mainstream, because what they're fed is filtered to make it look like that.

Then based on that mistaken impression, they proceed to treat people who disagree with them as though they held wild, outlier opinions, not mainstream views, and get really pissed off that those people have the nerve to act as though THEY were the majority!

We really need some mechanism for breaking people out of these bubbles, so that they have a more realistic impression of the distribution of public opinion. I find Musk's "community notes" promising. The system automatically sorts people into clusters of folks who agree with each other, but then promotes comments that have cross-cluster support, rather than support confined to inside a cluster. It's a way of popping bubbles.

[EscherEnigma]

I mean, I think Trump is a liar and conman, so I have no problem saying his last year of whining about how the 2024 election was rigged was just him lying his ass off.

But if you don't think he's a liar and conman, and think he's sincere, then the question becomes... where's this rigged election? Surely he wouldn't make such very serious claims with no basis? So it must've happened, right?

[Bwaaah]

I understood the part about him being a liar and a conman. But then you end up intimating that surely, what he said, "must've happened, right?"

Which way is it?

I think I get it. You're treating me like I'm stupid, and you're trying to trick me into stumbling upon your obvious contradiction. For what purpose?

I quite well get that Trump is "a liar and a conman," although I wouldn't choose quite those words to describe his pathology. What is it that you think I don't know, that you think I need to know? (FYI: I'm not pro-Trump. I'm anti-progressive-Democrat.)

[ducksalad]

I think you’re misreading Escher. The first and second paragraphs are mutually exclusive scenarios, separated by the traditional “But if”. Seems clear enough.

Maybe he edited for clarity while you were composing your reply?

[Michael P]

Clearly, someone being a liar and conman is mutually exclusive with them ever being wrong.

We might as well start asking why Kamala Harris and other prominent Dems insist that Joe Biden is mentally competent.

[EscherEnigma]

You missed the first sentence of the second paragraph.

[Bwaaah]

[hobie]

I envy my black neighbors. Today was just another Wednesday in another year. Their vote never changes anything for themselves. They're still under the thumb of white admitted racists. They walked by my porch today and couldn't care less

[Frank Drackman]

you mean they could care less, Jeez-us Hobie-Stank, I'm supposed to be the one molesting the Engrish Language.

[BrotherMovesOn]

Pretty sure Hobie's construction is correct, though.

[Frank Drackman]

I could care less

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

>Their vote never changes anything for themselves.

You're right. Generations of reliably voting Democrat, and nothing ever changes for them.

>They’re still under the thumb of white admitted racists.

Yes. The Democrats. Just like in the old days.

[Bwaaah]

Many of them really don't care. But you don't actually envy them. You find their behavior to be foolish. You're smarter than them. And you think you have more privilege.

You're a contemporary, Democratic snot.

[EscherEnigma]

"Too many of today’s voices do cynical, nasty stuff. That stuff is destined to lose ground against better, more precisely correct, indeed kinder, voices."

[Bwaaah]

Guilty as charged, here.

[Area Man]

Not sure why everyone is still talking about this election. As we learned four years ago from very smart, disinterested lawyers, Harris, as the sitting VP, has the final and unreviewable constitutional authority to not count Trump’s votes and accept alternate slates of electors in her favor. So she can just declare herself the winner. It’s right there in the Constitution if you squint long enough.

[loki13]

Gallows humor. I just wish that some of the people who keep pushing election lies would see that this is just more Trump BS, and it has caused so much damage already.

I truly don't understand how someone who has done so many things that should disqualify them from being President would be elected. Heck, not just all the details of what he did after he lost the last election, but his comments about how he shouldn't have left office anyway that he's been making recently. Or, you know, the whole adoration of authoritarians (the Hitler thing was just the cherry on top of the poop sundae).

I keep going back to that conversation with Prof. Kerr a little more than eight years ago. I knew Trump from New York, and I just couldn't believe that THIS GUY, the slimy, lying, womanizing blowhard who was a real estate developer (kinda) and a joke to so many people ... and was a Democrat before and just switched so more people would pay attention to him ... that THIS GUY could possibly win.

It's like when I said, after seeing the trailer, that no one would see Titanic, because they know how it ends. Except being wrong in that case didn't have big ramifications.

I am trying my best to find something to be optimistic about, so I will just keep thinking that maybe I am wrong again, and Trump really will put aside everything I know about him, and instead of pursuing petty grievances and enriching himself (and possibly doing irreversible harm to our institutions, not that they are in great shape right not) he will turn toward being a good President and making the country a better place. I don't think I've ever wanted to be wrong so badly.

[Bwaaah]

Your sentiments about Trump eight years ago quite match mine.

I think the Democratic Party now has a dangerous, almost religious political machine that spits out racialized, sexualized, bigoted carve-outs for all kinds of ideas that institutionalize unequal treatment of people for capricious reasons. (Hobie is actually righteous under their current dogma.) They are now the older brother class to the American Black underclass, helping to ossify some of our worst historical outcomes and even trying to add new identities to their presumed underclasses (like all "BIPOCS" and "transgender identities"). And like the totalitarians that they are, my difference with them on such a matter, on ANY such matter, warrants me being smeared as "racist," "transphobic," etc., and summarily dismissed. It's that simple.

Am I describing the fringes of the Democratic party? Nope. That's mainstream DNC thinking now. It's backed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the smartest institutions of journalism and higher education in the country. Corporations, like police departments, are only now figuring out how to stand up against one after another absurd, leftist, morality play. The Democratic Party stands silent to all of that, as do Democratic voters, who fear being called "racist" more than anybody else.

And that's not to speak about inflation ("We'll spend our way out of it") and border security ("Come on in!").

I could go on. But that just makes me look like garbage. So I seek to take the teeth out of Democratic voices, and find Trump as the only plausible opposing force of the day.

Let me finish with a recent real example. New York State just voted for a purported "equal rights" ballot measure that enshrines protections for "gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy." (You can see the full text here.) The wording is so unclear, the implications so unstated, that THEY DIDN'T INCLUDE THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE PROPOSAL ON THE BALLOT. And they didn't include the text in the voter guide either. (See the dumbed down guide here.) The state merely presented a facsimile of the proposal with a simplistic take intended to get you to vote for the proposal without even understanding what it actually means. You know...civil rights. Do the right thing.

But this isn't about protecting people against harmful discrimination based on innate characteristics, but to privilege certain behaviors under the law. It's new civil rights territory, and they willfully obscured that fact. The measure passed. You don't hear any screaming. This is the new rubber-stamping ballot proposal process where state election officials slip the big stuff by ignorant voters, glazing over essential issues because they are not intended to be genuinely considered by voters.

I'm garbage. I vote. And as opposition to the Democrat ideology machine, Donald Trump is all I got. It was surely going to be a bad four years for me if Harris got elected. Now, I don't know how it's going to be. That's an improvement.

[Bwaaah]

Here is Joe Biden speaking in Vietnam in September 2023. His cognitive impairment was quite visible. The DNC machine, the news media, everybody who knew about his impairment just shouted down the concerns as if a higher reality was meant to prevail. Just trace over their steps of how they handled his candidacy, as if this were a minder's game, not a voter's game.

Joe Biden was a slow trainwreck that everybody could have known about, but nobody [on the left] wanted to know about it. That's more than a leadership problem. It's a cultural problem.

I don't read or watch right-wing nonsense. I just stumble onto b.s., Republican and Democrat alike, without even looking for it. And though too much of what the Democratic Party does is b.s., there's almost NO opposition to it in the party or its supporters. Deafness is all they have, and silence is all they offer.

Donald Trump, a very flawed man, is my only plausible ally.

[ducksalad]

I’m not convinced that this was some grand deception on the part of senior Democrats.

It’s more like a manager at the office, a person liked by his colleagues, who reached the position after 40 years of loyal service, is now showing signs of age. Do the colleagues have a duty to snarl at him that his time is up, put a flashing portable sign out on the street that says “Our General Manager is Senile”, and finally call the police and say a disoriented old man needs to be taken away? No, they’ll probably try to help him along and hope he sees the light on his own, telling clients that everything is OK and the office has everything under control, and then finally when it’s really bad do some kind of intervention where all the Asst Mgrs tell him he ought to step down or else they really will have to call Adult Protective Services.

Which is about what happened.

Three other points one could make:
(a) It’s not like they deceived you, or anyone else, and I doubt they thought they were deceiving anyone. More like saying your aunt with terminal cancer everyone knows about is “doing fine, looking good”.
(b) Formally removing him using the 25th would’ve left the VP position open, with a Republican House voting on the replacement, and the Speaker next in line if something went wrong.
(c) This one should convince you….removing him would have made Harris POTUS and some of them might have had genuine misgivings about doing that. They might have been delaying in hopes of some other path opening up.

[Bwaaah]

I don't feel deceived by the whole affair. Many Democrats do. I just point it out as an example of a political culture that has almost lost its ability to handle dissent in a rational manner.

[ducksalad]

(d) Suppose Harris and the cabinet had tried to invoke the 25th. They would’ve needed a lot of Republican votes to get the 2/3 vote needed. Do you think the Republicans would have approved a plan that helps Democrats get out of bad situation? Or would they have said, no, this is Kamala Harris trying to do a coup, with a lot of winking and smirking for their audiences back home? I think the ones that take instructions from Trump would be told to take the second option.

[Bwaaah]

They didn't need to invoke any laws. The popular Democratic voices could easily enough have said, "You look like sh_t, Joe. Time to bow out."

That, and a few weeks of media bashing, is all it would have taken to get Joe to give up his candidacy, just like it actually happened. But by then, it was too late to take advantage of the primaries to engage a democratic process that lets voters make the choices.

By the looks of it all to me, there doesn't appear to be a single, real leader in the Democratic hierarchy. It's nothing but a bunch of people who are mortally fearful of doing the wrong thing.

[David Nieporent]

That, and a few weeks of media bashing, is all it would have taken to get Joe to give up his candidacy, just like it actually happened.

That is not what actually happened. What actually happened was that Biden had a miserable debate performance that for the first time — yes, despite what you said — made publicly clear his infirmity. And it took not just some nudging and bashing, but polls showing that the public wanted him to step aside, as well as polls showing he was hurting the party, to get him to do so.

By the looks of it all to me, there doesn’t appear to be a single, real leader in the Democratic hierarchy.

The leader of the party that holds the presidency is the sitting president. Period. That is universally true. And the leader of the party that doesn't hold the presidency doesn't exist, until that party nominates a candidate for the presidency, and then that person becomes the leader. That's just the way American politics works. It has nothing to do with the current Democratic Party specifically.

[IANNAL]

"The leader of the party that holds the presidency is the sitting president. Period."

Gavin Newsom might disagree (at least in private)

[David Nieporent]

Here is Joe Biden speaking in Vietnam in September 2023. His cognitive impairment was quite visible.

I applaud you for actually trying to back up your claim instead of just asserting it like Joe_dallas and his ilk do. The problem is, I don't agree with you at all about your assessment. I started listening at the point you linked to, ~16 minutes in, and listened for about 3 or 4 minutes before I got bored. Nobody who listened to that would say, "This is a spry 25 year old speaking." But I don't hear any meaningful "cognitive decline" at all. I hear logical, coherent, discussion of the topic.

[Lee Moore]

I knew Trump from New York, and I just couldn’t believe that THIS GUY, the slimy, lying, womanizing blowhard who was a real estate developer (kinda) and a joke to so many people … and was a Democrat before and just switched so more people would pay attention to him … that THIS GUY could possibly win.

The explanation is perfectly straightforward. He has been exceptionally fortunate in his enemies. Somehow Biden is supposed to be likeable, though he has always been a sh1t, but he rather obviously has dementia. And as for Hillary and Kamala - they even make Ted Cruz seem fun. Almost.

Up against a tolerably sane, moderately agreeable opponent, with the ability to disguise his or her contempt for the working class, Trump would never have got near the White House. Someone like Shapiro, Roy Cooper or Hickenlooper woud have won in a canter.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, that's what I think, too. Hillary was a smart political operator, the way she rooted the DNC and turned it into part of her campaign organization before the primaries was masterful. But he had a well earned reputation for corruption, and charisma so low it was negative. Everywhere she went to campaign she LOST votes.

And Kamala did terrible in the 2020 primaries, got handed the VP slot as an affirmative action pick, and then just dropped into the nomination without having to lift a finger. And turned out to just be flat out bad at campaigning, she'd never have gotten the nomination if she'd had to fight for it.

Something seems broken in the Democratic party, they seem incapable at the moment of nominating sane, likeable people for President.

[EscherEnigma]

"Up against a tolerably sane, moderately agreeable opponent [...]"
You do know he won two contested primaries (2016 and 2024), right?

[Brett Bellmore]

He did.

Back in 2016, he was contesting with multiple establishment candidates, and the party base were sick of establishment candidates after Romney and McCain. The establishment failed to settle on one candidate soon enough to avoid dividing their votes, and Trump had the wealth most challengers didn't, to be able to last long enough to be perceived as a viable alternative to them.

In 2024 he only had one opponent that mattered, DeSantis. And DeSantis had a real shot at it, until March 23, when Trump was indicted, and the Republican voters rallied behind him.

[Lee Moore]

You do know he won two contested primaries (2016 and 2024), right?

You do know the market for “tolerably sane, moderately agreeable” is much narrower in primaries than in the general, right ? Which is why the sort of folk I named on the Dem side don’t get nominated.

On the R side, after the joys of the Bush dynasty, McCain and Mittens, "tolerably sane, moderately agreeable" begins to look very like "f**king caver."

[Brett Bellmore]

" so I will just keep thinking that maybe I am wrong again, and Trump really will put aside everything I know about him,"

Maybe consider the possibility that some of what you know about him isn't so? That you were just a big gullible about trash talk and political lies about someone you don't like?

If you look at the change in his wealth over the course of his first administration, the idea that he was enriching himself is utterly untenable. He lost about $1.5B while in office, that's a really weird indication of a guy enriching himself.

My evaluation is that Trump is a narcissist who wants to go down in the history books as a great President, and that's as good a motive as any for a guy to pursue what he thinks will be beneficial policies. Enriching himself isn't on the agenda, or else he'd never have run for President. He's wealthy enough that he could lose 90% of what he has, and his lifestyle would be untouched. Now he's in the market for an historical legacy, not dollar signs.

[loki13]

"Maybe consider the possibility that some of what you know about him isn’t so? That you were just a big gullible about trash talk and political lies about someone you don’t like?"

Just to be clear, I am not some person who first became aware of Trump in 2016. Nor am I someone who first learned about Trump from the Apprentice.

I know all about Trump from his earlier times. There was a good reason the NFL said, "Nope," when he came knocking. Any person could tell you that Trump is all sizzle, no steak (which could have been the slogan for Trump Steaks, honestly).

The gullible people are the ones who didn't pay any attention to his past. Because past is prologue.

[BrotherMovesOn]

The House of Saud's (MBS', not the government's sovereign investment fund's board) decision to invest in Jared's wacky hedge fund seems to have been incredibly prescient.
Well done, bone-saw murderer!

[Social Justice is neither]

Why? Because it makes you and the rest of the supporters of the hijinks from 2020 look bad? You conveniently overlook all of the shady actions and destruction of integrity controls for 2020 but demand nobody look at this election until you can plausibly say we should move on from old news.

[NvEric]

Harris is still down 12 million from Joe's "votes".
Obviously, Harris didn't get those "votes" because she didn't do this "We have assembled the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of the United States"