62 percent of Biden voters want to replace both candidates on the ballot: Poll
Roughly 6 in 10 voters backing President Biden say they’d replace both the incumbent and his rival former President Trump on the 2024 ballot if they could, polling released Wednesday shows. A Pew R…
Sure I'd rather vote for someone with Bernie's politics but that's not on the table right now. I'll happily vote for Biden over literal christo-fascism and the destruction of our democracy any fucking time.
I'd rather vote for someone with Bernie's politics but that's not on the table right now
And America's oligarchs will ensure that it never will be
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. Lucy Parsons
Every election we will be faced with 2 shit choices, and voters are to blame for keeping it that way
Probably ninety percent of those would want to replace any relevant Democrat that made it on the ballet. Big deal. What a useless story.
That’s because we don’t respect dance.
Ah five! six! seven! eight!
Starting at five? That's too progressive!
Kids these days don't respect a one, a two , a one two three four.
You call that a pirouette? Chin up and again!
What?
This is percentage of Biden voters...
The majority of people who would vote for him. Wishes there was any other option.
That's a pretty big story
It's an important fact, but hardly a major or unique case. I know I've personally never felt like any of the candidates in any of the elections I remember were great, just "good enough" or "better than some of the alternatives," I certainly would've replaced them if I could.
Looking at some recent primaries
Back in 2020, Biden only had 51.7% of the votes in the democratic primaries. That made him by far the biggest single candidate, but that also means that almost half of democrats would have probably been happy to replace them with one of the other 4 candidates if they could (though they would have disagreed on which of the 4.) Most of them would still go on to vote for biden despite him not being their first pick.
In 2016, trump won with 44.9%, again the biggest single candidate, but that means that 55.1% wanted not trump. Of course most of that majority still held their nose and voted for him in November, but the majority of them probably would have been happy to replace him at that time if they could.
2008 was really fucking close for the Democrats, Obama beat out Hillary with 48.1% of the vote to her 48%, and the remaining 3.9% voting for various other candidates, that means that the majority (51.9%) of people wanted a candidate other than Obama. Same year, McCain won his primary with 46.7%, so again the majority did not vote for him but for various other candidates.
And I think it's pretty safe to say that in just about any election throughout history, voters would like to replace the opposing party's candidate if they could, no surprise there.
A really big news story would be if the majority of the party not only would replace their candidate if they could, but were actually in agreement on who they would replace them with. If 6 in 10 Democrats said "We would like to replace Biden with this one specific other person that we all agreed on" then that would be big news.
Replace everyone in the house and senate if youre serious about changing anything
yea companies do this type of shit all the time
They dont do it often enough else these fuckheads that have latched onto the taxmans tit for 30/40 years wouldnt still be there.
Ever see a story in the sidebar, and know before clicking on it who posted it?
It's a tone thing.
There's a few regular article posters than either post articles with a certain tone to the headline or they editorialize the post title to fit their narrative. It's similar to how you can notice how somebody you're familiar with writes and uses language and can identify potential alt/sock puppet accounts from them.
Due to this I've come to believe that these people are astro-turfers with a disengenous agenda.
Whats a sidebar?
I'm running on mbin; it shows randomly selected stories / random communities in the sidebar (which I think Lemmy doesn't do) with no additional details besides the title.
The Community Info. Depending on the website layout it is often displayed on the side of the screen, as a sidebar next to the main content. It usually has things like community rules. Some layouts and mobile apps refer to it as the sidebar, community description, or the community info.
Nice!
That wasn’t a compliment lol
No shit but also why the fuck didn't we primary him?
People tried. They didn't even come close.
Seems like they'd have done better with 62% of the voting public behind them.
Trump faced an entire gaggle of conservative opponents and rarely failed to clear the 50% mark by state.
Biden's biggest defeat was to the 20% of voters who cast spoiled ballots in Michigan. Marianna Williamson and Dean Phillips were barely acknowledged.
Even RFK Jr isn't polling at better than 10%.
Who do these people actually want for the position?
Ask the DNC.
Democrats no long believe in primaries.
All the way up till 2024 democrats were furiously protecting Biden. Shutting down any critism of him. Now it's election time and all the discussions they refused to have for the last 3 years are at the forefront. Shame they waste their energy defending the presidential elect rather than vetting the better candidates. Like thats never blown up in their faces.
Because the unwritten rule is not to run against the incumbent.
Because no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president. It would be a waste of time and money.
no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president
So, a bit of history.
https://time.com/5682760/incumbent-presidents-primary-challenges/
Before primary elections became the dominant way to pick a nominee, party leaders were more able to either shut down challengers or smoothly pass the nomination to someone else. Notably, four incumbents who were denied the nomination in the 19th century — John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur — had been Vice Presidents who rose to the Presidency following the deaths of their predecessors, perhaps suggesting they’d never won their parties’ full support in the first place.
Then
In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, President Harry S. Truman was challenged by Senator Estes Kefauver. Truman lost the New Hampshire primary to Kefauver and dropped out of the race shortly after.
Also
TIME reported that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary was a statement that was “as much anti-Johnson as antiwar,” citing a NBC poll that found more than half of Democrats didn’t even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Attorney General Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. Then, on March 31, Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election.
As TIME reported in the April 12, 1968, article on Johnson dropping out, “So low had Johnson’s popularity sunk, said one Democratic official, that last-minute surveys before the Wisconsin primary gave him a humiliating 12% of the vote there.”
It should be noted that Ford nearly lost to Reagan in 1976
He racked up 1,187 delegates compared to Ronald Reagan’s 1,070, which was barely more than the 1,130 he needed to secure the nomination.
And Kennedy nearly beat Carter four years later
Carter won 36 primaries that year, but Kennedy’s 12 victories included important ones in New York and California, and he didn’t concede until Aug. 11, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
In another historic race, William Taft was nearly edged out by Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to place second behind Woodrow Wilson in 1912. That gave Taft the dubious distinction of being the only incumbent to come in at third place in a general election.
100 percent of return2ozma political posts are attacking Biden.
If they're not a voter suppressionist trying to get Trump elected they're doing a great pretending to be one.
Is the Hill trying to get Trump elected too because they published it? And these 62% of democrat voters - paid shills? Russian bots?
No pro-genocide centrist cares.
You are a one-trick-pony with the argument in these articles. I'm going to start voting even harder now.
Geez, i expected more fighting in the comments, but everyone here's just dunking on op and calling them a "bad actor" so I'll start one.
Is there even a single comment about the content of the article? Some of y'all commenting on FUD and OPs contributions should take a hard look at their contribution to both this comment chain, and Lemmy in general. I hope it looks better than what i see.
Anyway, enough of how disappointed i am with you, all of you, and on to the article.
Most of the article is just polling opinions, so not a lot to see, but i thought this part was interesting:
Fewer voters also say “it really matters who wins” the 2024 presidential race compared to those that said the same at this point in the 2020 cycle. Back then, 80 percent of Trump supporters and 77 percent of Biden supporters said the race really matters — but those figures have now dropped to 70 percent each.
This is surprising. I thought most people considered this election even more important than the last!
Is there a record somewhere of "election importance"? How far back does it go? Is this 7-10% drop normal?
By the way OP. As someone often critical of Biden i too get called a russian or chinese tank sometimes, so i feel close to ya. Thanks for contentin' and shit. here's an upvote from me <3
I think people forget how significant a moment 2020 felt.
Democrats are in for a rude awakening when the turnout plummets this cycle because normal people don't feel like it's the end of democracy like they do.
Although, as I've read, people who don't vote are more likely to vote for trump (basically the argument is that trump convinced them he was an outsider, and appealed to people who don't normally go out to vote because they feel there is no point), so a drop in turnout would actually favor Dems. And I do think Dems will be fired up more over abortion.
I thought most people considered this election even more important than the last!
The most important election in history is always the one happening next year.
I spent a good amount of time calling OP a shill in this thread without bothering to read the article. The combination of thehill.com + OP's bias + polls aren't really indicative of anything let alone deserving of the "multiple updates multiple times per day" conceptual weight they're being given in OP's posting history, led me to feel it was a better use of time to just talk about why are we talking about this again and why do we think OP posts this so much, as opposed to just obediently feeling like I'm obligated to spend time talking about it again, because OP feels like posting it again.
I mean I will say in my own defense that earlier today when for the other multiple time OP posted a whole story about how bad Biden's doing in the polls, I engaged with that story purely on its own merits. Here's the conversation that ensued:
And so on. It went on from there, but the point that I'm making is that engaging with this stuff on its own merits isn't the doorway to productive conversation it might appear to be. In my experience the shills will come out of the woodwork to make weirdly hostile bad-faith conversation with you for more or less an unlimited amount of time. I think blithely being okay with putting up with an unlimited amount of that isn't a fair thing to ask people to do.
Thank you. For supposedly being "the most important election of our lives" a lot of people don't want to hear the truth that Trump could win again and it'll be Biden's fault.
It's a little late for Biden to terminate his campaign. Best thing he can do is pick a progressive VP (I don't know much about Kamala right now) and then resign day 1.
I think Democrats have focused too much on who they don't want as President for the last 8 years, and now the party doesn't have any other candidates that have the name/brand power to go toe to toe with trump and his base of far-right brainwashed quislings. The best bet to win this thing is to run Biden at this point, but they need to build some candidate brand/visibility for their next election.
So there was just a burst of 11 upvotes for this story in 10 minutes, while during the same time period there were 3 downvotes.
I wonder if the same ratio will continue during the next 10-minute window or going forward; my bet is that the ratio will more or less reverse (or more), with downvotes dominating over time. What would cause an unusual number of people to all upvote this story all at once, right after it was posted?
Maybe I am wrong. Let's see.
Edit: I am wrong, I think. Beyond that fact that this post obviously isn't being downvoted heavily now that it's established, I spent a while looking at this question, and I found some things that maybe looked hinky, but nothing outwardly and obviously suspicious. And you can't really tell anything from the behavior right after a post -- it's all noise. After about 30-60 minutes, enough votes have been accumulated that you can say something about it, but before then, all bets are off.
That's probably just an ideological breakdown of the 15 people that browse New on Lemmy.
Honestly, just get yourself an account that allows you to see who votes and vote order, it will save you a lot of paranoia.
3 of the first 11 upvotes are people I recognise and have interacted with. It's obviously not sockpuppets.
If the downvotes I can see, two of the first 3 are people I've recently interacted with as well.
I'm a non-US fediversian and I upvoted it because I thought the headline was funny and because I sympathise with Americans for having to choose between these two old men (who aren't even Bernie Sanders, which would have been more understandable).
Yes, lemmy downvotes are a conspiracy to make Biden look bad.
It is well documented that many political-influence organizations have extensive social-media-fakery arms, and I'm absolutely certain that most of them have as their #1 priority from now until November to get Trump elected. And Trump is clearly a pile of elephant shit in human skin, so going after Biden for a variety of random bullshit (or just talking down the whole concept of democracy in general) is their best angle of attack.
It's not self-evident that they've discovered Lemmy, but I feel confident at this point that they have. And if they have, it would be weird if they decided on posting only, that voting was a red line they didn't want to cross.
It's an interesting fucking article. Just because it isn't pro-Biden doesn't mean it isn't news.
It very likely could be socket puppet accounts, but also there's occasionally a lag in federation of posts and votes. So the post could have showed up on some voter suppressionist server, the users all upvoted it, and then the votes were federated all at once.
2 hours later...
What are your thoughts now?
I actually spent quite a while looking at it. Honestly, I found some things that I found a little suspicious, but nothing really all that compelling. I decided I was chasing ghosts and abandoned the analysis.
Since you asked, though, here's what the ratio for this post looks like over time:
So, pretty much, exactly ordinary and as you'd expect it.
I mentioned some things I found a little suspicious -- as an example, here's the graph for this post which I also would have predicted to be a magnet for fake voting:
That one, to me, looks hinky. The slow dropoff after an initially elevated ratio looks like exactly what I'd expect if there was an organized effort right at the beginning to drop a bunch of fake upvotes. But... there could be a bunch of alternate explanations. It's actually pretty difficult to get a prediction of what a "typical" post should look like, because there are a lot of variables and not a lot of data points (there aren't that many posts that display the right combination of "controversial post" + "enough votes in total to get above the noise.")
Like I say, I gave up the idea concluding that, on the balance, there's at least not a strong indication that anyone is dropping fake votes in big batches.
Tin foil hat! Oh no!
Maybe those 62% agree with the article?
This community by far has the worst takes on US politics
Even people on the meme sub understand Biden isn't some magical deity who is going to save us from the literal incarnation of satan.
Why are people even remotely surprised the incumbent supporting a genocide is not popular, and that any opposition must be russian trolls or chinese propaganda.
because media has a narrative of conflict to push, and the fact that biden is overwhelmingly more popular than trump doesnt make good headlines.
The people who look for the politics sub to go post in are generally not the most reasonable about their beliefs
Not me. Fuck Trump. Biden is a good guy and I would vote for him no matter what but I think the idea of Harris getting to be president because Biden is too old and dies is a win win. So the Biden - Harris ticket is fuck yeah from me.
I fully agree, who in the hell would want two old coots, unless you want somebody that will be easy to control.
John Stewart for POTUS.
I don't care if he doesn't want it; that just makes him more suitable.
Washington didn't want it either. Can we force someone to be president?
Maybe nobody should be president and we work on ourselves for a while. Really self-actualize
"If they could"
They could, it's called the primaries
This is one of many problems with primary voting, but it still works. The DNC elites clearly wanted Hillary to win in 2008, and they wanted Bernie to get far fewer votes in 2016 and 2020. But the reality is there's not a lot of situations where they'd actually reverse a primary vote, if nothing else because the backlash would be so extreme they'd be guaranteeing an election loss anyway.
Democracy is a religion that glorifies the lesser of two evils.
I mean, not just America, the entire world wishes you had gotten your shit together for this one, but land of the free/home of the brave really is just a bumper sticker slogan I guess.
Their hairstyles are displaying convergent evolution.
raises hand
The Hill. lol
Idk if I'm back on the accelerationist train or not yet. Not that I can vote in the States, so it doesn't matter. Regardless, I feel like it would be hard for anyone that even slightly cares about the future to vote for either of these two earnestly. As a progressive, you'd have to weigh the pros and cons of the value of the Dems possibly reevaluating and restructuring if Trump gets back in, vs the absolute abysmal reactions and policies that Trump will cause if he does, especially outside the US. But then if you vote the Dems in again, the neo-nazis around the world will feel less empowered, and there will be less terrible decision making in the short term. All at the cost of Dems not having to change the status quo, and effectively being the lesser evil for the foreseeable future.
Actually, I don't envy the American voter. And I certainly wouldn't want to vote in this election.
No progressive is voting earnestly for Biden, they just don't want a fucking dictator dismantling the EPA and stacking the courts with more corrupt servants of the Federalist Society.
There are no pros for the Dems restructuring, they first of all won't do it, and secondly we are running out of being able to vote at all. The next insurrection has better odds of success.
How is this even a conversation with anyone? We don't like Biden, but he hasn't led an insurrection. Do people want to continue having any choice at all?
When Bill Clinton was in office in the 90's, after the Democrats lost three presidential elections in a row to Republicans, he did not adopt socialist policies. Bill Clinton and Democratic party declared they would no longer fight Republicans on economic issues. The Democratic party shifted to the right, not the left, in response to losing elections. They opted to grab moderate voters from Republicans rather than try to win over more progressive voters.
If Democrats see moderates voting in the next election, but not progressives they will move to the right to grab those voters. They aren't interested in chasing nonvoters or third party voters. So, the choice is not between averting fascism and driving the Democratic Party to the left. Those options are one in the same for progressives. The choice is between driving the Democratic Party to the left and averting fascism or allowing fascism to take hold in the US and allowing the Democratic Party to drift to the right. Of course if we lose our democracy, which way the Democrats shift isn't going to matter, but I think it's important to make this clear. There is nothing to be gained for progressives by not participating in elections, only things to lose.
This is a clear cut decision, but unfortunately people on the left are not framing it that way. We need to choose the option that delays fascism for another four years. We need time to give ourselves the opportunity to convince people that socialism is the answer to fixing our problems not blaming out groups. Considering the consequences of a fascist dictatorship in the US, voting is the thing everyone should want to do.
And this makes sense. Because the election has shown that the nation is happy to vote the right wing Republicans into the government, not the lesser evil Democrats, so naturally the Democrats would have to shift towards the popular opinion a bit more, instead of radicalizing to the left.
You guys need ranked choice voting.
We need to choose the option that delays fascism for another four years.
And then in four years we need to choose that same option.
And four years after that.
And four years after that.
And four years after that.
Just like every presidential election I've voted in.
This is why they don't need to worry about progressives. First, because the country isn't progressive at all. And second because they can always just tell them that if they don't vote they're enabling fascism.
Dude, fuck off. Your opinion doesn't matter, and if it's just that doing the best thing possible also sucks then it's not useful. Yeah, the system needs to change eventually, but I'm happy to vote for the person who is doing more good than most US presidents in my memory. Biden isn't who I'd choose, but he's much better than just a supporter of genocide or whatever. Under his administration the other day the FTC just banned non-compete clauses for example. It's all very quite, but the Biden administration has done much better than most US president.
Guy reiterated what any reasonably knowledgeable American voter already knows and almost equivocated over our choice like we actually have a choice. Well, we do… throw away votes by not voting or voting third party, voting for the trump disaster, or what constitutes our liberal party with Biden.
Unless you’re into fascism and a likely dictatorship, there’s really only one choice. The only people screaming about genocide and laying it at Biden’s feet are the same ones worshipping the military industrial complex.
Idk if I'm back on the accelerationist train or not yet
Voting as Fire Extinguisher
by Kyle Tran Myhre
When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember: there are children inside.
Yes, I get that, but at what point do you start considering future children over the current children? Accelerationists are not deontologists, they are consequentialists. A child lost now is valued against the amount of children saved at some calculated point later.
No, the best way to convince an accelerationist that accelerationism is not the right play is to show that there will be no decently positive outcome. Which I'm inclined to agree with, since I can only imagine the continual election of populist figures such as Trump will only increase the divide between voters of the two parties. This'll create more violence, possibly destabilize the US, and could destabilize large parts of the western world due to policy, military vacuum, and emboldening of alt right groups. Now measure all those consequences against the possibility of an improvement in the political system and multiply that by likelihood. This, to me, seems like a very low gain, for the high likelihood of increased losses. So it should be preferable for accelerationists to go with Biden, since he's likely to bring about accelerationists goals too, but with less risk, but much slower.
Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly hard to vote earnestly rather than strategically.
I'm a true Leftist and it's incredibly frustrating seeing so many Democrats that just went back to sleep during Biden's presidency. People should be out in the streets protesting and fighting for a better future. They let Dems do basically nothing because "at least Biden's not Trump."
Most Americans just went back to sleep.
Most people desire peace in their life, and will suffer greatly to maintain it. But it's getting harder for people to convince themselves that this is actually peace.
Yall call this civilization? It's the jungle with extra steps and concrete
This seems like a good opportunity to push for voting third party.
Excellent. Which 3rd party candidate do you expect will appeal to about 50% of voters in enough states to get 270 electoral college votes?
I vote Republican (apparently I'm the only one on Lemmy) and I'm part of this percentage. I don't care for either candidate, but both sides are going to vote for their candidate, because both sides have the "anyone but him" mentality.