I don't know what other quality I could have meant other than electability when I said he wasn't the strongest candidate. The job of a candidate is to win an election.

I thought you meant in the "actually capable of being POTUS if elected".

who do you think would have a higher chance than Biden to win the election for democrats?

Probably the Gov of CA Newsom or any of the people who ran in the primary against Biden in the 2020 primary, other than VP Harris.

If Biden had said a year out that he would not be running I can think of 4 or 5 better candidates

no you couldn't

lol, these clowns have been peddling conspiracy theories about the Dems shaking up their ticket for years now, it's been 100% obvious for months that's not going to happen and Joe/Kamala will be on the ballot, but they still keep at it.

Biden is the best democrat candidate to gather the votes of older whites especially non college educated ones, no one comes close.

the "national vote" doesn't matter, that some candidates can win california or NYS by bigger margins is irrelevant. You need to win purple states. In purple states basically it's always about whites over 50, at least that's how Trump won vs Clinton and Biden won vs Trump.

There is something to be said about latino voters as well but it's less clear how they skew, how they moved in the last couple of years and so on (only thing we know is that latino men are moving toward republicans, women far less if at all).

That 23y old upper middle class kids would have preferred many other people than Biden is obvious, but they don't decide presidential elections. Black women are going to vote 95% for any democrat candidate anyway so they don't matter as well. Minority men will more likely vote for a man than a woman to begin with, and having been Obama VP matters to some of them.

Maybe some candidate that specifically targets minority men would do better than Biden, but by how much? meanwhile no1 comes close with whites , especially over 50, especially non college educated whites, to Biden among democrat candidates.

People living in already-won (or already-lost) states *don't matter at all* to win elections. At all.

Which candidate would do better than Biden in Michigan? in Arizona? in Georgia?

i dislike biden but i agree with most of this. neither party has a particularly strong bench right now.. i thought the republicans might be in a better future position with desantis, but he has proven so far to be extremely weird and untalented for national politics.

Agreed. There is no bench for the Dem party right now. Dems were talking about newsom from CA or Beshear from KY replacing biden if he had to drop out.

Both of those guys would have been hammered by what is currently going on in their states. CA is the best example of some of the long-term unintended negative effects of Dem policies and you can't highlight the violence, crime, people moving out and homelessness in a national election because some people in middle America see those things as negatives.


Beshear's biggest city (Louisville) is the 2nd worst city in the 67 largest downtowns in the US and Canada in terms of "downtown recovery" (which measures exactly what it sounds like) since covid.

I just did.

I can't imagine why anyone who would vote for Biden over Trump would switch to voting Trump over nearly any democratic candidate who was endorsed and promoted by Biden.
Maybe even particularly white males over 50.

Unfortunately the rare exception may have been Harris, which complicated everything.

the actual undecided people at the margin live in completely incoherent worlds that we can only vaguely imagine.

first of all it's not absurd to think that even among democrat-leaning voters, 1-2% might simply refuse to vote for a woman as POTUS.

then, name recognition. it might sounds not credible but believe me that it's not about some people being a little less informed than us, who like to talk politics.

Some American voters are actually as informed about American politics as you are about Japanese politics.

there are people voting Biden who probably don't even know Harris is the VP