Get Biden Out!
Joe Biden is incapable of winning this election, we all know it. Centrist democrats dig in and unleash an outrageous gaslighting campaign.
As America swiftly approaches its eleventh hour, an unimaginable catastrophe happens. We are now thirteen days since the presidential debate between two of the least popular candidates in a long time. For the masochists who watched, we witnessed a disaster that seemed to defy Murphy’s law. A seemingly over-prepared Biden struggled to even communicate basic talking points, let alone defend or fight back against the fascist⁺ across from him; Donald Trump. My expectations going in were already faint. I expected Biden to be bullied and do his best to focus on his few accomplishments. The feeble optimism I relied on was his very strong State of the Union address in March, where his team likely gave him some strong stimulants for the big public appearance. Nothing could prepare for watching Biden utterly fail to complete thoughts only to be bailed out by the moderator, derailing sentences at random and seeming visibly lost. Trump didn’t have to even try, spouting his typical barrage of lies and half-truths while occasionally capitalizing on pointing out Biden’s incoherence. So we know one thing is not a secret; this was the worst debate performance in American history by a wide margin. Now what do we do about it?
This debate, being so horrendous, has spawned two factions in the democratic party; the realists and the gaslighters. In the week following it is clear, the debate tangibly affected polls. Biden in national polling was about tied or slightly behind prior to the debate, then post debate, the margin has grown to be a unanimous multi-point lag for Biden. When looking at swing states, it was already bad pre-debate; in May, Biden was behind in 5 of 6 key swing states. That margin exploded post-debate, putting unthinkable states like Virginia in play. The realists in the democratic party, even strong supporters of Biden, have seen this and made the reasonable call to ask Biden to not seek reelection. There are currently eleven democratic congress members who have called for Biden to suspend his campaign and thirty-eight more that have concerns about his ability to win in November. Media pundits across the board have subtly hinted that Biden should drop out of the race or have outright called for him to do so. More post-debate polling shows that three-quarters of registered voters say that another candidate would have a better chance at winning. It’s obvious isn’t it? This resistance isn’t coming out of nowhere. Biden’s credibility has been trending downward for years. Thanks in part to an aggressive far-right smear campaign which has leaked out enough to sour the uninformed voter’s perspective, but more importantly because Biden doesn’t offer anything tangible to voters. Biden’s major selling point last time around was being the ‘return to normalcy’ candidate. It was enough to scare centrist democrats into supporting him instead of the radical progressive this country needed, offered by Sanders or Warren. He barely escaped with the victory in 2020 and was not able to build the energy required to win enough of the congress to pass significant legislation. Now that his role as the moderate has been fulfilled, he is left with a rather unimpressive record to run on and zero momentum. It should be deeply troubling for everyone that Biden’s best proposal to voters is that he isn’t Trump. Being down in polls to someone running on a far-right retribution campaign should be sending blinking red lights and sirens to democrats.
Directly after the debate, the media grilled Kamala Harris who reflexively had to deflect for what happened and it was ugly. Then, in the days after, Biden’s camp covered him with all sorts of excuses like him having a cold, the jet lag, then redirecting the conversation away from the debate. Congress democrats who have backed Biden staying in the race now number ninety-nine, even including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Biden himself has been too egotistical to even consider dropping out as he deflects the issue in interview after interview. Eventually, Biden stated, in a revealing display of arrogance, that only God could remove him from the race and then said that if he loses “as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I could do, that’s what this is about”. My charitable read is that a lot of democrats are rallying behind him simply because they don’t see it possible to break through his arrogance and his insular inner circle. Much of the media that outright dismiss the idea of Biden dropping out; they ignore the obvious crisis, tell us not to believe polls then divert attention to how bad Trump is. These people are who we call the gaslighters. They are demanding we go down with the ship. We don’t need to be reminded of the dire consequences that a Trump presidency presents, that isn’t the issue. The issue is that Biden is losing… badly. The gaslighters have taken on the impossible task of convincing, erasing and lying to the voters that everything they saw with their own eyes that night was false. Regardless if he is competent enough to be president, Biden is not capable of winning this election with the path he’s on. What will happen the next time he makes an embarrassing gaff and verbally faceplants? Do we want to wait to find out? The sect of people denying this, in an election deemed ‘the most important election of our lifetime’, are not living in reality.
In this dire moment, democrats need to come together to pressure Biden into dropping the campaign. There are then many questions to be answered, namely, who will take over. There are proposals to run another primary but knowing the system, it's very unlikely. Another candidate from the democratic party would run into issues with campaign finance and legal challenges by republicans. The obvious answer is Kamala Harris. Just from the perspective of polling, Harris makes up all of the lost ground, especially with people of color and independents. From a campaign perspective, Harris is a black woman running in a year where abortion is on the ballot in many states: it's a slam dunk. Even Trump knows this, taunting that Biden should stay in the race, then took a week off to play golf while the disaster unfolds. While Biden finishes his term out in the White House, Harris would bring unrivaled energy to the campaign, especially with her history as a prosecutor. Even for a leftist like myself, she would certainly be much better on the Palestinian genocide⁺ issue and would be far more in touch with the younger voting bloc. She would surely bring a large turnout as well, possibly allowing democrats to win both houses. There is no more practical or better option. This has to happen.
Among the optimistic rumors floating around, one may think this is already in motion. Media like the New York Times have been hammering this story and today, close Biden ally George Clooney, called for him to drop out. In the various interviews, democrats like Nancy Pelosi, have given very uneasy answers when responding to the issue directly. Some rumors suggest that democrats in private are planning to coalesce against Biden. This has to happen soon and if they were to plan it, they should have Biden announce dropping out around July 19th. This is right after the republican national convention and would steal the media attention, polls would certainly rebound. If this doesn’t happen, they will bring us down with the ship.
When it comes to voting, there is no nuance to it. It is not a display of your morals, in a winner-take-all system, you have two choices. We do not live in the bastion of democracy that our high school history teachers lead us to believe. In a swing state you will be forced to vote for the lesser evil, and in a solid state, you’re maybe able to elevate a genuinely decent candidate. Centrists like Biden have leveraged this to force us into a corner, ‘vote for me or the fascist wins’. The political landscape today is one that is controlled by massive amounts of lobbying money as the capitalist machine grinds away the lives of the working people. The left is currently in disarray after narrow back-to-back defeats of Sanders and has a prevailing pessimist attitude. I think that the increasing nihilism and accelerationist⁺ theories are unproductive. I think the American left has plenty reason to maintain hope as it is our responsibility to bring about change. On the reformist front, though we are deflated, many progressives have made it into office recently and in 2028 there will be massive incentive for a progressive candidate to capture the continued frustration and disillusionment of working people. On the revolutionary front, the BLM protests in 2020 and the protests against the genocide⁺ in Gaza has paved the way for a new generation of leftists. It is these protests that tangibly make change in the minds of the public and in local policy. This takes time. One day, the left will take power in this country, it has already been done this year in France and Mexico. We must work on both fronts, reform and revolution; building a radical movement that reveals the contradictions of capitalism and our broken political system in order to bring about a world built on empathy. With that said, our first task is to ensure that fascism⁺ loses in November. We can all start by contacting our local democratic congressperson, by phone or by email, and demand they call for Biden to suspend his campaign.
Trump and Biden are both fascists and warmongers. They both suck.
Write in someone who is a descent person, and educated.
I will be writing in Jill Stein.
Respectfully, with Joe Biden‘s long and hard-working career, stepping aside, should be remaining on the sidelines, but let someone that has no baggage and threw his hat in the ring in 2020… what about Eric Swalwell and Adam Kinsinger for VP. They would be tough and sarcastic And vigorous and make Trump look like an orange boo-boo🤣 and give Vance a licking on the constitution.