NEO: How about the prospects of alternate nominees for the Democrats?
Do you think other Democrats poll better than Biden? See this. Now, granted it’s from mid-February of this year, which is pretty old news. But it’s one of the few polls I could find that shows how Trump would do against leading Democrat contenders, and the answer is “pretty well.” Here are the stats at a time when Trump was leading Biden by only 1 point:
In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.
Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.
Hey, remember this headline from Politico in 2019? Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.
While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.
According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.
“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”
So was Joe lying then? Similarly, did Dr. Jill plan even back then on being the reincarnation of Edith Wilson?
In any case, Dan McLaughlin argues, “I’m here to say: Sorry, Democrats. It’s now too late to swap out for another candidate. You’ve saddled yourselves to this dead horse. You’ll have to ride him to the losing line. And there are plenty of reasons why that’s the cold hard truth. The last time a major party got rid of an incumbent president campaigning for re-election was 1856.”
“What is Biden to do now, when the Democrat/Media Complex is abandoning him in light of his performance last night?”, Scott Johnson rhetorically asks. “He is to hang in there. He likes being King. Dr. Jill likes being Queen. He’s a stubborn kind of fellow. Is it unreasonable to foresee that they will rally once again to the cause of discouraging us from seeing what is in front of our nose when the members of the Democrat/Media Complex conclude they have no alternative?”
And note the Dems’ current paradox (not that it will likely stop them if they work out a way to do a Torricelli-style swap):
