They also pinky-promise that they are not running current psy-ops on many other topics. (Tee hee.)

That's like telling a starving person that long-term obesity concerns are the real issue.

Trump lost by around 50,000 votes in swing states, in the middle of a bungled pandemic response. In 2020, Biden was polling significantly higher than Trump; today he is polling significantly lower.

All this before that picture of Trump fist-pumping after being shot, which is going to be widely juxtaposed against Biden's inability to walk down 2-3 steps.

I don't know where this idea that Trump has "no chance" comes from.

Whelp... Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey's Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We're going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump's, they're going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

Polls have significant predictive power, especially when you poll reportedly and/or aggregate them. Which is why all political campaigns, R or D, spend literally millions running their own polling. Moreover, it's now July, the first convention is literally coming up within days, so the excuse of being "far out from the election" no longer holds.

Okay, this settles it: Biden is gonna be the nominee. Nobody else on the Dem side is gonna want to be the sacrificial lamb going up against Trump after today.

Are you being wilfully pedantic, or do you not know that it's possible to tell someone is ahead in a contest?

Lots of people seem keen to jump to this being staged. That makes zero sense: Trump was already winning before this, especially with Biden (his preferred opponent) looking to hang on to the nomination.

Bernie isn't a Democrat most of the time (not sure if he is one this year...), represents a state that will remain safely deep blue even in the event of a Trump landslide, and is far removed from the constituencies where voter support for Biden is cratering. So it's not surprising for him to have this opinion.

Not to mention his vested interest in the idea that politicians should remain in power long into old age.

Neither, it's the Fed.

Pick the old man as nominee, and you'll get the Nazis in January.

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models...

That's the point. Biden's legacy is most likely a Trump second term, alongside a Republican Senate and House. Even if he wins by dumb luck, it would still have been a bad decision, like a bad poker play that wins.

Suppose the "best case" scenario for Biden materializes. He hangs on, remains the nominee, and pulls an upset against Trump in November.

Even in this scenario, I'd argue that his legacy is irrevocably tarnished. His decision in 2022/2023 to run would still be a terrible decision, like a poker player betting the whole pot on a horrible hand and winning by dumb luck. His staff would still be complicit in lying to the world. It would be the shabbiest victory imaginable... and all that before the question of how he lasts another four years in office.

Not "Democrats". One specific Democrat needs to ask that question.

This makes sense. Frankly the Teamsters union leadership would be negligent in not trying to court Trump. There's a political realignment going on right now as more working class people are shifting to the Republicans, and urban upper-middle class to the Democrats. If union leadership refuses to budge, they may find their membership drifting away.

Thanks, I hadn't seen those latest comments from Clyburn.

Now I have no idea what his position actually is, haha.

Clyburn's comments were intended to lay out a marker. He was signaling that if Biden steps down and the nomination doesn't go to Harris, he'll burn the outfit to the ground.

I don't think the election against Trump is the primary factor for him; he's simply maneuvering to maximize the tactical influence of the CBC, no matter the outcome. If Biden remains, he will be even more indebted to the CBC than he already was.

The Biden campaign's made a big deal out of how no CBC member has openly called for him to step down so far, and they're actively lobbying them to that end. That's also why he visited a black church over the weekend in one of his rare bits of campaigning. The calculation is that if all black lawmakers stay the course, the effort to replace Biden can be tarred as racist.

The Biden stay/go camps don't divide neatly by left/right. Progressives and neoliberals both want Joe gone; the ones sticking with him, or at least the ones he's appealing to for support, are the unions and the black caucus, which you can think of as the political machine wing of the Democratic party.