But that consideration probably won’t be on his radar though, understandably so I guess. I think he’ll pick solely on who can get him the most votes from an area of weakness.
Look at why Trump picked Pence back for 2016. There might have been questions about his ability to appeal to evangelicals considering his own faith level. By choosing someone clearly revered by evangelicals, he really did great to cover this base. It cemented all the red states and did enough to get a few swing states for the win.
Back to Biden, his results in primaries when it came to African American voters were actually very good. He definitely beat everyone else handily in that demographic in South Carolina. I think he may want to focus instead on demographics that went for Sanders and Warren (younger voters especially for whom his age and old school democratic party policies are very unattractive). Second angle is states that are likely to be swing states and what kind of boost he’d get in these states from getting a specific VP. There’s no advantage to getting more of a majority in California or other deep blue states. I think he’ll want to focus on the midwest states (OH, PA, MI, WI, IA, MN). I think Amy would fit. She’s not that far from him on policies and has ran her own campaign so knows the ropes. Gretchen may work as well.
Warren did better than him in IA but to me she seems too far from his own policies to work.
Stacey may help obviously in southern states but still it’s hard to see her influence flipping too many red states. Maybe FL which would be a strong win for Democrats. Kamala - aside from maybe bringing more of the black vote - would do very little for him IMO.
Tulsi would tick two boxes for being young, non-white, and she actually may appeal to a lot of the anti-establishment voters but I think she won’t be considered because of the many feathers she ruffled during her campaign. Especially if Biden takes any advice from Hillary obviously. She also did not exactly lit the democrats on fire during the primaries outside of her own sphere of influence so gains from her being VP are not obvious.
Michelle said 100s of times she won’t run. There’s lot of goodwill for her among democrats and maybe with some independents. But someone this reluctant to run could also be vulnerable. And I’d be stunned if she agreed to get back in the line of fire after being there for 8 years of her life. She sounds smarter than that to me considering how good she’s got it currently (book deals, TV shows, speeches, etc…)
Either way, data analytics is probably gonna be the ones picking his VP more than anything else so we’ll see how it pans out.
That’d be unprecedented and I don’t know how anyone on either side could be happy of this bait and switch. Only 1 VPs resigned recently (if 47 years ago qualifies as recent) while suspected in an investigation and was in hot water with the president even before that.
A just-elected VP resigning for basically no reason would be clear cut breach of trust and something that’d build a lot of ill will towards the incoming administration, especially knowing that Pelosi would then become next in line and she’s been pretty polarizing.
Maybe I have the wrong perception on her personality, but she appears to me to be pretty straight about her position so I don’t see Michelle agreeing to this. If she was named VP, there’d sure be plenty of time ahead of the election to scrutinize why she changed position on running. At this point, no matter how good a VP politically she might be, I think she’s still an extremely long shot.
I agree. But Michelle on the ticket would put the fear of God into the Republicans. So would she “take one for the team”? Remember, nothing is more important to her team than victory in November. And Michelle is clearly the most powerful VP choice Biden could make. It would be an amazing ticket! No other Democrat woman comes close to Michelle in terms of star power. No other man either, for that matter . . . except for her husband. And everyone knows that with Michelle you also would get Barack.
I agree that the Democratic establishment would probably want her ahead of anyone on the Biden ticket. I don’t know how strong a pull they have with her though. Maybe I read her wrong the whole time, but I got the feeling that she doesn’t really give much weight to what they wants and will place the well-being of her family and her own sanity ahead of that. It may also depend on how much personal pressure is applied. Jill Biden was pretty clear today about her own wishes on this issue.
More coverage of the sexual assault allegations against Biden, including a video of her mom calling into Larry King’s TV show shortly after the assault asking about what her daughter could do to address the problems aside from going to the press.
Nancy Pelosi just came out with her vigorous support for Biden. Wonder if this news gave rise to Pelosi’s announcement, timed to cover this up, giving a supportive mainstream media something positive about Biden to report instead.
“Becoming” has sold more than 11 million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages. The former first lady’s popularity has made her a potentially pivotal figure in the 2020 presidential campaign. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, recently said that he’d pick her as a running mate “in a heartbeat,” before adding that he didn’t think she had any desire to be part of presidential politics again.
With Michelle on the ticket it is difficult to imagine how Biden could possibly lose.
That’s where the latest allegations of sexual assault may hurt him too.
As a woman, I cannot imagine working closely with/for someone who has credible allegation of sexual assault against him. It’d be very weird don’t you think? Even if you’re used to the normal political backstabbing in DC, I’d be watching my back (and front) a few more ways than the VP usually has to, no?
Still I’d bet good money that she’s gonna stick to her guns and not get swayed by people trying to sell this to her. She seemed all too happy to keep politics at arm’s length, and she’s having it pretty good right now (book, tour, Netflix film series). Why give that all up to get back into what is sure to be an ugly hyper-polarized campaign and then signup for 4 more years in the WH?
I gently disagree, but for partisan reasons I should not be writing on this thread. Maybe I’ll post over on the election thread.
Meanwhile:
I was taken very much by surprise by Bernie’s reaction to cancellation of the New York Democrat primary election.
Bernie and his people were really angry!
For a while now I’ve been like: The nomination belongs to Biden . . . the race is over . . . etc…
Bernie clearly is angling for more delegates . . . BIG time. He wants as many as he can obtain. This not with thought of becoming the nominee. Instead, he wants to influence the platform and shift the Democrat party en toto as far to the left as he is able. To do that at the convention ya gotta have delegates.
Personally, I’m wondering if there will even BE a convention! But apparently Bernie is planning on it.
Note:
Perhaps I changed the thread title here prematurely. I dunno. I pretty much wrote Bernie off thinking he was done.
In any event, this thread remains open as always for discussion of Democrat INTRA-party happenings and developments, whether related to the VPOTUS selection . . . or not.
I seriously hope not (or at least not an in-person convention as usual) or Democrats are more tone-deaf than I think they are considering that even in August, we’re likely to still have social distancing requirements for businesses to operate. We’ll see how things develop through the summer but at this point, I really hope they’re looking for alternative ways to hold the convention (such as with delegates attending large zoom meetings and voting remotely). Scaling it down in terms of costs would also be the responsible thing to do considering the financial difficulties everyone has gone through with this crisis.
State governors are already overriding local government restrictions.
Look at TX, prohibited any public mask requirements (which several areas had, such as Bexar county/san antonio. Which also had a $1000 fine for violation) as well as any enforcement. And also prohibited local areas from requiring businesses to use social distancing or mask requirements. There are only voluntary suggestions now. Also the governor prohibited local entities from extending stay at home requirements. TX has not contracted numbers of new cases, either. We still have increasing numbers of new confirmed cases every day.
The plan seems to be that we’ve given up on getting federal support to set up necessary testing/contact tracing at a level that would be required to move to a containment phase (and the budgetary support needed). So now we’re just trying to get everyone infected and hope there is at least temporary immunity from reinfection. Which is really probably the only alternative to a centralized and concerted response. (Separate state rules without coordination doesn’t work because we aren’t going to restrict travel between states… It would need to be beat down in all states.)
The end of next month could be worse than last month.
What will be pretty bad is if we find out there’s no or very short term “immunity” after recovery – then we’re in for this repeating every 6 months/year. Hopefully that’s not the case.
But on the other hand, do you really expect this status quo to be sustainable potentially into 2022? If a “cure” (effective treatment, vaccine, whatever) isnt in the immediate forecast, at some point we need to learn to live with the risk rather than keep hiding and hoping it’ll go away.
If we are still where we are now in September, we’ll be to the point of society starting to break down in epic disaster movie level proportions. Something’s gotta give, and it’s going to start giving soon. Which is why we see various places relaxing restrictions, it wont take much more for all hell to break loose.
They’re going to do everything they can, take every opportunity available to keep the Conventions on the schedule. It’s only partly about the formalities, the primary purpose is the party cheerleading heading into the home stretch.
It’s certainly possible to force risk mitigation into every decision.
Eliminate unnecessary risks (large crowds, unnecessary cross-contamination of spaces, etc).
Mitigate unavoidable risks (social distancing requirements within businesses and with customer interactions).
This can be done without everything being shut down forever.
The better option, of course, would have been stricter requirements for only a couple more weeks, to lower the overall number of infections. Coupled with a further testing ramp-up and getting ready the ability to do contact tracing. Both of these have only had preparations made in a very limited number of states/areas. But then you can just quarantine/monitor/test just small numbers of people on an ongoing basis (all contacts of any found infections). This route would likely have had the lowest amount of economic and human costs. And we really could have quickly rolled back most of the widespread mitigation actions.
Or if you want hindsight, we would have taken things more seriously originally and it wouldn’t have been so hard to push down the infections (since they were allowed to increase so high in numbers before any actions were taken to counteract, to numbers too high to even attempt to contract trace), we would have just stayed in a containment phase.
Yes it’s state-dependent. In mine, the policy outlined by the governor for re-opening boils down to: No mask, no work, no service, no exception. Capacity control, daily evaluation of employees and social distancing still very much fully in place.
But even as suggestions, flaunting the COVID-19 safety recommendations openly to host a glorified tailgate party is not exactly good optics, is it?
But there’s a middle ground no? Is the only choice between a complete shutdown or a return to business as usual and pray the healthcare crisis doesn’t look like New York’s? Is it really that much to require people adhere to safety guidelines to reopen businesses?
I think this is pretty idealistic. How do you effectively “contact trace” a grocery trip to Walmart? This isnt like an STD, where you pretty much know the people you’ve had relevant “contact” with. It’s impossible to identify everyone who was exposed to the vapor cloud from your breathing.
If contact tracing post-infection is a viable option, this virus isnt nearly as contagious as it’s been made out to be.
That’s why there’s a reasonable push to “curbside” for most businesses. The main contacts then are coworkers. Additionally, face covering/distancing requirements (mitigation) in grocery stores. You still can’t catch 100%, but you would catch the majority of the higher risk contacts. You don’t need to bring r0 to exactly zero, just to bring it to somewhat below 1. If you take out ~80% of the risks of contacts from being able to re-transmit the virus, that would bring an r0 of 4 to 0.8.
And then to test enough for monitoring the idea is to catch maybe an extra 1 or 2 contacts removed from the “missed” person before the resulting cases explode. There will still be cases found in the wild. But as long as they’re low enough numbers (that they can be effectively contact traced and all contacts tested, monitored, and quarantined if necessary), it’s “OK” and lets everything else get mostly back to normal.
There are also some programs in development based on “anonymized” bluetooth handshakes from smartphones. Which can potentially contract trace the grocery store example.
No, of course not. But most places allowing businesses to reopen are imposing additional guidelines and restrictions. That is the middle ground, and I’m not the one criticizing it as a stupid mistake we’ll regret.
