Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.

The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.

Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.

  • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed
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    46 months ago

    Yeah, don’t let rich donors run your party. Their cold feet cost us the country. My worry from the beginning of that whole episode was that they underestimated the number of voters who just would not vote for a black woman, period. They would rather get raped by an old white man than helped by a black woman.

    This all would have been discovered if they did a proper primary. Instead rich donors at the top of the Democratic organization decided that they knew what was best, and that they didn’t need the voters.

  • NickwithaC
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    386 months ago

    Can every American politician over the retirement age please kindly fuck off?

    • @[email protected]
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      156 months ago

      Best I can do is the youngest senate president pro tempore in over 50 years. She’s 74. That’s Patty Murray by the by, she’s who would become president if they make Musk speaker of the house and they botch the handoff. It wouldn’t happen but it’s funny to think that America could get it’s first Woman president by a few men’s incompetence.

  • @[email protected]
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    6 months ago

    Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.

    Biden was behind by 5 points when he dropped out and was slipping by the day. He had zero chance of defeating Trump. Regardless of the reality of the situation or what you think of his policies, the general public wanted someone to blame, and they decided that person was Biden. Doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. People decided Biden was the scapegoat, and nothing was going to change that.

    The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.

    This is 100% correct. Biden gave Garland the AG slot as a make-good over the fact that his Supreme Court nomination got railroaded. I’m also sure that the thought process, even though it could never be spoken, was that Garland would aggressively pursue Trump as revenge for his SC nod getting snubbed. Instead, we got an AG who intentionally sat on his hands for four years and slow-walked prosecutions that a first-year intern should have been able to handle.

    Biden made two mistakes in this regard. First, he allowed himself to be paralyzed by optics and fear that Trump would frame any action as political persecution and interference, as if Trump wasn’t going to do that anyway. His second mistake was not replacing Garland as AG sooner. Optics my ass, if you know the AG is sitting on a case with overwhelming evidence and is not prosecuting that case, replace the fucking AG.

    Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.

    But at the end of the day, she could not overcome the greatest sin of all – trying to run for President while being a black woman.

    • @[email protected]
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      196 months ago

      She didn’t lose because shes a black woman, she lost because she was running the same campaign the old white man did.

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          How is that your response?

          The person you responded to didn’t advocate an opinion about who should be president, but rather why the Democratic candidate lost.

          By what fucked up process does that end up translating into you thinking that person was advocating for Trump?

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          Who said anything about Trump? This entire discussion is about how Democrats lost.

          Critique of one is not an automatic endorsement of the other.

      • @[email protected]
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        66 months ago

        She was dumber than a senile old man is why she lost. The dems needed fresh talent. They painted themselves in a corner this time.

  • subignition
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    246 months ago

    the only way biden could ever dream to defeat trump is with some extrajudicial violence. and that is very obviously never happening.

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      Who is the only person who beat Trump?

      Edit: Says a lot about a person who downvotes a question because they don’t like the obvious answer.

        • @[email protected]
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          16 months ago

          Again, the point is that he is the only one who beat Trump. You can form as many reasons for him dropping out and I’ll probably agree with most of them, but that fact remains.

          • @[email protected]
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            26 months ago

            Just a sec, let me put my 401k hat on.

            Ahem

            Past performance does not indicate future performance.

              • @[email protected]
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                36 months ago

                You explicitly did trying to imply that Biden should have started in because he won in 2020.

                • @[email protected]
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                  16 months ago

                  Explicitly, I responded to a post.that indicated “Biden couldn’t dream of beating Trump” pointing out that he already did. I think we’re done here.

        • @[email protected]
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          76 months ago

          Wrong. Try again. I’ll help. Obama served two terms. Then Hillary didn’t beat Trump. Then Biden beat Trump. Then Harris lost to Trump. Just say’in

          • Verdant Banana
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            6 months ago

            Hilary lost same as Harris because Obama ended up doing nothing to help the citizens and here we are now

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              Doesn’t matter what your formulation is. Fact remains that Biden is the only one who defeated Trump. BTW, if what you say is true, why would that fact exist? Biden was Obamas VP.

      • Nightwatch Admin
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        46 months ago

        It’s an existing meme, I believe originally from right wing dumbf*ks but nicely fitting for this occasion. He had 4 years to make something out of it, he didn’t do bad at all but this is a bit of a silly statement.

  • @[email protected]
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    426 months ago

    He woulda lost for sure. He’ll be bitter in his old age, but that’s fine. He was on the wrong side of many issues throughout history, so I don’t feel the least bit bad for him.

  • FuglyDuck
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    546 months ago

    Let’s see…

    He barely won in 2020.

    He fucked around in Gaza.

    Fucked around with civil rights, voting rights,

    Failed to do anything to actually stop trump.

    Was polling significantly worse than he was in 2020z

    It took him most of his four years in office to even realize that people were struggling financially despite all the good numbers.

    Meanwhile, trump was running around shoring up his support for 4 years.

    If Biden actually thinks he could have won he’s a dumbfuck that needed to retire.

    • @[email protected]
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      156 months ago

      I also think it’d be dumb for Biden to have stayed in the race but in retrospect he’s the most progressive president we’ve had in my lifetime (I was born during Reagan’s administration).

      The response to the genocide in Gaza, in particular, was a huge political misstep - in terms of party popularity it seems to have been more costly than the Iraq War.

      Biden did a lot of other shit especially investments in tech and manufacturing that are already paying huge dividends. It’s actually astonishing he managed to get a high precision TSMC plant in AZ due to the existential threat that may cause to Taiwan and greenlighting plant reconstruction through the NRC may be a godsend if we’re able to start fighting climate change again in 2028 (America may still be dumb as shit though).

      It’ll take some time to really measure how these investments will fully mature but as much as I hate him for not rejecting genocide he has otherwise been the least shit president I’ve ever lived under.

      • @[email protected]
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        86 months ago

        He was great for the country and corporations. He was shit for the people. He forgot who actually votes until all he could do was try to gaslight us about a split recovery.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        While he does technically clear the low bar of most progressive from himself, Obama, and Clinton, I have to point out that the spotlight issue you present here for the most progressive president is corporate subsidies for national defense purposes.

      • @[email protected]
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        146 months ago

        Both poverty and homelessness skyrocketed under the ‘most progressive president since FDR™’

        • @[email protected]
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          46 months ago

          You’re not wrong - though that’s been happening pretty much across the globe. Late stage capitalism is a bitch and the squeeze is hitting everyone.

          I want to clarify that I don’t think Biden was a fantastic president or anything - he was just better than I’d initially expected and the least worse in recent history (if you ignore his response to the genocide in Gaza)

    • GladiusB
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      16 months ago

      I don’t think he would have won. I do however think that because he quit he put a lot of doubt in the Democratic Party. And the voters may have gone the other way based purely on that.

      • @[email protected]
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        66 months ago

        This is one of the issues I have with criticism of Harris.

        The woman had no control over the situation. She couldn’t exactly force Biden to drop out. There was no time for a primary. The woman was handed chicken shit and was expected to turn in into chicken salad with barely 3 months to go. The fact that she even made it competitive with 3 months to go, Biden’s numbers in the toilet, and her own popularity numbers in the sewer is itself a miracle.

        The woman was given cement shoes, told to sprint, and everybody shits all over her for only being able to jog.

        • FuglyDuck
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          26 months ago

          Agreed that Kamala got handed a shit show. At the time he did step down, she was the best candidate and she stepped up.

          Mad respect for that and what she did accomplish.

          Still, she needed to put daylight between her and Biden on Gaza, shouldn’t have run to the right on immigration and really needed to update the messaging on the economy.

          I mean the whole genocide thing… it seems pretty brain dead not to. My guess on that is to avoid pissing off AIPAC, but they were already pulling hard for trump anyway. (Fascists of a feather stroke cock together.)

          On immigration it was trump’s thrice-damned plan. Why the fuck would you run with that?

          And then, on the economy messaging… telling people who are struggling to make rent or buy groceries that the economy is doing great is just a great way to piss them off.

          When they say that wages outpaced inflation, they’re only talking the last few years. The people at the bottom have had ridiculously flat wage growth for decades. At least as long as I’ve been in the workforce. Actually, before the pandemic, I never had an actual raise, it always came with more responsibilities (aka a promotion.)

          Wages have been stagnant for the bottom half and the bit we got during the pandemic doesn’t even come close to keeping pace with inflation over the course of our lives. Which means that with all the stain, people are struggling.

          They need help. Not a “well, aktually…” the messaging should have been “here’s our plan to get you where you need to be, here’s what we’ve been doing and where we’re going”.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          56 months ago

          Kamala continued the Biden course and had many of Bidens campaign staffers because they deemed switching them risky with the time left.

          This likely contributed to her campaign being Joe Biden in everything but name.

          • @[email protected]
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            26 months ago

            Being his veep, it’s not like she could really put much distance between her and Biden.

          • @[email protected]
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            36 months ago

            Then (a) exactly what did you expect her to do, (b) why didn’t people say anything about it before the election, and © how the fuck is allowing Trump to return to power a better alternative in any way, shape, or form?

            All these people who are shitting all over Harris allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and in the process allowed the terrible to return to power. Y’all said that “Significantly better than Trump” wasn’t good enough so now you get Trump. Good job, guys. You played yourselves. You decided to step aside to watch the leopards start eating faces without realizing that those leopards have no problems eating the faces of the spectators too.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              26 months ago

              Biden dropped out because polling was awful. Kamala continuing his failed course meant guaranteed failure. Kamala should have taken the risk and swapped out the ghouls running Bidens campaign.

              Or even better, Democrats should have had a primary instead of shoehorning in Kamala.

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          She started strong. In the ACAB era we were gonna vote for the prosecutor, but then she stopped saying “they’re weird”, she stated cozying up to republicans, “I’ll put one on my cabinet”, Liz Cheney, supporting Israel (although honestly I doubt a candidate would survive going against them, maybe once she was president, but it very well could have lost her Michigan)

          Point is, it was working and then it got all “brat” and “we need to work with the traitors” and a fuckload of people just sat it out. Probably figured we’d be getting mostly the same either way, since that’s how she made it look. Either Trump wins, or the GOP obstructs for another 4 years while controlling SCOTUS.

          The fuck does it matter at that point?

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          There was plenty of time for a primary. He said in 2020 that he would be a 1 term president, and then went back on that. If he had stuck to being a one term president, then we would have had a primary in 2024. That wouldn’t have guaranteed that the DNC could hand us the worst possible candidate for the election though.

          Kamela absolutely could have reminded him at the end of 2023 that he said he was too old in 2020 and only wanted one term. That would have let her run a primary, and probably get primaried.

          • @[email protected]
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            26 months ago

            Neither you nor I know what kind of conversations were going on privately behind the scenes. For all any of us know, these conversations could have been going on for months with Biden just being stubborn.

            Kamala could have reminded him. She also could have jumped up and down yelling “Hi, I’m a squid.” for all that it mattered. Kamala had exactly zero control over any of this. She could not force Biden to drop. Now, you could obviously make a case that it’s Biden’s fault for not dropping out sooner when it was obvious he wasn’t going to win. But none of that is Kamala’s fault or anyone else’s. Nobody could force Biden to drop out. At the very least, put the blame where it belongs.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      Biden was at -5 when he dropped out and was slipping by the day. Kamala at least made it neck and neck.

      If Biden had stayed in, Trump would have won in a landslide that would have seen Regan/Mondale look competitive.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      Kamala had a lot of enthusiasm behind her when she took over the campaign. Then she squandered all of it by hiring the same hacks who lost to Trump in 2016. If she hadn’t sidelined Walz, or ignored the Uncommitted movement, or ran on the kind of left-wing economic message that won in 2020, she might have had a chance.

      Biden, however, had no chance. Even if he had reversed course on Gaza and adopted left-wing economic populism, he was doomed from the moment he walked on that debate stage. Everyone was worried that he was old and senile, and it turns out they were right. Nothing was going to make the American people vote for him after that became public.