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Some California House Democrats don’t want the process to replace the president on the ticket to seem like a Kamala Harris coronation.

  • Drusas
    18•2 months ago

    Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does. Nobody has ever been a big fan of Kamala Harris. She’s not popular based on actions or personality, she’s a cop, she’s a woman, and she’s not white.

    If the intention is to truly get someone who will win more reliably than Biden, it’s going to have to be another old white guy. Or at least a white guy.

    It sucks, but that’s where we are.

    • chingadera
      11•2 months ago

      I agree it’s not Harris, but to say we need yet another unrelatable motherfucker to replace this already old unrelatable motherfucker is not correct.

      • Drusas
        1•2 months ago

        I’m not saying it’s what we need. I’m saying it’s what would actually succeed. And I agree it’s a problem.

    • @talOPEnglish
      7•2 months ago

      Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does.

      These guys tried to quantify it based on the limited poll information that we have available:

      https://abcnews.go.com/538/kamala-harris-stronger-candidate-biden/story?id=111656941

      Let’s get one caveat out of the way: We don’t have that many public polls testing Harris against Trump. From April 1 through July 2, just over a dozen polls asked about this alternative matchup. But we do have polls from all the major swing states, thanks largely to tracking from Morning Consult, and we have enough national surveys to calculate a Harris-versus-Trump national polling average — and thus to forecast how she would perform in states without any polls.

      For the most part, national polls have shown Harris doing about the same as Biden in head-to-head polls against Trump. In a March Fox News poll for example, Trump led Harris by 6 points and Biden by 5 points (well within the survey’s margin of error). And as recently as June 28, a Data for Progress poll showed the president and vice president each losing to Trump by 3 points (also within the margin of error). That said, a June 28-30 CNN/SSRS poll found Harris losing to Trump by only 2 points while Biden was trailing by 6. This was also within the margin of error but was nonetheless a bigger gap and could mark the beginning of a shift for Harris.

      When we plug all these polls into a polls-only version of the 538 forecasting model — which jettisons the economic and political priors our full model uses, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates — Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100. On a state-by-state level, Biden looks stronger than Harris in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Harris’s odds are higher than Biden’s in Nevada.

      Harris also does slightly better than Biden in our forecast of the national popular vote. The model forecasts that Trump would outpace Harris nationally by 1.5 points, while he would outrun Biden by 2.1 points. However, this could be an artifact of our model not having any Harris-versus-Trump polls that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tends to take slightly more votes away from Democrats than Republicans when included in a poll.

      However, Harris’s popular-vote edge is almost entirely negated by the bigger Electoral College bias against her. In our polls-only forecast pairing Biden against Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by just 1.1 points to win the presidency. That’s thanks to Biden doing better in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in our model. Harris, by contrast, would need to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to win Pennsylvania and, with it, the Electoral College.

      However, whether Harris would truly be a stronger candidate than Biden also depends on information besides the polls. In our full forecast model — which includes a variety of non-polling economic and political variables, which we call the “fundamentals” — Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.

      This is thanks in large part to the boost our model confers on Biden as the incumbent president, which is worth an extra point for Biden over Harris in our fundamentals-only forecast of the national popular vote. However, one factor our model does not consider is whether presidents’ approval rating and economic growth impact incumbents running for reelection more than non-incumbents running from the same party, and that may actually push Harris’s numbers over Biden’s. In other words, your mileage may vary depending on how much you believe that Biden should get a boost because he’s the sitting president. There is no objectively correct answer here; one of the reasons election forecasting is hard is that it requires judgment calls like these.

      • Drusas
        -13•2 months ago

        You are really going to need to tl;dr that. I’m not one to not read, but that’s just excessive.

        • @talOPEnglish
          10•2 months ago

          I mean, it’s not a really simple result.

          I guess in a nutshell:

          • There is limited Trump-vs-Harris state polling data available. Some has to be predicted based on other polls, and there won’t be many sources to work with.

          • Harris polls slightly better nationwide than Biden, but it’s not by much.

          • However, the model they use, which makes use of information above-and-beyond just poll results, also predicts Biden to have a better chance of winning the Electoral College.

          • However, this model is built based on assumptions that may not hold for this particular unusual situation, and the authors are not sure how well those assumptions will hold up.

      • @talOPEnglish
        3•2 months ago

        In my other comment responding to this parent comment, I linked to an article where Five Thirty Eight was doing statistical analysis on Harris’s potential performance: and they said that both Harris and Biden were hurt by being insufficiently moderate and doing poorly with moderates. But even aside from that, my expectation is that if the Democratic Party picks a candidate with the explicit goal of winning the general election, it’s most-likely going to be, if anything and given the freedom to do so, shifting more-centrist from where things are today, not further to the left. The primary system will tend to pick candidates that are further from the center than would be an optimal choice from a strategic voting standpoint, since you want a candidate that will win (which includes appealing to swing voters), not the most-favored candidate by voters who vote in the party primary.

        I would assume that the party would further optimize to win in the Electoral College, so from a party-chosen candidate, I’d expect to see someone that would disproportionately look like what a swing voter in a swing state would want. You’d want someone that would look good to someone who is undecided between the Republican and Democratic ticket in Michigan or Wisconsin, say. A purple voter in a purple state.