@lanechanger said:
I don't know how this works but in 2024 can the democractic party have another member run for presidency or is Biden/Harris automatically locked in to try for a 2nd term? I don't know what the odds are for AOC running for 2024 but based on her recent interview it seems like the hostility from even within DNC has gotten her down and disillusioned with american politics :(
My views are certainly more aligned with AOC's/Bernie's than with Biden's, but I think if this election has told us anything, it's that a more progressive ticket was never going to win in 2020, and I think the same will probably still be true in four years.
My intuition is that 2016 was about "establishment" vs. "outsiders" (with people on both sides of the aisle leaning toward the latter), and that in that environment, Bernie as the Democratic nominee might have actually won. But in 2020, four years of Trump had so poisoned our political discourse that a more progressive candidate became impossible. The fact that the GOP gained House seats even as they booted Donald's ass out speaks to that. Probably most harmful of all to the party generally was the "Defund the police" rallying cry, which is an excellent idea but a crappy slogan because it's so easily misunderstood by right-leaning people.
The two Georgia Senate seats are obviously going to be huge. If the Dems actually win them both, they can push DC statehood through and gain a perpetual mortal lock on two more Senate seats, which seems likely to shift the balance of power significantly for the immediate future. If not... well, mid-terms almost always see the president's party lose congressional seats, and then it'll be on to 2024, where anything can happen.
The incumbency advantage is such that the Dems would be crazy not to run Biden again, with the caveat that he'd have to still be healthy. I mean, the dude is gonna be 81 in 2024, and he had surgery for a brain aneurysm thirty years ago. So it's not, like, out of the realm of possibility that he dies in office, or that it becomes obvious to all that he's not healthy enough to do the job anymore (safe bet the GOP will argue that Biden's senile in 2024 regardless of whether it's true or not, but if he's, ya know, actually senile at that point, that would be a problem). At that point I really don't know what the Dems would do. But Harris would probably become the default option. I wish I had faith that racism/sexism in America was such that a person who's both non-white and female could win a presidential election, but sadly I don't really see it happening in the next few cycles. I'd love to be wrong!
I really do wonder if there will be a kind of detox from Trump that sees the GOP returning to being a slightly more sane party, or if it will all just get worse. I think that's anybody's guess.
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