Kamala Harris Launches Presidential Bid: ‘My Intention Is to Earn and Win This Nomination’
Kamala Harris has launched her campaign for the White House, after President Joe Biden stepped aside Sunday under pressure from party leaders.
The vice president has Biden’s endorsement, and is unchallenged as yet for the Democratic nomination, which will be formally decided at the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said in a statement. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”
In her statement, the vice president paid tribute to Biden’s “extraordinary leadership,” saying he had achieved more in one term than many presidents do in two.
I don't like Harris, mainly because of her time as a prosecutor. I'm also not going to lie, I was having a really really hard time grappling with voting for Biden, I was begrudgingly willing to before the debate but when I watched it I was so outraged. I genuinely feel like his administration has been deceitful with his condition for a while. I'm not saying I wasn't going to vote for Biden, I understand the stakes, but I kept watching his interviews trying to get any genuine motivation for Biden. All I saw was a stubborn old man who refused to even acknowledge reality.
I've been following Biden news and this week I was convinced that he would drop out and so I wondered who would replace him. Harris immediately came to mind. Now as I said I don't care for Harris but before Biden announced this today I personally decided I would be willing to support Harris.
She isn't ancient, I believe she's more progressive, and I think she will be good in the debates. She isn't my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th pick, but I have far fewer hangups voting for Harris compared to Biden, and of course over Trump.
She isn't the best candidate in terms of absolute popularity, but when you factor in funding logistics and the fact that I think many good Dems picks would want to run in '28 when the timing isn't fucked, I think Harris is the most realistic pick. I'll happily take her compared to Biden.
You know what? I felt the same way before today. But I've been thinking about it a lot since the announcement, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Harris is the best possible presidential candidate.
Like you, I don't think she'd make the best president. Hell, she wasn't even in my top 10. I'd have vastly preferred someone like Hakeem Jeffries. But here's the thing: the person best suited for the office of president isn't necessarily the best person to run for president.
Harris has all of the advantages Biden had: she can run on this administration's record, since it was her administration too. Every positive talking point about the stuff that Biden's done for the country can equally apply to Harris. Additionally, she gets his entire war chest, and with the president's blessing today, she's likely going to have 100% party support as well. To make matters even better, she doesn't have any of the flaws he sported: she's young, she's sharp, she's great in debates, and because she's the antithesis of Biden in all of these respects, all of the criticisms pointed at Biden (which could also 100% be applied to Trump) will now all be applied to Trump and Trump alone.
Lastly, I think that now is the most favorable moment in our country's history for a non-white, non-male person to become president. She's got the built-in support of everybody who dreads another Trump presidency. A significant number of people who would vote for Biden but not Harris due to sexism or racism will be rethinking that position when the opposition is Donald Trump. Also, something like 40% of people in the US just simply don't vote. Biden would never appeal to those people, but a black / asian woman who has succeeded in a mostly male dominated field could be very inspirational to a large number of otherwise apathetic non-voters.
I honestly think that Harris being endorsed for President is just an unalloyed good. I don't see any realistic downsides, and an incredible number of upsides. It actually has me excited, which is a feeling I haven't felt since 2008.
Don't forget that the fascists will push away moderates everywhere because they have no idea how racist and sexist they are, nor how to hide it, because it's their entire platform.
I don't know where all this "I don't like Harris" stuff comes from. Considering the presidents we've had lately, hahaha... if she won, it would be amazing. I'm sure there are better people in the world, but they don't even get close to the White House. We have to be realistic. She's a great pick considering current political realities.
Oh for sure. Don't get me wrong; she's not my ideal president, but she'd still probably be in the top 5 presidents we've ever had. That's not necessarily making a judgment about her without seeing her performance first, it's more of a statement about how bad most US presidents are. Still, I have high hopes for a Harris presidency. I think she'll do a great job. She's just not my #1 draft pick.
Mainly her policies she has fought for and enacted while in political office
I'm personally a little nervous about Harris--I remember the 2020 primary where her only notable accomplishments were accusing Biden of being racist over opposition to federal busing policies, and then flaming out shortly after and shuttering her campaign two months before the first caucus and polling single digits in California. Admittedly, she doesn't have the same headwinds now that she had in 2020--she doesn't have to differentiate herself from over a dozen other candidates and she won't struggle to raise money--but she also made some unforced errors (e.g. coming out for total elimination of private insurance before revealing a plan that included private plans, or admitting her own policy on busing was essentially identical to Biden's).
Hopefully, she'll run a much tighter campaign now since she'll inherit Biden's staff and can focus solely on attacking Trump, but I do have some concerns.
Polling single digits in California might actually be indicative of her having a better chance. The same reasons why she want the top choice in a deeply blue state may make her a stronger choice in more "on the fence" voters.
This is an incredibly important point. Unless rich donors said they'd fully make up the current campaign war chest for the new candidate, there would be a significant funding issue. Being able to use the existing funds is extremely important.
As to that 2028 topic....If Harris wins, it pushes all of them all the way back to 2032. Many of those hopefulf may like their odds right now, as opposed to 8 years later, unless those same people are confident Harris will lose against Trump.
If Harris wins, this election is proof that a competitive primary that knocks out the incumbent isn't a death knell for the general. I promise you, Harris will have opponents.
Let’s hope so
She wasn't anyone's top 4 even in 2020. Between what they did before Super Tuesday then, and now this, this isn't democracy. This is DNC controlling what happens to prevent something like Bernie. People aren't getting choice and primaries are pointless.
People could have voted for someone other than Biden in the primaries. That was always an option. Just because the incumbent was running again didn't mean the voters HAD to vote for him.
I've gradually come around to "they'd rather see Trump than someone like Bernie" despite snorting at it the first few times I heard it suggested.
Bernie is too old now honestly. I'd vote for him, but I don't think he'd win. At least where he is he can push for what's right.
I'm curious who are your top 4 picks?
What didn't you like about it?
She has also gotten close to $100M in funding just in the last 24 hours. From small donators.
That’s a record of some sort
Literally having a criminal prosecutor run against a convicted criminal is kind of beautiful.
If the Dems can pull off a black woman president, the Republicans are gonna blow a gasket. I'd love to see that.
Going to be interesting to see fox news shift gears into full-time demonization of her.
I'm sure they'll find their footing eventually, but so far it's been pretty piss poor. Aimless. I think it legit never occurred to them this could happen.
They were always piss poor about Obama, because there wasn't any ammunition to work with
The biggest grievance about her has been that she was overly hard on criminals, and that would backfire on them if they echoed that sentiment to the right wing base. It can piss off leftists though, so astroturfing leftist Internet folks while trying to not say it too loud so people on the right won't hear it seems to be the game.
It does seem like the concern trolls have very quickly moved on from repeating that Biden is too old ad nauseum to Harris convicted too many criminals.
I think the best thing anyone can do in this day and age is educate themselves on trolling/astroturfing tactics. Once you do they stand out and it makes their goal of dividing and astroturfing significantly more difficult. It also makes them waste their time if no one takes their bait, which is good for everyone.
Know of any go-to docs on this? I think we'd be better off with a guide or doc somewhere that just gets stickied to every politics thread.
Admins: wanna get in on this?
This is the most indepth article I know of and includes a table. It's a bit lengthy though. I hope this helps!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7573649/
Okay, that paper is fantastic. Thank you.
For everyone else the TLDR here is: trolling works by being a huge distraction and it may be more overt or subtle than you think. I'll leave this here for every to see as they scroll by:
Laid bare in this research it's now clear to me that this isn't the domain of savants or hyper talented people. You can absolutely train anyone to do this. But we can also train people to identify it.
Yeah I’m still mad at her on her treatment of criminals, but I’ll vote for her
They're regressives. Thinking ahead is exactly what that isn't.
xD Well, okay.
Which is hilarious, since Biden is old as fuck, and has one of the most stressful jobs in the world. You'd think they'd already have a contingency plan in place in case he kicked the bucket while in office with all of the hate talking points for Harris.
I wonder if the 'Black' part means less to the republican party than her being a pretty competent woman. I can see Harris pulling a LOT of single issue woman voters over the abortion rights issue. And that scares the republican party. It would kill the down ticket vote as well.
Black prosecutor vs Old white felon. Hahahaha their poor brains are gonna get cloudstriked
Party of law and order is running a convicted felon.
Dems are running a DA.
Wtaf?
"Law and order" to Republicans means "use the law to enforce the order."
ooooh never thought about that. people dislike that she's a prosecutor so i don't know if she should use this at all but it's still kinda awesome
The "soft on crime" line is completely broken, though. They can't use it against her because the response is how she built a career around holding felons like Donald Trump accountable, and nothing else. There is zero comeback.
good point. funny how the "tough on crime" people are supporting a convicted felon. of course as with all of their issues it's just code for bigotry.
they don't care about crime, they want to oppress black people.
they don't care about the sanctity of marriage or family, they want to oppress gay people.
they don't care about the welfare of babies, they want to oppress women.
and as an obvious part of that of course they never cared about women's safety in public places or women's sports, they just want to oppress trans people.
I hope she gets a chance to say something like that to his face in a debate
She already has, talked about she was a prosecutor who took down sex predators and scam colleges, both of which are Trump.
I like that angle, I think that could play
Now we just need to get Trump to step down. Then we can have a less insane election.
He really should. He has no business running.
Even if the assassin had finished the job, his cult would prop his corpse up and wait for him to come back to life.
That would have been fine.
I think I would shit my pants from happiness if that happened
I think we'd all shit your pants.
Rumour has it that Trump shits his pants, or at least pisses his pants. There was a whole "real men wear nappies" thing in support of him when it was around.
I don't think we can have a president with one fucking ear anyway.
There's just no way.
It's all or bust for trump. He's not gonna choose bust.
He won't choose it.. no.
I’m going to need 4 months of how old trump is, starting right now.
Him being a fascist and all kinda overshadows that.
Apparently not for voters. But we did keep hearing about how Biden was too old to be president.
You can be too old to be president, but never too fascist!
He's all kumbaya, unity, defender of democracy, and holding hands now.
What do you mean you don't trust a duplicitous billionaire politician?
He said that in-between getting shot and his acceptance speech, then went right back to the same old bullshit.
He didn't even make it through the acceptance speech 🤦♀️
A turd is still a turd no matter how much you shine it.
"Hold my beer!" -- JD Vance
You mean the oldest presidential candidate ever?
If anyone is concerned that there is only 4 months until the election, remember Jacinda Adern became opposition leader 3 months before the 2017 election and won - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41675801
She was a kind, empathetic leader and was great at uniting the country in crisis... multiple times.
Unfortunately she was distinctly average as a stable environment politician. Wouldn't want her as PM now but would be great if we could hire her out on call when everything does hit the fan again.
I worked at a Sydney airport shop years ago and she would come through our area from time to time. She was approachable, easy to talk to and despite having big spooky security guys around, was happy to just go shopping and wait for her flight.
The Fijian PM at the time used to come through, crack jokes, run up a bill and then jokingly ask one of his security guys to buy all the stuff for him. He was a really funny bloke and he made our day.
Jacinda Adern wasn't just a good leader for New Zealand, she was a good leader for the world in the covid crisis. She's the reason several of my elderly relatives are still alive. Under Boris Johnson, the UK policy was initially "herd immunity" which basically means wait till everyone gets infected and then those that survive will be immune and it'll stop spreading and die out.
They actually moved covid patients from hospitals into care homes, which seems stupid on the face of it, but was at least consistent in persuing the maximum death policy. The Conservatives had heard that non white people, poor people, people with preexisting health conditions (who cost a lot in the UK's free health care system) and elderly people (who cost a lot in state pensions and state supported places in care homes) we're worst affected. I think they saw whole scale death as a cost cutting measure and we're never fans of ethnic minority folk or poor folk.
Anyway, along comes Jacinda Adern and implements lockdowns and travel restrictions and it works and it's seem as sensible, then the Scottish leader at the time, Nicola Sturgeon, does the lockdown thing and it's seem as responsible and then a fortnight later, Boris Johnson does it for England and Wales. We might not have abandoned our death first policy of it weren't for the international leadership of Jacinda Adern.
Meanwhile, Boris copied another policy from abroad where you give vast sums of picnic money to drug companies to jump the queue on vaccines. This worked out well for us and was the best thing he ever did in his entire self-serving lying life. Of course he lied about it by claiming that being in the EU would have prevented it (it didn't, and a few EU states went their own way on vaccines, facts never got in the way of what Boris wanted to say).
The whole VIP lane for masks and gowns, if you didn't hear about it was the most bold faced corruption enabling scheme the UK has done in my life. No tendering process, no checks, no process, you don't even have to be in a related industry, just, and I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all, literally if your company was recommended by a conservative mp, they were in the VIP lane and the government would order as much equipment as your company claimed you could supply. Guess what happened!
Anyway, I'll always be grateful to Jacinda Adern. I credit her with not losing any close relatives to covid.
Does the New Zealand system have a restricted 3 month official campaign period the way the UK does? A lot of Kiwi government shares similar structure with the British system.
The US doesn't, and normally campaigning spans a substantially longer period of time.
kagis
Yeah, this sounds like they do. Three months.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/historical-events/2023-general-election/key-dates/
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2023/09/04/how-did-the-us-presidential-campaign-get-to-be-so-long/
You can argue whether the US should or shouldn't restrict the campaigning period (though I'm almost certain that doing so would violate the First Amendment and thus require a new constitutional amendment permitting it to put into force).
But the thing is, Trump doesn't have that restriction, the American system doesn't normally expect it, and Harris is going to be trying to run a British-length campaign with no lead time for prep in the American system when her opponent has no such restrictions. She is gonna have to hit the ground running.
Also, American presidential campaign spending and fundraising is very large compared to the European levels I've seen. Dunno what things are like in New Zealand, but I remember that when Hillary ran against Trump in 2016, each campaign spent about a billion dollars.
EDIT: I don't know if this is directly comparable, because it sounds like Kiwi rules don't have parties declare donations under $1,500 (and I don't know if these aggregate figures include individual contributions that don't have to be reported individually). I think so, because this is measuring spending, not donations. The Kiwi system is parliamentary rather than presidential and so the race for the executive is the same as the race for the legislature, whereas the spending above is only for the executive race in the US, excludes all legislative campaign spending. And I'm not clear on whether this includes donations to individuals, which apparently can differ from party donations, though the Westminster system is more party-centric than the American one, where candidates need to do a lot more of their fundraising and spending thenselves. But without my digging much more, some Kiwi numbers:
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/350220141/labour-spent-1m-more-national-lose-2023-election
Also, those are Kiwibucks, not American dollars, so the USD numbers are only something like 60% of that. Accounting for that, if the numbers are comparable, that'd be the largest-spending Kiwi party doing $1.6 million USD across all of their seats compared to the US presidential campaigns alone doing about $1 billion.
Harris has got to raise some -- or all, not sure whether she can get funds from the Biden-Harris campaign warchest -- of that in the time remaining, which means that she's gotta convince people that she is who they want to be president enough to pitch into the war chest so that she can spend that to sell herself to the public. She has to build a campaign, plan to spend the money, and do so to target voters. Not much time to iterate doing that.
And keep in mind that the first Republican presidential debate mentioned above, 444 days before the election, isn't when those people started campaigning, and certainly isn't when they started planning their campaign. It's just an early milestone in the campaign. Harris is gonna have to pull all of this off in about three and a half months.
The US presidential election is an awfully large and expensive marketing fight for voter minds.
EDIT2: One positive sign for her: this person says that she believes that Harris most likely can get access to the funds that the Biden-Harris campaign has, so that'll help get her some of the way there:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-fundraising-surge.html
And she picked up a little more after announcing:
Lucky for her she also has a significant national and international threat as her opponent. She isn't an unknown going in to try take 50% - she's already got all the votes for those who see what Trump is.
I mean, that's true. But she's a not-terribly-high-profile veep. The regular crowd has been campaigning for over a year. Hell, Trump served as President, and he's got the visibility from that; he started campaigning for Trump-for-President like a decade ago.
Yeah, okay, Harris ran for Senate and California Attorney General, maybe they can draw some material from those campaigns or something, though running for President and targeting specially the Midwest isn't quite running to be a senator for California in terms of what material will work best, but they're gonna have to start getting people to put together a lot of content and to get it out there.
Harris has no campaign website, no volunteer network, no...like, I'm assuming that she has to be expecting to get at least a substantial chunk of the Biden-Harris campaign infrastructure, and hoping that Biden's endorsement will result in his volunteers volunteering for her.
checks
It looks like Biden's 2024 campaign website, joebiden.com, just redirects to ActBlue, a Democratic donations website, with a plain text message put up by him. They don't even have a graphic, campaign logo, anything. Like, they didn't have all this lined up and ready to go hot, or I expect that it would have redirected to a Harris campaign website.
looks further
They haven't even taken down the old website's content, just had the main page redirect.
Well, this is gonna be a historic campaign, win or lose.
She can campaign on access to abortion, healthcare and if she wants to really get radical, weed.
Who?
Prime Minister of New Zealand. I have a comment on it in response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacinda_Ardern
Labour prime minister of New Zealand. She was great, I was sad when she stepped down.
Kamala Harris I look forward to you wiping the floor with the Orange Turd.
The next debate should be hilarious. Someone with facts and speaking ability vs a windbag lie machine
Also, she is a cop/lawyer. She's prolly pretty good at arguing as long as she can handle the big(ger) stage.
I wonder if she convicted anyone of falsification of business records? It would be interesting if she mentioned that as one of her past accomplishments while on the stage with someone found guilty of 34 counts of that crime.
Trump won’t debate her. He’s fucking stupid, but he’s not that fucking stupid.
Oh I quite think that he’d love to debate her! However his handlers will absolutely go bonkers trying to get him to shut up about it to keep that from happening.
So she should go on Twitter every fucking day and make jokes about how he's too much of a coward to debate her. A narcissist can't handle a bruised ego.
Damn, this would be amazing to see.
After the debate and especially after the botched assassination attempt, I felt despair and a hopeless sense of certainty that our comrades in the USA would have to endure a Trump presidency and all of us around the world would suffer the consequences.
I'm genuinely optimistic now. I think Harris can win.
People who complain about her not being a socialist or how electoralism won't change the system are missing the point. Those are true things, but the alternative is a fascistic climate change denier with the Sons of Jacob as his cabinet.
The Americans are standing at a crossroads between an increasingly fragile status quo and tyranny. As much as I hate the status quo, I'm glad that the odds are now smiling far less at tyranny.
Thank you. Well said, rambling lunatic.
Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to
Gabby Johnsonrambling lunatic for clearly stating what needed to be said. I'm particulary glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.Fuck it, I'll vote for her if not for the mere fact that I would get a lot of entertainment seeing people complain how our president is a black woman.
Thanks, Harris.
That might be the funniest outcome.
Fine. Whatever. No go on the offensive HARD before the Regressives can recover from the change! GOGOGO
Harris/Kelly ‘24!
Who is Kelly?
Damnit, he's a doctor not a VP!
My heart fluttered seeing that. 🥰
Senator, astronaut, navy captain, identical twin, and straight white man.
And his wife is Gabby Giffords, a former congresswoman who survived being shot in the head in an assassination attempt (and I mean actually shot in the head, not just a grazed ear).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kelly
I would not be surprised if John Glenn's failed presidential bid poisoned the idea of a former astronaut as VP candidate in the eyes of the DNC. They're all old.
Yeah, Democrats famously talk all the time about how much worse the election would have gone had it been John Glenn running against Reagan instead of Walter Mondale.
Democrats or the DNC? Because we're talking about the latter and they are terrible at reasoning.
Senator Mark Kelly, AZ
AOC for running mate! AOC for running mate!
Nope, gotta have a contrasting VP to spread the draw. Running AOC as VP would be like trump running Vance....just stupid. AOC is far more effective where she is anyway.
Okay I see your point. AOC is like a very young and sexy Bernie.
She can maybe get a cabinet position though, that'd be cool
I very much am hoping that Gretchen Whitmer gets picked for VP. Trump picked Vance to draw in the Midwest votes, Gretch could easily kick him in the balls if picked
As much as that would be a neat historic thing, and probably a good pairing, the Midwest can be as backwater as the South and would lean Fighter Pilot over Two Women, unfortunately. Can't take risks chasing achievements when we need to play the game to win...and the harder trump fails, the better. I want him to see the entire country reject him in a landslide before he slips into the torment and constant fear of full blown dementia for the rest of his miserable days.
The only running mate for Kamala is Kamala
Mark Kelly, he'd murder Vance on the debate stage.
It will be Josh Shapiro or Mark Kelly.
NOW KICK THAT FASCIST FUCK OF A RAPIST PIG IN THE BALLS AS HARD AS YOU CAN
Right in the coconuts.
Didn't like her in the primaries, still don't like her now but honestly she's the best shot Democrats have now. I'm just so pissed off that Democrats and Biden waited this long and now have to scramble like this.
It's absolutely infuriating at this level of incompetence.
Meh. Timing is pretty good imo.
4 months is loads of time for her to establish a brand.
Great distraction from everything that's gone wrong.
How long until a major Republican drops a hard R n-word accidentally?
I wouldn't doubt someone already has, on purpose, but behind closed doors.
I doubt they can keep it private now that a black (Asian?) woman is running. Someone will say the quiet part out loud and on record.
Accidentally? Could be years or decades. "Accidentally", it's probably already happened multiple times, let's be honest.
Wow, so the DNC might actually be interesting to watch this year if another candidate gets any traction.
Is there any way she's not nominated? I'd like to donate to the Dem nominee as soon as humanly possible.
This is such a quintessential American question. Never in my life have I had to donate my hard earned money to a political candidate, it is such a strange concept to me.
Yeah I was reading the comments in another thread and multiple people were talking about donating money to the democrat candidate
They're giving money to politicians? Are they fucking insane?
Another article I was reading was about how one of their politicians has managed a 700% markup on her investment portfolio in the last decade and nobody was actually calling for this woman to be fucking jailed for insider trading, it was just "Oh yep, they're corrupt and that's how it is"
Then they want to donate money? 😂 Fuck me
It's been so corrupt for so long that we all just accept it. If we were studying ourselves from the outside, we might conclude that bribery is an openly accepted aspect of the American political system, comparable to how it was in the Roman one.
The problem is their retail politics style being more costly.
It's not like I'm dying to hand my money over to someone who's probably a millionaire. But, you see, I really really really hate Trump.
Could turn out she's a convicted felon, sexual assault allegations may arise, or have conspired to commit treason.
Hahaha, yeah. Would be hilarious if it wasn't depressing as fuck.
Well that clearly doesn't stop nominations at this point.
Doubtful that anyone else could get as much steam as her at this point. And the endorsement from so many have already rolled in, including POTUS. Though she might have to go through the formal nomination process, it's clear he's passing the torch to her. They broke the record for donations this year today alone!
No. Based on the fundraising today, a preference cascade is occurring and she'll have the entire party behind her by mid week.
It already seems like a done deal to me.
I questioned the idea of Biden dropping out via press release on a Sunday afternoon, but so far it has proven to be a masterstroke. They took advantage of a lull in the news cycle to completely control the narrative and present a united front in place of all the infighting we had just a day before.
I'm pretty sure the DNC and it's donors helped force this hand, so I wouldn't be surprised if they field a different candidate.
That being said, I'd actually like to see a non shill run who will actually fulfill his promises with legislation and not half ass executive orders that die after 5 seconds.
They'll never let Bernie in, but like cmon choose at least someone who can agree genocide is not good. Can't believe we're still scraping the bottom of the barrel for requirements here.
After all the shit they gave Biden about his age, do you think Bernie, who's even older, would be a good idea?
I think he meant candidates like Bernie.
I think Newsom could beat Trump. He has a track record of fighting for progressive (by dem standards anyway) shit and is used to telling Republicans to fuck off.
Through a horrific series of events I watched him debate with Desantos on Fox News. I was fairly impressed with the job he did. I still have no idea why Desantos agreed to debate him lol.
Kamala/AOC ticket could win it I think
The American public isn't yet ready for AOC in executive office, as great a she would be. Her time is yet to come.
Yeah I don't totally disagree there... This would be a great time to force it though... If it was someone like Romney rather than Trump then a lot of centrist Dem/Reps would probably shift to him, but with Trump, I don't think they'll do that, at least not enough to matter... They'll take anyone other than Trump. So AOC doesn't cost us all that many votes from the center (under these particular circumstances) but she WOULD bring in millions of young progressive votes that will probably just stay home or vote 3rd party if there's no progressive for them to vote for.
True, but there's also a VERY loud dissent against her on the right, which they would be happy to run with in their ads up to the election. The right - and the sponsors behind them (Russia, chiefly) - ate experts at loudly dispersing disinformation with their rhetoric (see: anti-vaxers, everything about trump, etc), and having AOC in the spotlight would give them a lot of ammo in the form of ThE rAdIcAl LiBeRaLs "talking over the executive office" etc. I just don't trust that the milquetoast voting public wouldn't buy into that loud rhetoric enough to not siphon more votes than they would gain. Unless that's too pessimistic of me?
People need to stop reflexively posturing defensively.
The right is a known quantity at this point. They aren't growing their support by any significant margin. The reason they're a threat is because Dems keep choosing candidates that don't inspire turnout.
AOC, were she to get maneuvered into a political position where she had some institutional support to a presidential shot, absolutely would drive turn out. I'd imagine in similar levels to Obama.
People on the left need to stop worrying themselves with what the right thinks of how the Dem party is run or how the right would respond to a candidate. Flinching and hesitating because of what the right might think is how Dems lose elections.
That's a really good point. Perhaps I am thinking too defensively. If someone as progressively strong as her does run, it will give them the excuse to ramp up their attacks on her, but also ramp up our attacks on them.
Nailed it
Just to clarify I meant AOC as running mate to Kamala... In case that wasn't clear. However, I think the more the magas run their bs the more the left will recognize whoever they're attacking as legitimate. I don't know why people worry what the right is going to say. They're going to spread their crap anyway. The young progressive left is larger than the center left at this point... Give them someone worth showing up for and they will, and then it won't matter what the Republicans do. Especially with Trump as the nominee... No one is moving blue to red while he's running... Maybe fewer centrist reds will move to blue but the young progressives will far outnumber whatever reds decide Trump is better than Kamala/AOC
Really? I don't think AOC has a chance in hell among the voting public.
No one who was going to vote for Biden is about to vote for Trump just because Kamala is a black woman... Stop worrying what the Republicans are going to think... They were going to think that about any "lib", and it doesn't matter because they were never going to vote for a Dem. The only people we need to worry about are the young progressives who still have no one to vote FOR and might stay home because of it... Throw AOC on the ticket and a lot of them will get excited enough to show up.
I think they'll err on the side of appeasing people who are on some level uncomfortable with minorities and women and run some generic straight white man.
I know Biden is Free after January, and he has experience being vice president.
Yep probably... But that's the wrong move... Those people aren't about to switch to Trump just because they're uncomfortable with a black woman... Trump is just too much of a Trump you know? Like if it was Romney running as R... Then yeah, but Trump is different. The people who "always vote" are going to vote blue no matter who... It's the young progressives that need to be swayed to vote at all. And there are significantly more young people who could be swayed to show up than there are centrists who might switch to Trump instead of a black woman.
AOC would be a good VP or Speaker pick, but for president I think we'd need someone with more broad appeal.
I think Mark Kelly or Newsom would be able to capture enough votes.
Honestly I think a Newsom/AOC ticket would do even better than Kamala/AOC... Just have to have someone actually progressive on there to get the young progressive left excited enough to show up
i really hope kamala gets nominated. Shes younger than most candidates, under my age range for politicians (just barely) and experienced enough to be capable for the position.
There is literally no better candidate you could pick other than her, but a white man instead, because that would assuage a few more voters lmao.
From whom?