Activists from around the country told The Intercept that they will advocate for an anti-war agenda at the convention in August and withhold their vote in November unless an adequate candidate steps up, listing policy priorities such as support for a permanent ceasefire and standing up to the pro-Israel lobby as it intervenes in Democratic primaries. Even as the Biden campaign insists that he will not step aside, many Democrats appear to be lining up behind Vice President Kamala Harris as an alternative candidate, with some Democratic governors being floated as well.
“My number one criteria for any candidate is opposing the genocide in Gaza,” said Saad Farooq, an uncommitted voter in Massachusetts. Farooq said it was unlikely that the Democratic National Committee would select any candidate who took a stance against Israel’s ongoing war, and that he would support Green Party candidate Jill Stein if she were to appear on the ballot in Massachusetts.
Will Dawson, an uncommitted voter in Washington, D.C., named several factors that could get him to switch his vote from the Green Party’s Stein to another politician. First on his list is a promise to call for an immediate ceasefire and fighting the influence of the pro-Israel lobby and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Congress.
“This candidate would also ideally work toward pulling further away from the Israeli colonial project over time, with the goal being repealing our absurd financial support, ending the foreign interest agency of AIPAC, and pushing for a nation-wide boycott a la [South Africa] during their apartheid,” Dawson wrote.
The candidate would also have to push to reform the Supreme Court, he added. “The candidate would have to promise to both push for justice impeachment, and expand the courts,” Dawson said.“If a replacement candidate met both of these requirements, I would absolutely consider switching my vote from Jill Stein. Hell, I might even knock doors/canvass for them!”
I was using the same language as the OP when referring to the poll, but if you feel better about yourself now good job.
You draw a pretty extreme conclusion about the polling of a generic candidate. Honestly it sounds like another specious conclusion that’s been drawn because it agrees with a bias. I’m open to being wring and am interested in how you came up with it.
This CNN article has some pretty interesting discussion about generic candidates. The general consensus seems to be that generic candidates simply indicate a party preference rather than a judgment about a particular candidate.
Another specious conclusion?
The polls’ own graphics show Trump losing two points to the “undecided” category in head-to-heads with most other candidates after the debate, and most of those alternative Democrats are only polling one point behind Biden.
I can understand the DNC being reluctant to switch candidates for a net polling gain of a single percentage point, but the fact that they aren’t fighting tooth and nail for every single vote they can swing is why I’m confident that they’ll be throwing this election just like they did eight years ago.
I think I see what you’re trying to say. You’re saying “the best candidates are the unknown people, the nobodies, because Trump is getting 46% to 47% of the vote against them, rather than the 48% he’s getting against Biden”.
I drew the specious conclusion that you were refering to Joe Biden as the best candidate because he is polling the highest among candidates (tied with Harris) at 45%, has nearly the same margin of victory against Trump as all other candidates (2%-3%), has beaten Trump already, already has a massive campaign infrastructure, and is the current nominee.
On your last comment, more important than Donald Trump losing 2% to “Not Sure” is the fact that he’s still beating all the candidates by 2%-3%. Without more information the best assumption we can make is that the undecided voters will vote the same as the decided voters once they have enough information.
As I said before, the only real conclusions we can draw with certainty from these polls is fewer people know who these candidates are than know Joe Biden.
The uncertainty of a larger undecided pool is exactly what the DNC needs right now.
As it stands, there’s very little to suggest that my 2016 prediction that Trump would take back the presidency this year is incorrect. Biden isn’t doing any better than Hillary was at this time in the campaign cycle.
We need to get back to the point of not being able to tell who is going to win before we can swing it the other way, and switching from the candidate polling at -3 to either of the -2s puts us a third of the way there and gives us almost 50% more undecided voters to work on at the same time.
That’s a reasonable take and I appreciate you taking the time to share. I can see your point that increasing the uncertainty means that the new DNC candidate has an opportunity to pick up a larger share once the unsure voters pick. This seems like a sort of mutated version of the gamblers fallacy to me.
Having a larger uncertainty pool doesn’t really provide any advantage for Democrats. While theres opportunity for the DNC candidate to pick up votes from this pool of voters there’s also opportunity for Trump to pick up votes once they know more about the other candidates.
Without more information the most likely outcome is Trump picks up about 51.5% of undecided voters and the other candidate picks up about 48.5%. If we know why these voters are unsure then we can make a more educated guess about how they might vote for each candidate and we might be able to say the DNC candidate will pick up the required votes.
Unfortunately we don’t know why they’re unsure so saying that the best thing Biden can do is drop out just isn’t supported by the information available.
On a personal note I think Biden should announce he’s old and tired and just doesn’t have 4 more years of being president in him. After that drop out of the campaign, endorse another candidate, and announce a clear plan for how the DNC is going to actually select the next candidate.
If he doesn’t make it extremely clear that dropping out his decision, or there’s no clear and transparant plan on how the next candidate will be selected, then it’s going to start a civil war in the DNC that will hand the presidency to Trump.