Why the Democrats Must Keep Biden as the Candidate
President Joe Biden's performance at
the first presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27, 2024, was a disaster.
Biden's stammer was in full flower, and he sometimes had difficulty expressing his
thoughts fluently or at all. The President's movements when he walks are stiff
and unnatural. My sister, who is a nurse, thinks he has Parkinson's Disease,
which her husband has also.
And now the Democrats are in panic
mode. The New York Times is calling
for Biden to step aside, obviously having forgotten how replacing Senator
Thomas Eagleton as George McGovern's running mate was largely responsible for
Richard Nixon's re-election landslide of 60.7% to 37.5% in the popular vote and
520 to 17 in the Electoral College. Replacing Eagleton showed McGovern to be a
weak and indecisive leader. Replacing Biden will show a disloyal Democratic
leadership too craven to have confronted an obviously infirm candidate. This
author spent all last year trying to persuade Governor Gretchen Whitmer of
Michigan to throw her hat into the ring.
How did
it come to this?
Biden bullied the Democratic
National Committee into making South Carolina the lead-off primary instead of
traditional New Hampshire. New Hampshire has played an important role in
picking the President, especially since 1952. Of the 40 major party nominees in
the past 20 presidential elections, 28 (70%) won the New Hampshire primary. In
only three of those elections, 1992, 2000, and 2008, did one of the winners of
the New Hampshire Primary not go on to win the White House. That means New
Hampshire voters helped to pick the winner in 17 (85%) of the last 20
presidential contests.
New Hampshire is a small state with less than 900,000 voters.
A New Hampshire campaign requires pressing the flesh, meeting the flinty New
Englanders in person. Most Americans never lay eyes on a president or a
presidential candidate. Assessing the personality of the candidate is a service
that the people of New Hampshire provide for the rest of the nation. A
significant number of New Hampshire voters have seen or met all the candidates
and many of the presidents.
And New Hampshire takes its role
seriously. New Hampshire presidential primaries get general election-sized
turnouts. The turnout in the 2024 New Hampshire primary was just over 50%. Here
are the real, non-partisan results from New Hampshire.
|
Candidate |
Vote Total |
Percent |
|
Trump |
178,470 |
39.5% |
|
Nikki Haley |
145,251 |
32.2% |
|
Joe Biden |
79,680 |
17.6% |
|
Others |
47,837 |
10.6% |
|
Total Ballots |
451,238 |
99.9% |
In 2020, Biden received only 8% of
the Democratic vote in New Hampshire. This year, with no major opposition, and
even though he ran as a write-in, he got only 63% of the Democrats. New
Hampshire voters are fiercely independent. Henry Cabot Lodge won the 1964 New
Hampshire Republican primary against Goldwater and Rockefeller on a write-in.
By making the South Carolina primary first, Biden was actively trying to
prevent the emergence of an alternative candidate, which is a novel way of
"protecting our democracy."
The Democrats are now stuck with
Biden. Contrary to the partisan spin, the Supreme Court's immunity decision takes
the responsibility for picking the President away from the courts and puts it
back in the hands of the voters, where it belongs. The Court has actually saved
Biden's campaign, but the Democrats are too short-sighted and partisan to
appreciate it.
The Democrats,
as usual, are trying to lose an election through their misunderstanding of how
politics works. Now that the Supreme Court has saved the Democrats from the
folly of their stupid legal cases, they are considering jettisoning Biden, the
equivalent of political suicide. Remember Thomas Eagleton? It's too late to
introduce a new candidate after months of news coverage, hundreds of millions
of dollars of campaign expenditures, and tens of millions of primary votes. But
hey, this wouldn't be the first time the Democrats threw away victory. Remember
2000?
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