I Bet As Many DINOs Vote For Trump As RINOs Vote For Biden

True-- except he was never liberal on civil rights or civil liberties

Every Republican presidential candidate has had a Democrats For [GOP asshole] and every Democratic candidate has had a Democrats For [Dem asshole]. I'm old and I don't remember an election when that wasn't the case, although I imagine Republicans for Biden is going to be a lot larger and more vibrant than a Republicans for Bernie committee might have been. Biden is a great fit for Republicans-- above and beyond any animus any of them feel towards Señor Trumpanzee for any reason:

According to the Daily Beast, the folks who operate Biden are spending a lot of energy building out a strong Republicans-for-Biden operation. The various #NeverTrump groups, like the Lincoln Project and Republicans For The Rule Of Law, for have already been bashing Trump-- and GOP congressional candidates-- more skillfully than the cloddish and incompetent DCCC.

Hanna Trudo and Hunter Woodall reported that Biden admits "he's been 'speaking to a lot of Republicans,' including 'former colleagues, who are calling and saying Joe, if you win, we’re gonna help.'" I guess that means if he beats Trump they'll be delighted to steer him in the conservative direction he's moved in since the early '70s until Obama made him behave a little better. But some may even be willing to help him-- he claims-- before he beats Trump, although this sounds like typical Biden bullshit:

"Matter of fact, there’s some major Republicans who are already forming Republicans for Biden. Major officeholders."

That's an obvious lie. Not one 'major Republican officeholder' will back him before the election, unless he means former officeholders like Jeff Flake or fake Democrats like Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ) and Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR) who everyone knows aren't bona fide Democrats but parade around with "D"s next to their names.

Interviews with several of the most prominent NeverTrump Republicans reveal that for now, the nascent effort is loosely defined and could ultimately take a variety of forms. But preliminary talks about messaging, engagement, leadership, and rollout are starting to be broadly sketched out, according to sources directly familiar with the matter. And the talks have happened more frequently as Biden moves solidly into general election mode.

“It is literally just forming,” one former top Republican Party official involved with the preliminary discussions told the Daily Beast. “I’ve had several conversations with people who have approached me. It’s going to take off, it’s going to happen. The question is to what degree and form it does,” the source, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions, said.

“You don’t want something like this out on the street before it needs to be,” the GOP source added. “It just makes it much harder to do.”

The contours of a developing “Republicans for Biden” movement are indeed fluid, with longtime operatives and former party loyalists mixed on what a final product would look like and when it might come into fruition. The movement behind-the-scenes is in contrast to the very public effort to unite the left, but matches Biden’s own professed fondness for working with Republicans.

When presented with Biden’s comments, GOP sources interviewed referenced two main possibilities: an external group that would work on his behalf as a political action committee-- similar to other Democratic-led outside groups—that could theoretically clear a pathway for others to join; or an internal operation within Biden’s campaign, with one or more recognizable Republican figures joining as the public face.

A second source well-placed in Republican circles-- who has had conversations with senior Biden advisers in recent weeks—said that any mounting effort would most likely come from within the campaign’s vast network.

“My impression is the official one will be part of the campaign,” the Republican source said, referencing the apparent “Republicans for Biden” group Biden mentioned himself.

Among the GOP’s more ardent anti-Trump faction, several names came up in conversation when asked who could theoretically have a role in an outside political entity, which would not be allowed under campaign-finance laws to coordinate with the campaign directly. Those names include former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Wisconsin-based political analyst Charlie Sykes, conservative media giant Bill Kristol, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, longtime campaign operative Steve Schmidt, former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL), and columnist Mona Charen, among others.

Meanwhile, one name in particular has been floated as a choice to help give legs to such an effort from the inside: former Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The source who has spoken to top Biden allies about a number of topics said there has been discussion in Bidenworld about Kasich, a leading NeverTrump voice, who joined as a CNN analyst after leaving office in January 2019.

Throughout much of the primary, the former VP remained the national frontrunner with the explicit message that he can appeal to a broad coalition of individuals needed to beat Trump, often maintaining more moderate policy positions when his opponents tilted leftward. At one juncture in late 2019, he even floated the possibility of selecting a Republican running mate, an idea he has since backed away from since becoming the party’s presumptive nominee.

...As his campaign continues to plow forward toward November, Biden has taken new steps to appeal to Republicans. In late April, he said during a virtual fundraiser that he would consider naming Republicans to his Cabinet under the stipulation that they were “the best qualified person.”

To some Republicans, that type of public messaging from Biden, paired with early private discussions, is setting the right groundwork for one or more efforts to take off in earnest on his behalf, albeit at a slower pace in the age of COVID-19.

No ordinary Republican

“I know that it’s happening and it’s coming together,” Jennifer Horn, a longtime Republican operative and former state party official, told The Daily Beast. Horn said she was approached several months ago by a national GOP operative about specifically joining a “Republicans for Biden” effort, but hasn’t been involved directly. Instead, she’s focused her attention on the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC she advises along with George Conway, the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Schmidt, and political operatives John Weaver and Rick Wilson (a Daily Beast columnist).

With less than six months until Election Day, there are already a number of Republicans and ex-Republicans who have stated they intend to vote for Biden. On Tuesday, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina, who competed against Trump in 2016, declared that she “cannot vote for Donald Trump in 2020,” while entertaining the possibility of not voting.

For Republicans aiming to get a pro-Biden movement off the ground, that potential scenario-- where voters may feel they simply can’t vote for Trump or Biden-- is a nightmarish thought.

“It’s really hard to get people to take that last step,” Horn said. “To publicly say and do something. You need five or 10 people who are all ready to go at the same time.”

...While most Republicans interviewed spoke candidly about the first portion of Biden’s statement, when asked about the second part-- that “major officeholders” are starting this effort-- no GOP source contacted could present a concrete name. Indeed, most admitted they would be shocked to hear of anyone at the Senate or House level likely to take such a step, but did not rule out the possibility that Biden could be referring to state or local elected officials.

Others are less convinced. Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who plans to vote for the Democrat in an expected Trump vs. Biden matchup, said  “it’s still a leap,” for a Republican to publicly say they’re against Trump. “It still takes some balls, and so I don’t think you’ll see a huge number of well-known names,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any freaking way a current elected Republican would ever sign their name on to Republicans for Biden,” Walsh said. “They’ve demonstrated over the course of the last three years that they’re just too damn cowardly to do that.”

That sense of skepticism was picked up in other conversations.

“No one wants to end up like Jeff Flake,” Fergus Cullen, a Trump critic and past chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, said about the former Arizona senator, who retired with an isolated anti-Trump crusade early last year.

The sense of resignation shared among some disgruntled Republicans is built, at least partially, on recent history. Early in the presidential cycle, so-called NeverTrump Republicans were not able to woo a single marquee challenger into primarying the president, with Kasich and others passing on the opportunity.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford ran in the GOP primary for a short time before abandoning his run in November, leaving Walsh and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld as the most prominent remaining options. Both failed to gain much traction or sway any prominent current GOP office holders to their cause.

“This is about killing the alligator closest to the boat,” said Rick Tyler, who served as Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) communications director during his 2016 presidential campaign. “People say how can you support Biden? The alligator that’s going to kill us is the closest one, and that’s Trump,” he said.

“I don’t want Biden to be president. I don’t want Trump to be president,” he added. “Am I willing to have Biden be president so Trump won’t be president? You’re damn right I am.”

Are there as many progressive Democrats saying "I don’t want Trump to be president. I don’t want Biden to be president. Am I willing to have Trump be president so Biden won’t be president? You’re damn right I am." I doubt it... but there are certainly some. Which reminds me... once Biden has his Republicans-For-Biden operation up and running, will he try to cobble together a Progressives-For-Biden operation too? I guess he could lasso some make-believe "progressives" to join, like Hakeem Jeffries or other Congressional Progressive Caucus not-really-progressive members like Donald Norcross (NJ), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), Gil Cisneros (CA), Don Beyer (VA), Jimmy Panetta (CA), Grace Meng (NY), Brendan Boyle (PA), Juan Vargas (CA), Tulsi Gabbard (HI), Andy Kim (NJ), Angie Craig (MN), Joe Morelle (NY), Adam Smith (WA), Lacy Clay (MO), Darren Soto (FL) and Frank Pallone (NJ).

The Democrats Will Never Voluntarily Stop Force-Feeding Us Lesser Of Two Evils Elections

If U.S. politics were as binary as the average Joe thinks it is-- and everyone was either a Democrat or a Republican-- then any Democrat not voting for Status Quo Joe would be a traitor, just the way so many average Joes on Twitter seem to think #NeverTrump/#NeverBiden Americans are. Don't hate them for their simpleminds. Even the Simple Minds had a hit song. People who know nothing about Biden except that he was Obama's vice president-- if not why-- and is running for president, feel they can assail people who know a lot about why Biden is unfit for leadership because of their well-placed hatred for Trump. Some people, however, are committed to voting for a candidate, not against another candidate.

Likely many millions of Americans will be finding out exactly who Joe Biden is between now and November and the corporate entity known as The Democrats better hope that their anybody-but-Bernie jihad and their forever lesser-of-two-evils strategy, which has driven millions of Americans away from the party in disgust, works for them. They're so driven by both of these conditions that they're willing to risk inflicting Trump on the rest of us for another four years.

The Other #MeToo Movement

Last week Zak Cheney-Rice, in a New York Magazine essay noted that Tara Reade is making it harder to hide Joe Biden. He wrote that "Biden's most effective campaign strategy has been to lie low and let people vote for whatever imagined version of Joe Biden congealed inside their heads. On Friday, he went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Tara Reade allegations. It was not a good argument for changing this strategy.

For the most part, the interview with Mika Brzezinski held few surprises: Biden denied the allegations that he assaulted Reade in 1993, when she was on his Senate staff, while maintaining that women who make such allegations should be heard and have their claims investigated seriously. He declined to speculate as to Reade’s motives and called on the secretary of the Senate to search for her complaint in the National Archives-- the “only … place a complaint of this kind could be,” Biden said. Less surefooted than these broad strokes were their substance and delivery. Soon after Biden called for the search, a National Archives spokesperson told Business Insider that they do not hold the records to which he referred, which, if true, means the vice-president directed the inquiry toward an easily verifiable dead end. More predictably, Biden proved to be an uninspiring spokesperson for himself, fumbling his words at times and cutting himself off mid-sentence, unprompted.

It vividly distilled his party’s bigger plight. With the general election looming, Democrats have organized, rationalized, and voted themselves into the unenviable but richly earned position of having a presumptive nominee who’s at his best when he’s neither speaking nor appearing in public. While other campaigns busied themselves with big plans, stirring rhetoric, and disruptive ideological positions, Biden’s candidacy has been judged by one criterion to the exclusion of all others: whether it’s up to the task of beating President Trump. Poll after poll has shown that Democrats privileged this metric in an outsize manner when winnowing the primary field, which included contenders who diverged negligibly from Biden in both demographic and ideological terms. But what the other candidates lacked has proved to be determinative: a career long, resilient, and ideologically contortive enough to have produced allies and admirers at every level of American politics, and the imprimatur of serving under the party’s most mythologized figure, President Obama. The persuasive heft this combination gave Biden’s pitch as a proven winner and America’s best bet for a return to normalcy-- meaning the pre-Trump status quo that gave us Trump-- was such that being the prohibitive front-runner where some candidates had campaigned for months merely required him to show up.

He proceeded to test voter goodwill at every turn. He reminisced fondly about working with segregationists, even as his record as a busing opponent, “tough on crime” zealot, and architect of punitive criminal-justice policy came under fire. He joked glibly about asking permission to touch his supporters, shortly after more than half a dozen women came forward with accounts of him touching them inappropriately. Perhaps most damning to the prospect of his running a presidential administration come January, to say nothing of four to eight years from now, the 77-year-old proved to be senescent, leaving thoughts unfinished in his public remarks, going off on tangents from which there was little hope of returning, and stumbling through debate appearances while his opponents ran roughshod over his stream of gaffes. It didn’t matter. His lead in the polls collapsed only briefly when Bernie Sanders’s momentum heading into the Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada primaries-- contests that Biden had largely dismissed as lost causes anyway-- suggested a general-election viability to rival his own. But a livelier-than-usual debate performance and endorsement from Representative Jim Clyburn cemented the vice-president’s South Carolina firewall and restored his winner’s sheen. He won that election in a landslide, prompting several challengers to drop out and endorse him. His victories on Super Tuesday and beyond left Sanders with little choice but to do the same.

This all happened despite Biden getting out-organized, out-debated, and out-spent by one or more of his opponents, sometimes several at a time, most glaringly in states like Alabama, Maine, and Minnesota, where the vice-president had no field offices but won anyway. That voters in these states could crib together their champion from fragments of a comparatively nonexistent effort to win them over suggests it hasn’t mattered much what Biden says, does, said, or did, as long as he can win — an endeavor aided immeasurably by the fact that everything else he does seems immaterial. The result is a national campaign to elect someone who exists largely in the minds of Biden’s supporters. Luckily for the real Biden, nobody to whom he’s inclined to listen is asking him to be anything more.

Nor, it seems, has his MSNBC appearance given them a good reason to. Quite the contrary: In the face of mounting evidence that Reade’s allegations are more than the baseless smear his campaign has dismissed them to be, Biden has mostly faded into the background while his surrogates, supporters, and some pundits went to bat for him, deploying timeworn canards about sexual assault victims and what circumstances justify disbelieving them, or dismissing Reade outright before a fuller picture sees daylight. When pressed on the latest developments-- that Reade told a neighbor and a former co-worker about her assault shortly after it’s alleged to have happened, according to Business Insider-- columnists from the New York Times to The Nation stepped up to discredit her, and politicos from Stacey Abrams to Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed their support of the vice-president. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, who drew ire from within the Democratic Party when she pushed for Al Franken to resign after evidence of his misconduct surfaced in 2017, doubled down on her support. (That it’s fallen mostly on women to speak for Biden when he’s hesitant to speak for himself-- and will likely continue to be-- indicts both his strategy and the sexist standards from which it profits.)

We’re now at the point where corroborating testimony supporting Reade’s allegations meets or exceeds the threshold established by those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Many of their defenses are now being deployed to protect a man whose efforts to nullify the former’s power and depose the latter are being framed by his supporters, and even some of his skeptics, as America’s best alternative to catastrophe, moral and otherwise. Opportunism guides political behavior as much as cynicism and hypocrisy shape it. That’s about as involved an explanation as this reversal merits, I think. More striking is that Biden hasn’t had to do much of the defending himself. Mounting evidence supporting Reade’s claim makes things harder, but he’s largely staying true to the strategy that’s guided his campaign since early on, which holds that the winningest Biden is one to be imagined, not seen, heard, or even thought about too hard. His staff recognizes that the less its candidate speaks, the less opportunity his supporters have to neglect evidence that undermines their faith-- in his competence, his election odds, and, increasingly, his innocence. If there’s one thing for which the Democrats have yet to punish Biden this cycle, it’s his silence in the face of lingering doubt. To change that now would be to change the very foundation of his campaign’s success.

I made up my mind about Biden when I was living abroad and reading about a young racist asshole running for the Senate in Delaware. Since then, he's never given me a moment to reconsider. In fact, he consistently got worse in the Senate and after that, Obama called all the shots for him. I believe Obama is doing that again today and whether Biden is ultimately the nominee or replaced with a younger, more palatable version will be Obama's call as well.

Bonnie Kristian attempted to figure out what many people want to know. Is it possible to get rid of Biden... if not elegantly at least not by some method that smacks of a coup? "Before the convention, which is currently rescheduled for August," she wrote, "the answer is probably no. Suspended primary elections have already raised concerns about abrogation of transparent, democratic processes... While Democratic delegates will understand the need to modify normal convention procedure to avoid spreading COVID-19, their understanding won't be unlimited. Sweeping changes to the nominating process would be suspect, and if the process continues as anticipated, Biden will very likely be selected as the nominee on the first ballot.

So far, Biden has 1,406 of 1,991 delegates needed to win that initial vote, and those are delegates pledged (by strong custom, though not law) to Biden by primary and caucus results. Between now and August, there will be 22 more primaries whose outcomes will pledge another 1,368 delegates. Biden has no remaining challengers campaigning against him and needs fewer than half those delegates to win the first ballot. Unless the Democratic Party, wildly improbably, tosses its entire rule book out the window, Biden will take the nomination at the convention in a single vote.

Ah, but what then? In the waning days of the Sanders campaign, I argued endorsements from superdelegates-- prominent Democratic leaders and elected officials-- showed party bosses had decided Biden was their guy. I don't expect to see those endorsements disappear, not publicly. But is the party leadership's commitment to Biden as solid as it once was?

Suppose, plausibly, it is not. Suppose they don't want to run a historically elderly candidate amid a pandemic that is deadliest for the elderly? Suppose Tara Reade's assault accusation and Biden's tendency to misspeak even from the low-pressure, high-preparation environment of his own basement further fuel the "two senile sex offenders" narrative of this election? Suppose enthusiasm continues to grow for running New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), whom one poll found 56 percent of Democrats would prefer to Biden as their nominee? (Cuomo says he won't do it, but that could be an obligatory performance of deference to a party elder.)

"The presidential debates are in effect already occurring daily between" Cuomo and Trump, Craig Snyder, a former Republican Senate chief of staff, argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We don't have to suppose Democratic Party leaders have noticed; they undoubtedly have.

So if they wanted to replace Biden (whether with Cuomo, the veep nominee, or some arrangement of both) Democratic leadership could wait until after the nomination to do so. Then, as they did with Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton in 1972, they could ask Biden to step aside, citing his health.

Biden's agreement is a long shot. Eagleton continued his Senate career after leaving the 1972 ticket over pressure about his mental health, but he was a much younger man. At Biden's age, stepping aside would end his political career for good. Relinquishing the nomination would therefore suggest he expects an embarrassing loss and ruined legacy if he stays.

With Biden out, the Democratic National Committee, a group of around 350 which is "composed of the chairs and vice-chairs of each state Democratic Party Committee and over 200 members elected by Democrats in all 57 states and the territories," would vote to select a new nominee.

Such a switch could be made any time between the convention nomination and Election Day. Because we technically vote for Electoral College members rather than presidential candidates, it may be, as Vox proposes, that Electors could simply transfer their vote from the old Democratic nominee to the new one regardless of what was printed on the ballot. But the legal situation is uncertain and varies from state to state. "For instance," notes FiveThirtyEight, "Michigan's law requires an Elector to vote for the ticket named on the ballot whereas Florida's rules say that an Elector is to 'vote for the candidates of the party that he or she was nominated to represent.'" That means a sooner swap, allowing more states to print the new name on the ballot, would be better. Yet court battles would be inevitable with the ever-litigious Trump involved.

The likeliest outcome remains the most straightforward: That Biden will be the Democratic nominee and will face Trump in November. But if Democratic leaders did want to change horses midstream, late August or September could well be when they make their move.

Obama will decide.