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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If any argument based on something other than opinion polling is “vibes” then sure, whatever
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Michael Love@elkmovie.bsky.social |
164 followers 270 following 2142 posts
Founder & President, Pleco (pleco.com); maker of mobile Chinese dictionary apps since 2001
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If any argument based on something other than opinion polling is “vibes” then sure, whatever
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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The fact that they’re all pledged to Biden and Biden is telling them to vote for Harris? I don’t think anybody has done a dang poll of convention delegates, but it sure seems like the majority are likely to follow his lead in supporting his VP.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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And the people calling for his resignation can do what they like, the people who get to decide who replaces him would quickly coalesce around Harris and she’d have way better odds of beating Trump than he does.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Yes. If it hadn’t been for that threat then he would have drawn a stronger challenger than Dean effing Phillips, if he steps aside now I think the party will come together around Harris with similar efficiency.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Anyway, you’re welcome to think otherwise, but my support for replacing Biden is derived in no small part from my confidence that Harris would take over with minimum bloodshed.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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It really wouldn’t, though. In part because of the unifying threat of Trump, in part because she’d have that extra legitimacy from the primary, in part because he’d endorse her, in part because she’d get his war chest and most of his donors / endorsements… it’d be a clean well-orchestrated handoff.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If it’s Harris - and it should be - then primary voters have already implicitly endorsed the idea of her taking over when he can’t do the job anymore; he’s going to be 82 in November, the actuarial odds of him passing away before the end of his second term are like 1 in 3.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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OTOH, every young person we register and turn out in NY this year is a potential supporter of Hochul’s primary opponent in 2026.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If he’d done a better job explaining the stakes then more people would vote for him. “Why aren’t people talking about Trump’s threats to democracy more” discussions pay way too little attention to the possessor of the biggest microphone in the world.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I don’t think he should resign, I think the inability to confirm a new VP would be a sufficient excuse but also Biden staying on blunts the impact of whatever October Surprise Putin or Netanyahu or MBS is planning.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I’m pretty sure that to the extent my little voice has any impact at all, it has far more of it among Democrats considering whether to replace him than it does among swing voters considering whether to support him over Trump. (I am for example planning to write my D electeds about Biden on Monday)
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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You can settle your conscience however you like; personally, if I support Biden now and he goes on to lose to Trump, I don’t know how I’d live with myself.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If Biden stays in and loses, I don’t think the people who wanted him to drop out are going to be the ones getting blamed for it
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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An awful lot of people have been nursing misgivings about Biden ever since it became clear he intended to run again, but until the debate, there was little reason to hope we might be able to do anything about it. The best time to dump Biden was two years ago, the second best time is now.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Prior to a week ago, every time somebody brought up the idea of replacing Biden because he was too old, they were either a) mocked or b) told to shut up because they were hurting his chances.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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When your response to “is the Pope Catholic?” is “no,” there’s really only one way the church can respond.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Whether he's too old to do the job right now may still be an open question - he may well be perfectly functional even in 2028 - but when you cast your vote for somebody who's going to be 82 on Inauguration Day, then simple actuarial math means you're also strongly endorsing his running-mate.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If you voted for Biden, you were also, effectively, voting for Harris to take over if Biden grew too old/infirm to do the job, since we knew in January she was his running mate. So with her at least, the "millions of people voted for Biden" argument lands somewhat weaker.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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The "how dare you raise concerns about Biden's age he's the nominee and no power on Earth can stop him from being the nominee and by criticizing him you're only hurting our chances against Trump" people are having a real one
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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And frankly, Biden's advisers have given us little reason to be confident that if he has, in fact, gone totally senile in 2026, they would gracefully orchestrate that hand-off to Harris rather than trying to Weekend at Bernies themselves into another year or two in power.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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My current thinking is that absent any unambiguous electoral advantage for one or the other, we should pick Harris, because electing an extremely old president and simply hoping that there'll be a smooth transition of power to his VP at some point in the next 4 years seems like a bad idea.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I love how the painted warnings on various NY highways appear to say “bridge low trucks no”
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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God’s going a little overboard with the serenity-granting this week
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I don’t think they can be, absent a revolution or national breakup or something else that would leave things even worse (at least for most of the remainder of my lifetime and a goodly portion of the kids’).
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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That MA compliance company seems to do a lot of work for scummy PACs, yes: www.opensecrets.org/campaign-exp...
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I don't know if I am in fact going to join others in leaving the US, but if I do, I'm not going to feel like I'm abandoning a community, but rather like I'm escaping from a community that abandoned me years ago.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Personally, I became a parent in the happy post-Obama-reelection days of 2013, and in the ensuing 11 years I've come to feel betrayed on multiple fronts by that community - electing Trump and closing schools and everything else - and meanwhile have the interests of my kids to worry about.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Closest anyone has ever come to "getting shot by the president on 5th Avenue" is "getting shot by the vice president in New Jersey." (just ahead of "getting shot by the vice president in Texas")
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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This is... not true: see Rick Hasen electionlawblog.org?p=144245. Wisconsin law literally has a specific section about presidential candidates nominated at conventions, and the deadline for the party chair to certify the nominee is September.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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(in Harvard's case I'm talking about donors - I haven't heard of any widespread opposition to Gay among academics, by all accounts she was a marvelous and unbelievably well-qualified choice, but Harvard has a whole lot of buildings with anti-DEI Republicans' names on them)
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Without absolving the NYT of culpability in either case: this only worked because a large number of influential people within their respective organizations were uncomfortable with Biden / Gay and were taking this as an opportunity to re-litigate a battle they had recently lost.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Also: assuming Harris is (or might be) the replacement nominee, you really don't want her in the position of having Putin/Netanyahu/MBS/every-other-world-leader-who-likes-Trump try really hard to make her look bad for the next 4 months; lame-duck Biden would shield her from geopolitical ratfuckery.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Yes, my point is that thanks to that, if Republicans are convinced they can win ME-02 (despite it having a D Congressman) they'll be less likely to pull the trigger on Nebraska.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Charitable interpretation is that he's trying to make his district look more Trumpy in order to scare Nebraska away from eliminating congressional district EVs.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If nothing else, it would force them to create some awkward new precedents around what the president is still not allowed to do, which they would then have to even more awkwardly repudiate when Trump tries to do the same things.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Like, why would you want to put your new candidate in the position of getting blamed for everything bad that happens in Ukraine or the Middle East over the next 4 months if you don't have to?
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Biden serving out his term seems like a much safer bet, not only for this reason but also because if Harris does take over, every bad actor that wants to see Trump elected is going to be champing at the bit to manufacture some sort of crisis to make her look bad.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If Biden wins and has the potential to flip the Supreme Court, then it seems like there’s a very good chance some red states secede and we get a civil war anyway.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Biden hasn't been officially nominated yet - how are states going to force him to remain on a ballot that he hasn't been added to?
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I mean “guy who was at January 6th repeatedly falls down and looks like an ass” is not wholly without comedic value
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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It's a shame book 5 still isn't out, I imagine it would be highly instructive in this situation
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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(2026 if they thought it would shore things up for the midterms, 2027 if they wanted her to be able to run for two more terms - this being Biden's call rather than hers, I suspect the former would have been more likely)
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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The idea of Harris stepping in at whatever point Biden becomes too feeble to go on has already been endorsed by Democratic primary voters - who knew perfectly well that that's what they were voting for this time - so this can be presented as simply moving up that timeline to 2024 from 2026/7.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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AOC turns 35 in October
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Indonesia at a big, beautiful crossroads
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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I mean yeah but so what? Everybody listening to that speech is going to vote for him anyway.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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And the smart kids are assumed to be well-connected (or at least benefit from the apparatus that exists to connect people to the rich kids), so it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement to some extent.
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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If you do this to a Cybertruck it'll have to be totaled and either Elon or the buyer will lose $100k
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Michael Love
@elkmovie.bsky.social
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Stat Trek would be a good name for a terrible podcast with, like, Wil Wheaton and Nate Cohn
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes