There was never any risk of me voting for Trump, but when I watched the debate it became abundantly clear that Biden could not win an election. He came off as an extremely frail old man and I had my doubts that he would survive the entire debate, let alone another four years in office.

I'm a pretty left-leaning person and I find Trump to be an overwhelmingly unappealing idiot in general, but even I had to admit that Trump "won" the debate. He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.

Love Joe, but 2 minutes into the debate it was clear he couldn't win an election. He was behind, and he needed to come out strong, and somehow he made it worse. Whether or not Kamala can remains to be seen, but at least there's still _potential_ there.

>He was still the moronic walking Markov Chain that he always is, but he at least looked alive.

Off topic but I find this insult(?) a bit funny. Is it supposed to be an insult as in his action / speech are as predictable/determined by current state only, as is Markov chain?

I believe GP is referring to the way Trump essentially talks as though the only thing he remembers is the last three words he said.

Yes, it feels like Trump has an n-gram of maybe 6. It doesn’t sound like “intelligence” in the classical definition of the word.

He’s talking to his audience.

Maybe, but he always sort of talked like that, even well before he got into politics. Just a rambling incorrect ding-dong that speaks with a far-too-high confidence-to-understanding ratio.

I don't like to admit it. He has charisma and he's funny in a way that's very fitting to current internet culture.

not a fan of his totality, but he is an epic troll and memester in a way that has broad resonance.

It doesn't seem sophisticated, but it is perfectly engages one audience, and perfectly enrages a second target audience.

Examples that come to mind is mocking Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" or rebuking the question of him as a dictator with "No, no, no, (other than day one)."

It's an interesting case study in that people's perception of "who won" determines "who won".

However, if you change the criteria to "who had the most favorable impact on undecided voters" then apparently he lost? The news was Trump lost undecided voters from that debate..

So Trump won because everyone thinks he won(including me haha). But what did he win?

I don't have polling data so this is just "personal vibes", but I get the impression that left-leaning people like me thought that the last debate was going to be more or less like the 2020 debates, where Trump ends up looking like a blabbering idiot and Biden comes off as reasonably snappy and charming, and that the election might be another shoe-in for Biden.

I think the statement of "Trump won the debate" largely boils down to the fact that nearly every left leaning person who watched it turned it off feeling like "holy fuck looks like we're getting another four years of Trump".

Having watched it, it's not like Trump got "better" in any regard, he's still a blabbering idiot (maybe even more than in 2020), but he didn't "disappoint" me like Biden did this last time.

It’s hard for me to say it because it’s not like Trump was actually “coherent”, he just didn’t seem like he was on death’s door.

Also, wouldn’t me saying I hate him a lot but still acknowledge he won lend more legitimacy to it? Like it’s actively working against my biases and I still acknowledge he won.

Yes. Because Trump "winning" what was potentially the worst debate in US history isn't even worth a consolation prize.

This isn't even a RvD thing. I'd take back Romney, McCain or go as far back as Bob Dole. Hell, Sarah Palin was at least a pleasant form of stupid instead of malevolent. I remember when the R's at least has some minimal sense of class, but even that's out the window. This is just an embarrassment to my country at this point.

I don’t think all (or even most) republicans are stupid, but I think that Trumpism (and demagoguery in general) is a natural consequence of the Republican party’s unwillingness to outright condemn the conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones.

They’ve flirted with that kind of thinking my entire life (with the Satanic Panic and acting like Harry Potter was out to brainwash children), but it feels like the conspiratorial stuff really picked up in around 2013; that’s at least when my grandmother stopped sending me unsolicited Fox News articles and started sending me unsolicited InfoWars articles, and when she started really going off the deep end.

I agree. Their reasons pre-2016 may have been selfish at best or fundamentally misguided at worst. But I felt the worst the potential Romney era would do is slow (but not halt) gay marriage. If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president (outside of completely throwing education under the bus... But 8 years of Obama didn't fix too much and Biden tried but got huge resistance to some starts).

There's definitely a much more explicitly hateful undercurrent in the trumpism era. I never would have expected a Charlottesville to happen so brazenly in the 21st century. Let alone the insurrection.

And on the other hand, Kamala' complexion is part of why Im worried about the D vote. Because despite much progress there are undeniably some older D's who hold prejudiced thoughts (external or internal).It undoubtedly was a partial factor leading to Hilary's loss. I really hope I'm just overreacting though.

I agree with most of what you said except for this:

> If you don't subscribe for the conspiracies, W Bush wasn't an awful president

I think he was still pretty awful; his administration basically banned stem cell research from happening in the US, he withdrew funding for anything involving climate change research, and he shares blame with Clinton for the 2008 housing crash. [1]

He wasn't quite as stupid as Trump, he didn't try and bribe a foreign official to investigate his opponents, and he didn't try and overthrow democracy with a violent mob, so I guess if that's our bar then he's pretty ok, but I think my standards are still higher than that.

[1] I'm aware that it was Clinton who signed the subprime mortgage stuff that caused it, so he definitely deserves a large share of the blame. However, the Bush administration sat on it and were happy to take credit for the short-term benefits until 2008, meaning that they weren't thinking about the long term consequences either, so I think they deserve a share of that blame too.

Meh, it was a downward spiral after the debate. No way he was going to last long.

Even Manifold politics had him at 20% two weeks ago. And 10% for the past week.

Possible. But I thought his stubbornness would prevail. He's so close in behaviour to my late grandparents, I really did not think he would pull out.

That’s just how you do it. It would have been far, far more damaging for him to spend a few weeks going “ah, well, maybe I won’t run”. It always looks a bit silly in retrospect, but total confidence right up until you change direction is just how you have to do politics, in general.

It seems to me the pressure built up and he could no longer fight it, which means he had no choice. The party did not allow it, just like they didn't allow Bernie in 2016.

> The party did not allow it

Except in this case "the party" is actually "people that vote for Democrats". It's insane and infuriating to try to blame this on "the elites" when a significant majority of Democratic voters wanted Biden to step aside. If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.

> If anything, it was "the elites" who tried to hide Biden's true condition and then tried to gaslight us all by pretending his debate performance was just some kind of bad one-off.

Yes, and it worked, and it's working again. I'm just saying it's not what people would have voted for if there was truly a choice. The presidential election is just a show for the managerial class to select their new spoke person.

I mean, you could read it that way, and without inside knowledge it would be impossible to prove or disprove, but realistically, even if this was fully amicable, even if this had been _instigated by Biden_, it would still have played out in public exactly the same way. There’s no world in which an incumbent national leader will say “hey, thinking of resigning, more info in a few weeks”; it’s just not how it works.

There is no message his campaign could give other than "Biden is running" and have Biden still run - any other message would damage him.

Saying you are considering dropping out would be immediately pounced on, and effectively mean you'd have to drop out. So I don't think there is any signal in the messaging there except that he was probably still seriously considering running.

The timing suggests there was conflict within and Joe couldn't unite the party. Otherwise it would have happened much earlier before the primaries.

One way to destroy the trump shooter stories too.

Or perhaps he became seriously ill and this helped convince him