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.

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.

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.

…it’s not part of the poll.

That quote comes directly from the poll you linked.

…that means their floor is where Biden is.

That’s a specious conclusion you’re jumping to because it supports your biases. With out more information it’s more likely that once the respondents know who the candidates are the overall responses will fall in line with the population averages and the candidates polling results will be the same as they are now.

All we can confidently conclude for now is “39%-71% of people polled don’t know who the candidates in the polls were”.

You kind of buried the lede there:

Overall, these results show that voters continue to be concerned about Biden’s age — but there is not yet clear evidence that an alternative nominee would significantly outperform him against Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

That’s evidence that some candidates poll similarly to Biden.

That’s not evidence the best thing Biden can do to stop Trump from becoming president is drop out.

Please provide some evidence to support your claim that the best thing Biden can do to prevent Trump getting elected is to step aside.

To clarify, that case was thrown out becuase plaintiffs lacked standing. I guess that counts as the DNC winning?

In Wilding v DNC:

Plaintiffs filed a putative class action alleging that during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries the DNC and its chairwoman improperly tipped the scales in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was challenging Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This website reports a similar quote about replacing candidates though with more context:

[I]f you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

That isn’t the entire quote and it seems to be missing some important context. The link to the transcript is dead unfortunately.

Even if that is the complete context:

• I don’t know if what Spiva is saying is legally true. As the Trump trial has shown us just because a lawyer argues something in court does not mean it’s true or legal.
• Assuming what Spiva is saying was true then and is still true now, he also says “And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.” I’m not 100% sure what this means because of the missing context, but it seems to imply simply picking the candidate in a cigar filled room would have brought legal trouble to the DNC.

It’s still not clear the DNC can unilaterally replace Biden as the candidate without his consent. If they did it would open a whole host of new problems, the least of which is how do the pick the new nominee now that nearly all states have already held their primaries.

Saying “it’s a simple thing that has to happen, just do it DNC” is just blatant misinformation.

Also, Spiva appears to no longer work for the DNC. It isn’t clear if their current counsel holds the same opinion.

But one DNC lawyer’s argument actually tries to justify the party’s right to be biased on behalf of one primary candidate over another, according to an article from The Young Turks. In other words, they could have chosen their nominee over cigars in a backroom. That’s what the attorney reportedly said in a Florida federal court:

Do you have a more reliable source than “a laywer said”? Do you know which lawyer is alleged to have said it? Do you know if that lawyer is still working for the DNC? Have the DNC bylaws changed sine 2017 when this quote is alleged to be from?

You’re making a lot of assumptions based on a poorly sourced anonymous quote from 7 years ago.

They’re the mascot for confidently incorrect.

Honestly I think they’re just to pretend like that doesn’t exist. I would be interested to hear their stance on it though.

There isn’t a lot of self consistency with the conservative logic around abortion. Abortion is murder to them, but they drive by abortion clinics every day and do nothing. You’d think a building dedicated to murdering children would demand a stronger response.

Abortion is murder, but it’s okay to murder the child if it wasn’t conceived under the right conditions.

Abortion is murder, but we can leave it up to the states to decide when it’s murder and when it’s okay.

Just a lot of mental gymnastics.

They’ve backed themselves into an ideological corner.

For years the right has campaigned against abortion on the premise that “life begins at conception”. Because of this stance IVF puts them into a tricky situation: continue to maintain their extreme view that life begins at conception and oppose IVF, or accept IVF and concede that life doesn’t begin at conception.

If they accept IVF then that undermines their entire argument against abortion, which is obviously not a choice you make if your goal is to make all abortions illegal. So conservstives take the ridiculous stance that IVF embryos are babies, and since some embryos are lost during the IVF process, IVF must be murder.

That’s very true, I should of said “from a civility standpoint it’s an improvement”.

Pretty much every Trump debate has been like this. This one was actually an improvement from 2020 and 2016 because his microphone was turned off so he wasn’t able to just yell over the other person and constantly interrupt.

One of my links shows AOC has opposed the genocide of Palestinians since 2021. How far back do we need to go?

It’s pretty apparent you have no evidence to support any of your claims and are trying to move your own goal posts.

At this point you’re just spreading misinformation and poorly trying to push some kind of weird narrative.

Have a good day.

I know it’s hard to provide a source for a negative, but do you have any showing she is friendly to Israel and the AIPAC?

These suggest she is harshly critical of Israel, the AIPAC, and the invasion of Gaza: CNN, March 2024

NY Times, September 2021 This article shows a history of being critical of supporting Israel

Times of Israel, November 2023 This is a biased source, but it contains the tweets where AOC directly condemned the AIPAC

NY Times, November 2023 MSNBC, June 2024

The last article seems to be about the “Zionist lobbyist on her live-stream”, where AOC said:

Criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic and criticism of zionism is not automatically antisemitic. That being true does not mean that we should not recognize criticism and when that criticism crosses a line into real harms against our Jewish community.

Do you have the quote where she said “criticism is Israel is antisemitism”?

Why didn’t the AIPAC spend $15 million to buy AOCs seat as well if that’s all there is to it?

I think something you may not be taking into account is that Bowman’s district was redrawn since he first got elected, drastically changing his constituency:

The congressional district’s boundaries have shifted since Bowman first won office in 2020, losing most of its sections in the Bronx and adding more of Westchester County’s suburbs. Today, 21% of its voting-age population is Black and 42% is non-Hispanic white, according to U.S. Census figures, compared to 30% Black and 34% white in the district as it existed through 2022. Bowman is Black. Latimer is white.

This change made him particularly susceptible to a primary challenge, regardless of PAC spending.

This article shows the AIPAC has contributed almost $900 thousand to Wesley Bell’s campaign as of April 30th. This isn’t total spending in the race, just direct campaign contributions. Still less than they contributed to the Latimer’s campaign for sure, but not insignificant. We’re still almost 6 weeks until the Missouri primary election which is when the spending usually ramps up. To do an apples to apples comparison at this point in time would take more time than I care to invest but I’d love to see the results if you want to do it. Regardless of the exact figures, it’s clear the AIPAC is targeting only specific progressive Democratic candidates, and it seems to me the reason they’re doing so is because the candidates are already politically vulnerable.

Also Latimer beat Bowman by nearly 17% per NBC news.

I respect sticking to his principles, but sometimes in politics you have to do something you find distasteful for the greater good.

We have no idea what would have happened had Bowman kept his head down about Israel, but we do know that speaking out against the invasion of Gaza and calling for a ceasefire didn’t really move the needle on actually achieving a ceasefire. It did make him unpopular with his constituents and made him vulnerable to a primary challenger.

Now Bowman is probably going to lose his seat in congress and there’s one less progressive voice and vote in congress.

I don’t know what the full outcome of this will be, but sometimes doing the right thing causes more harm than good in the very morally gray area of politics.

Why do you think that is?

My opinion and all the evidence I’ve seen is that It’s because AOC wasn’t vulnerable.

Polls from March show Bowman was already in trouble as far back as March. Bowman’s campaign (the Upswing research poll) showed Latimer and Bowman were essentially tied. That’s bad for an incumbant. The AIPAC poll from the Melman group around the same time showed an overwhelming preference for Latimer over Bowman. That’s when the AIPAC started pouring money in to the campaign to exploit that weakness.

The AIPAC research showed Bowman was vulnerable, similar to why the AIPAC is spending big to replace Cori Bush but they are essentially leaving Ilhan Omar (so far).

The AIPAC analysts are highly skilled at collecting and analyzing data. This allows them to know how and where to spend their money to get the maximum return on their investment. They aren’t going to waste money trying to defeat a candidate like AOC who is still largely popular with their constituents.

This is really unfortunate. Bowman had a choice between doing what he thought was right and oppose Israel’s invasion of Gaza or keep his head down and probably get reelected.

I feel this is a great example of the Overton window in action, and AOC easily winning her primary shows how broadly the window can vary even in adjacent districts.

You genocide lovers just can’t get enough genocide. The invasion in Gaza isn’t enough for you, you guys just have to get Trump into the Oval office so you guys can really ramp things up.