Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate

    > Sadly, this has never
    > happened, anywhere, ever.

If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.

However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.

That totally worked in 2016?

my thinking exactly

why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to

Sure or some simplified version of ranked choice voting. Perhaps where only the top two choices get counted instead of having unlimited ranked choices (which can get messy and be harder to audit).

It was written during a time when the average life expectancy of men was around 40.

No one is required to vote for a party's nominee.

Very ironic coming from the same party that claims they need to "protect democracy". They aren't even allowing "open and fair" elections in their own candidate selection process, yet we're supposed to believe they will do that on a national level?

As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.

Seems more like a competition issue. In general if both parties weren't entrenched to this degree, they would be out competed by a group with increased transparency. "Vote for the black box behind the curtain!" vs "Vote for the person who's talking to you!" should be a pretty easy win at the poll. IMHO what we are seeing is a systemic result of the lack of competitive elections and winner-take-all and how it interacts with parties. The parties are far too comfortable. If they expected to have to compete, they wouldn't select vegetables.

There was a primary, every state except Florida held one. Dean Philips is the only notable person who ran against him, but you did in fact have a chance to vote/caucus for someone other than Biden if you were a democrat.

In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.

And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool.

"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"

You have a really strong union.

That's gotta be a pretty well-studied number.

Why on earth does anyone actually go into that career?

None of that support staff is constitutionally allowed to make the call to respond to an imminent or ongoing attack. We need a commander in chief and we need to know who that person is -- which was the whole point of the Presidential Succession Act and the 25th amendment. This isn't even a Biden thing -- we had similar issues with Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan, and I'm sure that some administrations had similar issues that were never reported or written about afterwards.

Isn’t that true of airplanes as well? In theory support staff in the flight control room could instruct e.g. a flight attendant or even a passenger to land an airplane. However it is still not a good idea, chances are it will fail, so you do as much as feasible to prevent both pilots from becoming incapacitated in a large commercial plane.

Airplane can fly and land themselves for the most part it’s only in case of a emergency does a pilot really need to have quick judgment

Economic attacks are a thing.

Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots.

Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.

That's a completely different situation.

Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?

I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.

It's a completely different situation for sure.

But I think the argument is still valid for other reasons.

Ironically, FDR pulled a Biden but succeeded. By early 1944 he was already dying of cancer and hid it, as he hid his disability. He made it through the election, and then died a few months after his inauguration leaving Truman in charge. Of course, FDR was more popular than Biden, but I do believe it was his closest election.

It's still bad, because at that age, close to retirement, they surely don't want to deal with all the nonsense and mayhem that US domestic passengers cause.

That's a false equivalency.

Airline pilots have a mandatory retirement age based on health and safety studies associated with the risks and requirements of flying a plane.

Girl scout age requirements, as you might imagine, aren't based on the same criteria.

The minimum age requirement was intended to provide a safeguard against the election of individuals who might lack the maturity and experience needed for such a significant role.

The maximum age is a different consideration.

The thinking at the time was: how can someone under the age of 35 ever have enough accomplishments to be elected president? They believed that would only happen if they were the child of a famous person or former president.

The Constitution was largely written as a departure from the monarchical British system. By not allowing presidential candidates younger than 35, this would prevent hereditary transmission of the presidency. Past 35, a candidate is more likely to stand on their own merits rather than their family or connections.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-a-presidential-...

Well... why indeed? If you don't feel up to justifying it you should support removing arbitrary limits.

For the same reason that the president needs to have spent at least 14 years in the USA prior to be elected: so that the people can know the candidate.

I work with someone in her 80s that’s incredibly, incredibly sharp.

This is just tech people being tech people, as always.

I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”

You are almost certainly wrong, but it's also possible that your thereness measurement scale is still calibrated to the briefest and least knowledgeable period of your life.

I intend this charitably.

I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”

Maybe, but I know a lot of 20ish year olds that aren’t all there either.

"Joe Biden is older than 80 lol"

Joe Biden is older than radiocarbon dating (so we can't be sure exactly how old he is).

[it was an idea for a novelty website: things Biden is older than; including all the common computer stuff, but also ejector seats, SCUBA aqualungs, basic oxygen steelmaking, Velcro, the float glass process by which all common flat panes of glass are made, hairspray, spray paint, hovervrafts, LASERs, microwaves, mass production of Penicillin...]

Oddly (or not it'd definitely selection bias/survivorship) there's 4 people over 70 on my ski patrol, all of them re-certified on the toboggan this year, 3 of the 4 on black diamond. They're some of the best skiiers I've seen and their bedside manner and health skills were amazing. The main issue for most of them is just hearing which makes them seem more off than they are. All of them had transitioned to management / dispatch and back to patroller they've been doing it so long. One literally wrote the book.

from my perspective, the reason to consider age limits for politicians, while using Biden as an example, is not the chance that he will die in office; it's rather the chance that he won't die in office.

he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job

Look at the difference in Obama's hair from when he took office to when he left. Frankly, the job is a killer.

But the issue isn't his age per se, it's his capacity to do the job. This isn't about ageism.

That aside, if there's an issue with age, its having a foundation and reference points that are disconnected and out of touch.

And life expectancy is trending upwards and has for a long time as we eliminate more early mortalities.

Sadly, that is not true in the US.

It's the only developed country where life expectancy is going down quite a lot.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...

https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

Yea people do. Some of the more recent interviews with Jimmy Carter is a good example. Recent as in pre his wife passing away. I havn't seen any interviews of him since then, so I am not sure if he is declining. It is often that in a long marriage, when one partner dies, the others start slipping. But the ones before, he was in his upper 90s and outside of the fact that me may not move particularly fast, he was (still is?) still sharp as a whip.

I’m gonna add another one to your list: Hubie Brown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubie_Brown

The guy’s in his 90s and still does broadcasting for the NBA and is as sharp as you can be.

You’d never suspect he’s a person in his 90s while listening to it.

Buffet’s been doing multi-hour shareholder meetings in his 90s, and at a high level.

Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.

Term limits are actually bad for democracy. The most effective politicians are the ones who have learned how to do it over time. There's this bizarre American idea that being an elected official shouldn't be a job. It definitely should.

The problem here wouldn't even be solved by term limits, because Joe Biden has only been president for <4 years. The problem is that he has started to rapidly decline. Unless you institute some kind of Logan's Run Rule, you can't avoid elderly people in positions of power.

The actual, less fun solution, is for the party apparati to start elevating younger people to positions of power and influence. And that only happens if the members of that party start to demand it. It worked on Joe Biden, and he stepped aside.

Term limits are a dumb way to enforce change where there are definite benefits to institutional knowledge by the members, otherwise they are targets for capture by staffers and lobbyists.

Have a minimum (25 for House, 35 for Senate, POTUS, Judge) and maximum (75) age for all positions.

Hypothetically, but parties are also incredibly weak right now.

In California, we run an Open Primary system for every partisan office outside the POTUS so parties can’t even guarantee they’ll get a candidate into the general election even if they are otherwise eligible to put nominees forward and sometimes it’s Democrat vs Democrat (this has been happening for US Senate elections) or in some legislative districts Republican vs Republican.

Then coming from the opposite direction, you had a complete outsider in Trump effectively takeover the Republican Party in 2016 and he’s still holding the reins in 2024. Bernie Sanders almost managed something similar with the Democratic Party and they just barely held strong enough to keep that from happening. Twice.

Frankly political parties are incredibly unlikely to come together to impose any restrictions that would impose any kind of extra burden on their elder members, let alone age-gate them.

as lobbyists, you guys are going to lose most of them at modulo and the rest at monotonically

The generation should not have to voluntarily step back. The political system should be such that it allows for middle aged people to enter.

As I said in a post above, I resemble that remark--at least sleeping in, once in a while a nap. But I tend to stay awake until close to midnight. (I'm also not in my 80s, at least not yet--just hoping to get there.)

Civilization progresses one funeral at a time, but maybe if we knew we would live to four hundred we would take up longer term thinking and work for projects that took 100 years. Nod to Kim Stanley Robinson.

Was there a primary election this year in your state? This question is open to anyone to answer.

"Innocent until proven".

(No really, you cannot conclude anything from circumstantial states that only increase chances of some conclusion, but not determine it as true, strictly. It is also one of the basic principles evident past consideration of prejudice and racism...)

Also you are much more likely to decline in the next four years at eighty than at fifty.

It seems similar to the construction in the phrase, "When two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." I'm also reminded of Jefferson's quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."

I think I agree with you/them - eventually, the stochastic processes of politics will yield despotism, that natural attractor from which we may break away only with difficulty.

Part of it is that there really wasn't a primary in the first place. Democratic voters gave their consent to Biden on the understanding that he was capable of beating Trump again. As it became more clear that that wasn't the case, it became less reasonable to rely on that consent. Polls have all along shown voters preferring someone else by a substantial margin, although I don't know that they ever agreed on the someone.

There is a degree to which this move is "less democratic", but we have to be careful. It is less democratic in the governance of the Democratic Party, but it's worth noting that the Democratic Party is not a polity. Running someone who can win instead of who the party chose might be a more democratic outcome with respect to the organization that matters more.

There's absolutely room for this to be taken too far. With mostly just the two parties, elites could (and arguably did, pre-'68) use these kinds of concerns as cover for excluding certain perspectives from power. That's something to watch for, but given the context it is obviously not what is happening here when the person being excluded is the current President, with the support of the party elites up to this point.

No, I am not upset about anything the DNC has done. Trump has more and nastier court cases (including a pedophilia case) than the convicted felony. The RNC is abhorrent and the two cannot be compared.

That's HN users that hit [flag] and [vouch]

TBH a great many high comment high interest threads get [flagged] on HN thanks to fat fingers on little screens so it's hard to judge from that alone.

Watching it on the day they were mostly not flagged for much of the time .. dang (moderator) wasn't even "here" until hours later - he took an internet free holiday fishing somewhere or something.

It sounds you actively want to read too much into it and find some conspiracy.

Announcing a scheduled time would be as silly as your question. As soon as they scheduled it, it would leak and they would lose control of the narrative.

I don’t know if you noticed this, but the internet is kind of a big deal and politicians have been using social media as part of their campaign and communications for a while.

If Trump was smart he’d have picked a candidate of color.

Sounds racist. How about he pick the person best suited for the role?