Subject: Re: Abrams did an hour with Dean Phillips
Look, the problem with Phillips' argument for his own campaign - and with your various posts about Biden - is that it is possible for these two things to simultaneously be true:

1) Trump is more likely than not to beat Biden; and
2) Sticking with Biden is the Democrats' best chance to win the Presidency.

How can they both be true? Mainly because most of Biden's problems aren't unique to Biden. They'll attach to any Democrat, just because the Democrats are the party in charge. Voters are unhappy with the cost of gas and groceries and housing - even though inflation rates are down, the prices are too high for their taste. So they rank the GOP as being better to handle the economy than Democrats.

The Democrats did themselves no favors with their early-term choices, either. The three signature domestic accomplishments of the Administration were the Covid emergency response fiscal package, the infrastructure bill, and the IRA. None are helping Democrats' perceptions on handling the economy. Covid response has faded from voter salience. Predictably, most of the money from the BIL and the IRA hasn't actually gotten through the system yet, because it takes years and years for building projects to get designed, permitted, and contracted. And the IRA ended up being more about Green projects than anything else, and while voters pay lip service to fighting climate change, it's not usually a priority.

And any non-Biden candidate would have their own problems, probably worse than Biden's. You can't just swap Biden for a specific replacement - if he drops, it just throws the race wide open. Whoever made it out of that gauntlet would be underfunded, have few (if any) national connections to base a national campaign on, and would probably be named Kamala Harris (who has her own issues with polling and popularity).

There's a reason why parties almost always lose the Presidency if their incumbent chooses not to run for re-election (except for a situation like after Rutherford Hayes, who promised ahead of time he would only serve one term). The conditions that lead an incumbent not to seek re-election typically mean things are really bad for the party in power, and a disputed primary in that environment rarely is a solid foundation for a good re-election campaign.