Abigail Disney, the granddaughter to Roy O. Disney, who cofounded The Walt Disney Company, told CNBC on Thursday that she plans to withhold donations to the party she has funded for years until Biden drops out. The president has said he has no plans to withdraw from the race, despite calls for him to do so.

“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket. This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high,” Abigail Disney said in a lengthy statement to CNBC. “If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”

  • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Or in other words, the system you’re in is flawed but you’re working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.

    Making the best of a bad system

    Except that the issue you’re discussing, the choice being narrowed between Biden and Trump in this election, is not related to the anti-democratic flaws of that system.

    However it’s clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren’t arguing in good faith here.

    Sorry that you find democracy such an offensive concept.

    • upto60percentoff@kbin.run
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      4 months ago

      If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn’t be running if he hadn’t lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.

      This started as you deriding the US’s system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it’s your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?

      • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn’t be running if he hadn’t lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.

        How is that relevant to my choices being narrowed down to Trump and Biden by the opinions of the electorate?

        This started as you deriding the US’s system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it’s your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?

        Sorry that the idea that the candidates with near-majority support being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you, and the idea that an ultrawealthy megadonor attempting to change one of the candidates without democratic support being a symptom of oligarchy is, likewise, apparently incomprehensible to your worldview.

        • upto60percentoff@kbin.run
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          4 months ago

          being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you

          Given that the overarching question here is “is biden really the best candidate?”, and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.

          But again, this is just more bad faith whining so goodbye.

          • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Given that the overarching question here is “is biden really the best candidate?”,

            Yes, he is the best candidate currently running.

            and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue

            No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.

            while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.

            Okay, cool, if ranked choice voting was implemented, who would have the support of the electorate who isn’t Biden or Trump?

            • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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              4 months ago

              On what basis are you making the claim that Biden has near-majority support here? Because if it’s simply the fact he’s the candidate that was produced by our shit system, it seems like you’re just begging the question.

                • howrar@lemmy.ca
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                  4 months ago

                  Did you read the article? It says everyone polls approximately the same as Biden.

                  • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    Polls taken before Thursday all largely deliver the same answer: any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — performed about the same, or worse, than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they’d vote in head-to-head matchups.

                    In averages of national polls fielded between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden by about 2.3 percentage points, per tracking by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.

                    Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump in every poll in which he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but that’s also based on only two polls.

                • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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                  4 months ago

                  Lmao, those polls are asking how people would vote in hypothetical head-to-heads - as in:

                  the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.

                  But I guess since this says each hypothetical polled resulted in near the same chances, that means all of the alternatives have ‘near-majority support’, right?

                  • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.

                    Good to see you still can’t read worth a damn.

        • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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          4 months ago

          This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen you hide behind “the opinions of the electorate” as a defense of status-quo positions, except this time it’s pretty clearly not the opinion of the electorate that Biden is the preferred candidate to go up against trump.