When there’s a dominant campaign then the real primary campaigns often happen years beforehand when their organization does everything possible to ‘lock up’ as many strategists, donors, and influential figures.
It can be an expensive and bruising process but then the primaries become an afterthought.
It doesn’t always work. Just ask Jeb or Hillary Clinton. But it beats the alternative of having them run around causing trouble.
Like the time some strategists looking for someone to challenge Hillary decided to create the cult of Bernie when Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t step up.
Combine unhappy donors and campaign people on the loose, and they can create alternative candidacies that mostly fizzle, but some (like Bernie) stick around, burn up a lot of money, and cause chaos.
That’s the can of worms that opened up on the Dem side in the summer of 2024.
There was virtually no primary campaign, and the Biden people have left behind a bunch of unhappy donors and strategists who had been hovering around alternative candidates that wouldn’t dare to commit.
Now a bunch of them are having fun because there’s blood in the water. And they can smell it.
The Biden campaign is struggling to control the situation, but it doesn’t have enough money or a leader at the top. And so the bleeding is getting worse.
Will Biden survive this? I think he still will, but it won’t be easy.
The consensus is slowly drifting to Kamala as an alternative, despite her unpopularity.
And unlike fantasies of bringing in Gov. Newsom or Michelle Obama, that one is achievable. It’s now a collision course. The question is who has the staying power?
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