This is completely off the rails
Over the last few days, with the more turbulent news cycle, it’s become rather commonplace to see a number of ridiculous political takes drummed up by the pundits based on fairly slim evidence or pure speculation. One noticeable pattern has been speculation that President Biden will not run for re-election in 2024 and there will be a large primary field like there was in 2020 – which is fairly laughable since Vice President Harris would almost certainly be the frontrunner in that unlikely scenario.
That brings us to another even more ridiculous scenario in which President Biden drops Kamala Harris from the ticket as his running mate. There’s been speculation that nearly every sitting president of the last 40 years won’t run for a second term – and it’s never more than just that. Joe Biden has dreamed of being POTUS for at least 50 years. He’s not stepping away a minute earlier than he absolutely has to.
The rumor of the president picking a new veep has been just about as prevalent and yet it hasn’t happened in nearly 80 years for a fairly obvious reason: It would be admitting that they made a mistake and any undecided voters on the fence would pick up on that immediately.
There’s also the inane speculation that the Democrats will run on a “unity ticket” with a running mate being some prominent Republican like Mitt Romney – and this is the most obvious clickbait. The last time anyone tried a unity ticket it had the opposite effect, leading to the presidency of the first president to be impeached: Andrew Johnson, who put a halt on Reconstruction after the Civil War just because he could. Generally if you see an article floating any of these three topics, you can safely ignore it and its author. There’s a lot of misinformation out there and we can all do our part by reducing the circulation of the pieces that are the most obvious.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making