On July 2nd, Peter Hamby at Puck News headlined an exclusive, “Biden Plunges in Swing States in Leaked Post-Debate Poll”, and reported that whereas in the total U.S. electorate there was no significant effect of Biden’s poor debate performance upon voter-preferences between Biden and Trump (which is something I documented by different evidence, likewise yesterday), there were very significant drops in voters’ support for Biden in the few swing states that will probably decide the election’s winner. Those are the states where campaigning has been the most intense, and therefore where voters’ interest in the campaign is much higher than in the other states — so, they had big drops for Biden after the debate. Hamby reported: “Harris, Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg all poll ahead of Biden in every battleground state.”

Furthermore, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer now polls nationally much better against Trump than does Biden; so, this is a huge incentive for the Party to ditch Biden.

Other possible nominees score now marginally better against Trump than Biden does: Buttigieg, Harris, and Newsom. The Puck report also says: “Whitmer and Buttigieg demonstrated serious strength against Trump in the electoral college in a two-way race, with both of them polling above 50 percent in states totaling between 260 and 301 electoral votes. Harris and Newsom, meanwhile, did not benefit from the name recognition adjustment.” This means that the replacement nominee will likely be either Whitmer or Buttigieg.

At this point, I shall comment upon Puck’s superb and comprehensive report (I suggest you read it), in order to provide additional depth to it:

As Hamby noted, most of these findings come from his having obtained access to private (nonpublished) polling by OpenLabs, which the DNC (Democratic National Committee) hires to carry out its unpublished polling. Therefore, a reasonable assumption would be that it was the DNC which selected those four names (Harris, Whitmer, Buttigieg, and Newsom) to test out against Trump. All four of those candidates are confirmed neoconservatives, just like Biden, Clinton, and Obama, are and were — neoconservatism (support for the Military-Industrial Complex above all other federal priorites, otherwise called “hawkishness” or support for expanding even further the U.S. empire) is a prerequisite in order for a U.S. Presidential candidate to be able to raise from billionaires the amount of campaign money that’s needed in order to run a campaign that has a realistic chance of winning. So: if the DNC might otherwise have thought about other potential nominees who aren’t neocons, that reason alone (one’s being NOT a neocon) would still have excluded those persons from the DNC’s consideration.

Whereas both Harris and Buttigieg had started out in the 2020 Democratic primaries as receiving even more money from billionaires than Biden did (because the billionaires who had funded Biden’s previous two Presidential campaigns found him to have been a loser and didn’t want to lose with him a third time), both of them had dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primaries and endorsed Biden against Sanders, who (Sanders) by then looked set to win the nomination until the 29 February 2020 first-ever Democratic Primary win by Biden in his Presidential campaigns occurred, which was in South Carolina, where the majority of Democrats are Black, and where huge spending by billionaires combined with an enormous preference by Black voters for Biden against Sanders, so as to produce that win, which catapulted Biden to victory on Super Tuesday, 3 March 2020, in those 15 states where the billionaires had already donated far more than enough to win the nomination for Biden, who therefore ended the campaign season by having received funds from 66 billionaires (which was more than any other candidate); #2 was Buttigieg with 62 billionaires; Sanders received donations from no billionaires. Harris had dropped out even prior to the primaries, on account of her dismal polling results, but before she did, she was raising almost as much money from megabanks as Buttigieg was.

So, the likeliest two to replace Biden are Whitmer and Buttigieg.

Whitmer’s political career has been funded mainly by corporations in the privatzed healthcare sector, especially her biggest donor, Centene Corp. Remember “Hillarycare,” which was designed to jump-start the HMO privatization of healthcare in America but was so unpopular that her husband Bill Clinton quickly abandoned it? Well, it’s nonetheless already here, courtesy of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others; and there are now many HMOs, despite their providing worse healthcare and higher costs than either nonprofit or Government-funded healthcare does. And some of that waste goes to pay lobbyists and political and advertising campaigns in order to fool the public to the contrary and to buy privatized mega-corporate health insurance and health care, thinking it will cost less though it actually costs more. Whitmer’s a champion of this. And (because so many billionaires back her and fund this propaganda) she’s popular, even though voters don’t know she fronts for privatized healthcare. HMOs are backed actually by both Democratic and Republican Party billionaires. In addition, she is also a reliable supporter of other Democratic Party billionaires’ corporations such as switching away from internal combustion engines to all-electric cars, which is promoted as reducing carbon-emissions but which probably increases carbon emissions. So, she would be an even better sales-person for her Party’s billionaires than Biden is.

Then there is Buttigieg. On 29 March 2019, an enthusiastic Vox headlined “Pete Buttigieg makes the case for ‘democratic capitalism’”, and reported that Buttigieg told them that “The big issue we have right now is regulatory capture.” His argument for that wasn’t basically the same as RFK Jr.’s is — that the even deeper American problem is the corruptness of our Government (the corruptness that’s built into extreme capitalism or “laissez faire,” such as Reagan introduced) — but is instead that,

When you’re in a system where money can equate to power, even more than it has historically, through the ability to purchase influence in politics, what starts to happen is the bigger you are and the more resources you command, the more you can bend the system to your advantage.

I think that structure helps to explain why our society has become more and more unequal. And all sorts of horrible side effects happen when you have that inequality, in addition to it just being morally upsetting. Look at the way that a lot of powerful businesses get their way in Washington. In statehouses it’s even more pronounced, because there’s less scrutiny.

It also leads to much greater concentration and consolidation in our economy. People are usually talking about that right now in the context of the tech sector, but it’s just as big a problem or bigger in the agricultural sector. This is a nation-wide illness that winds up threatening both democracy and capitalism.

That sounds much like what Kennedy has long been saying, but it’s stylistically very different. Whether there is any actual substance to that difference is hard to say. However, Buttigieg has a much better track-record of getting billionaires’ money than of getting the public’s votes; and, so, if this will now be a contest between Buttigieg and Whitmer, then I think that Whitmer will win the nomination, because billionaires crave to win.

How would that replacement of Biden happen? The Democratic Party’s billionaires would tell Biden that they don’t want Harris, because she couldn’t even make it to the primaries in 2020, and so they want Biden to resign at the Convention and to appoint Governor Whitmer (or else Secretary Buttigieg) to take his place, and that if he will do this, then they will gratefully repay him by funding his family generously and by funding honors to himself as having been the great Democratic President who so wisely chose Whitmer (or Buttigieg) to run against Trump (the Republican billionaires’ nominee).

In any case, however, what is most important to understand about the American dictatorship is how it actually works: that the DNC and RNC aren’t part of the Government but instead are merely private self-appointing clubs (tax-exempt ’non-profits’), each of whose members (who appoint one-another) represent their Party’s — their Club’s — megadonors, either by having had a political career that was funded by them, and/or by serving them as lobbyists for their corporations; and, so, they represent the billionaires, in either case: the Democratic billionaires, or else the Republican billionaires. So: the idea that they represent their voters is a lie, propaganda that’s funded by the billionaires’ organizations and that fools the public to think of the DNC and RNC as being public instead of private entities. The names and backgounds of the Party’s actual members are secrets so that even when a ‘news’-medium says something like “Now, the DNC’s exact roster of current members doesn’t appear to be easily available on its website. But I got a look at a recent membership list, and I’ve posted the names on it here,” that link is either dead or pay-walled or otherwise nonfunctional — so, that that’s just a way of pretending it isn’t secret (that it’s instead public and open to the public’s scrutiny). The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved) article “Democratic Party (United States)” doesn’t even mention that it’s a private club, much less provide any way to access its membership-list. So, this is how ‘democracy in the United States’ actually works.