"Shoulda woulda coulda never did nothin’", as a close friend's mother once said.

I don't think that it would have made a difference one way or the other. Dems had to play the cards they held, they decided to play it this way, and whether the other strategy would have achieved a better result is everybody's guess. And irrelvant.

What I don't like, though, is that when the decision was made, that even Nancy Pelosi (whom I admire deeply for all of her political career) first praised Biden for his humility in putting country before ego, and then, when things went south, backstabbed him with ridiculous accusations. That I find indecent. (Apart from the fact that blame games never work and that they never win anything. Things turned out this way, not the other.)

All the blame-games about why Dems lost not only the White House but both Houses of Congress ignore (in my opinion) the impact of one topic that seems to have been decisive in these elections but hasn't yet been spoken about in the post-election discussions. And it has (in my opinion) been so decisive that it would have turned the election to GOP's favour regardless which candidate Dems had finally come up with.

Many talk about the individual person's economic assessment as decisive topic. Others name migration and "the border situation". Fair enough.

But the more driving factor (again: in my opinion) has been abortion. And here Dems were in a bind. They chose abortion to rally a certain segment of the population. And that worked fine in white middle class people with higher education. But at the same time it seems to have alienated another important part of the traditional voting blocs of the Dems, viz. the Latino voters, who are said to be more faith driven and more family value driven.

If you add abortion to migration/border and economic hardship, you get a powerful surge for the T campaign.

1) Many low-income earners and many "minorities" feared that more migrants would take away their jobs and put more strain on already scarce resources of #infrastructure (housing, education, health services). They acted like they didn't want to see "their" "opportunities" they once received now offered to others, a "close the door quickly after me" sentiment. Not directly racist but an example of lateral violence.

2) Advertise abortion and "minorities" and low-income people, most often faith and family value driven, get the feeling of their sense of identity being threatened. And here not T, not tax cuts for the rich, not the rise in consumer good prices due to his planned tarrifs, not Project 2025, not his fascism, not the surveillance capitalists' tech imperialism, or whatever you like to come up with, matters. The only thing that matters is that Dems (and only Dems!) threaten the identity of the vulnerable.

So perhaps Dems could have avoided the outcome of the election if they could have desisted from using abortion as topic at all. It's my impression that they blew it with this topic. And it is my impression that they not really had a choice: They probably couldn't have *not* used this topic as they needed the strong female support.

There was no way around, I guess. Dems were doomed with the abortion topic, one way ot the other. It blew up their Big Tent. Regardless whom they would have finally selected as candidate, by whatever process.