Lexicus
Deity
It's quite possible that this is the calculation she's trying to make. She wants to be in a position where no one can say she isn't a Democrat, which I think ultimately was the most damning attack line against Bernie in the Democratic primaries. It's less a matter of ideology ("full centrist") and more orientation toward the party as an institution and its "establishment."
Not so much based on "evidence, proof and such" but more that there is ample material out there for the right-wing garbage that makes up most of the media that the "I want an outsider" type voters are exposed to to create the necessary associations to paint her as an insider.
I wanted to respond to this first because of course this is all 20/20 hindsight...but in hindsight, yes, of course Biden should have been clear throughout that he would not serve a second term. He should have dropped his institutionalism and pushed for things like abolishing the filibuster and really tried to go hard on domestic policy when he had the chance. Not entirely hindsight here, because I warned throughout the last four years that Democrats' political survival was at stake and letting Sinema, Manchin and the goddamn Senate parliamentarian thwart their domestic agenda would torch their credibility.
With respect to Israel the issue was less "pushing harder for a ceasefire" and more realizing that Netanyahu should be treated as a US Republican using his position as head of a US military outpost to, in effect, campaign for Trump. Far more than any details of policy, Americans just don't want to see (real) violence on the tv and Biden constantly claiming he was working toward a ceasefire which never materialized made him look like either a feckless incompetent or a liar. Imo, to the extent that Gaza had an impact on the election, most of it was this projection of weakness that hurt Biden far more than any of the concrete policy issues at play. Same argument applies to Ukraine to a certain extent.
To a certain extent, I agree, because like 2016 I will insist that this election was winnable, just not with the Liz Cheney campaign that Harris ran. I don't think it would be fair to pin all the blame for the current situation on Biden but at the same time I foresaw something broadly like this when Biden was nominated in 2020 and especially (as I've noted elsewhere) when Democrats did not get comfortable majorities in Congress in 2020 and outright lost the House in '22.
A lot of people talk about the advantage the electoral system gives the GOP and that's all valid but they have another advantage less talked about, which we might call the Constitutional problem: the US is set up to make doing things difficult, and the Democrats really need to do things a lot of the time. Not just things, big transformative things that have an immediate effect on people's lives - the things the Constitution makes it very difficult to do. All the GOP has to do is sit on their hands and that in itself validates their argument that government is the problem and the solution is to have it do nothing.
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, but I was clear eyed about the realities of the polling... which is why I laughed so hard at 
