"People, at the end of the day, want to win," Bill Maher said on last night's Real Time on HBO. But is that the case on the Left? Now that the panic has hit the Democrat disco, we could be about to find out.

Newsbusters grabbed this two-minute exchange between Maher and former MSNBC host Chris Matthews discussing Joe Biden's prospects for suffering a massive landslide loss in November. Maher notes the post-debate polling on the performances of Biden and Donald Trump, and then wonders why Democrats haven't already started plotting to rescue themselves from oncoming disaster. Matthews throws a little cold water on this idea, although not nearly enough:

MATTHEWS: In the real world outside of the Biden world, it is clear to me that another candidate like Newsom, the governor of California, could have the dynamic to move from June, right now, to November, and build up support to match Trump's and maybe overtake him. He could change the whole situation.

MAHER: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: The problem is, and this is the Democratic Party, and the way it is. It's a party of center-left and left. If he does that, Kamala Harris people will go, “Wait a minute, I'm next” and he’ll say, “You’re right, you are next,” because that's what he is saying right now and that's the problem.

MAHER: No, but here's the great thing about Gavin Newsom as the candidate, she can't be his vice president. You can’t be from, you can't be from—

MATTHEWS: No, she’s next for president.

MAHER: Oh.

MATTHEWS: That’s the problem. The problem is the—of the team.

MAHER: I’m not sure that’s even that big a problem for the Democrats. People, at the end of the day, want to win.

Let's unpack this, starting with Maher's final comment. Do progressive Left activists just "want to win"? Do we have any evidence to that effect? Over the last nine months, the progressive Left has lost its minds campaigning for Hamas and against the Jews in a country where 82% of the electorate cuts in the other direction. Maher himself has been excellent on pushing back against the Left, specifically on this point. Does that sound like a movement founded on winning elections?

One could suppose that they're trying to convince people to change minds, but ... what tactics has the Left employed in pushing this agenda since October 7? Intimidation. They have seized campuses and terrorized Jewish students and faculty. They have seized streets and highways to intimidate drivers and pedestrians. They have held rallies threatening violence and demanding surrender by elected officials to their agendas. 

The progressive Left doesn't want to win elections -- they want to rule by force.

That brings us back to Maher's proposal of simply handing the nomination to the nearest white male while overlooking Biden's current running mate, the black woman Biden selected to be the next in line. The center-Left part of the party might -- might -- go along with that idea out of desperation. The progressive Left, as Matthews astutely points out, would go into an utter meltdown. Harris' allies don't want to win by giving up any power at all. 

And in a real sense, they'd be correct to oppose it. Harris may not have been on the primary ballots this year, but Biden won 99% of the delegates with Harris explicitly remaining on the ticket. Newsom never even bothered to enter the race. If Biden pulls out, those delegates may be released in a legal sense, but Harris and her progressive allies have a very good argument that primary voters endorsed her as well as Biden. And you'd better believe that the same progressives that are conducting Occupy operations on college campuses and highways to support radical jihadi terrorists in Gaza will show up in much more force if Democrats pull a back-room switcheroo that leaves Harris without a seat when the music ends. 

And you'd better believe the center-Left knows it, too.

The irony of this, of course, is that Harris might be an even worse candidate to run than a senile Biden. She's less popular than he is, she's worse on the stump and in interviews, and Harris doesn't even have the excuse of senility to explain her pointless word salads and inappropriate chuckles. But progressive Left identity-obsessed activists won a hard battle to get her on Biden's ticket four years ago as the promise that they would take power in the party through her, and they aren't going to give that opening back. Any attempt to sideline Harris, especially for Newsom or even Gretchen Whitmer, would produce an instant and likely violent backlash.

Matthews is exactly correct about this. 

Another point: Dems can't do anything unless Biden withdraws. Biden owns the delegates and will sail to victory on the first ballot. Having been president for the last three-plus years, Biden's team likely controls the DNC to boot, so there won't be a last-minute rule change in the offing. But even if they were inclined to try a hostile takeover of the convention on behalf of any other candidate, to do so would be to make their voters entirely irrelevant. Is that how one "saves democracy" -- by having party insiders reject the elected nominee in favor of someone that the elite clique prefers? And that problem will exist even if Biden does withdraw, unless they have a completely open and fair convention fight to determine the next nominee ... which itself will create party splits that won't have time to heal before early voting starts a month later.

This is the Kamala Conundrum, about which I began writing last year, created by Democrats insisting on preventing primary challenges to Biden. They could have avoided this by allowing for this debate to take place ahead of the primaries so voters could weigh in on the question, but it's too late for that now.  If Biden can't answer the call now, Harris is the only other option for Democrats, and she's arguably worse. Ironically, Tulsi Gabbard also appeared on Real Time last night as part of this conversation -- who depantsed Harris not once but twice in primary debates in 2019 and exposed her as an utter lightweight. But having anointed her as capable of being One Heartbeat Away in not one but two presidential cycles now, Democrats can't just toss her into the garbage now. How do they explain her being competent enough to be Biden's backup but not to run in his place?

By the way ... would all of these Biden/Harris delegates choose someone other than Harris, even in an open convention -- while she's the sitting VP?

All of this explains why the spin machines have been turned up to the maximum over the last two days. While some media outlets are calling for Biden to withdraw, Democrats have stared into that abyss and decided it's better to just keep gaslighting Americans about the obviously senile Joe Biden. Suddenly, Biden just had "one bad night," ignoring all of the evidence that they earlier called "cheap fakes" in their previous gaslighting. Maybe Biden can't string together two minutes of coherent extemporaneous thought, but he can do the job! And so on. 

Because in the end, that's their only chance of winning at all: lying and propaganda, abetted by the Protection Racket Media.