SUPERTHREAD: 2020 United States Elections

[The Romulan Republic]

Nah the perfect response is Bernie as Iron Man wiping ThanoTrumpos from existence.

That'd work too, except for the uncomfortable implications given, you know, Iron Man dying at the end.

[His Divine Shadow]

Might as well take it and roll with it before the opposition does

[His Divine Shadow]

Someone already did it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tj57v260Rc

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Nah the perfect response is Bernie as Iron Man wiping ThanoTrumpos from existence.

That'd work too, except for the uncomfortable implications given, you know, Iron Man dying at the end.

Well he has already had one heart attack...

[The Romulan Republic]

Wow- not only is Biden likely to lose, and possibly come in fourth, in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but his vaunted South Carolina stronghold that was supposed to save him (as it did Hillary) is starting to look shaky. A new poll has the Bern only seven points behind Biden. In South Carolina. And expect that lead to vanish if he comes fourth in the first two states.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... on-sanders

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has cut former Vice President Joe Biden's lead in South Carolina down to single digits, according to a new poll showing the Vermont Independent making inroads in the early-nominating state.

A Change Research–Post and Courier survey released Friday found Sanders with 20 percent support among likely primary voters, second only to Biden's 27 percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was third with 19 percent. No other candidate was in double digits.

The results from Change Research, a left-leaning pollster, showed Sanders performing better than in state surveys conducted by other polling outfits.

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A Quinnipiac University poll last month found Biden with a 20-point lead over Warren, who had 13 percent support. Sanders was third with 11 percent.

But the new survey shows a surging Sanders when compared with a Change Research–Post and Courier poll from October, when Biden was at 30 percent, followed by Warren at 19 percent and Sanders at 13 percent.

The most recent Change Research survey was conducted Dec. 6–11 among 998 likely primary voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Among the early-nominating states, Biden has been expected to have his strongest showing in South Carolina, in part because of his popularity among black voters.

An Economist-YouGov national poll this month found that 49 percent of black voters said Biden was their first choice among the Democratic presidential candidates. In contrast, only 13 percent chose Warren, while 11 percent picked Sanders.

Holy fuck, Sanders might actually pull this off yet. Though I fear a conspiracy of Blue Dogs to throw the race to Trump if Sanders is the nominee. I don't think most will sink that low, but their attempts to block him from the nomination could divide the party, and there are a few, like Manchin, who I wouldn't put it past them to turn their coats.

[The Romulan Republic]

In other news, it looks like there may not be a December debate, due to a strike which has lead several major candidates to pledge not to cross the picket line to participate:

https://rollingstone.com/politics/polit ... te-927124/

[The Romulan Republic]

An admittedly speculative look at a hypothetical Bernie Presidency:

https://politico.com/news/magazine/2019 ... ion-084447

MANCHESTER, N.H. — It’s a celebration much of Washington thinks has approximately zero chance of ever happening. But to get a sense of what a Bernie Sanders inaugural ball might look like, consider the dinner that unfolded at a banquet hall near the airport here in late November, when several hundred union members ate mashed potatoes and filet mignon while Sanders drank from a Michelob Ultra bottle with a paper napkin wrapped around it. Ceiling drapes hung over pre-set tables and signs depicting the labor movement’s bread and roses. “If we were going to throw a Bernie-themed wedding,” a young aide said off-handedly at the press check-in, “this is where we’d do it.”

Then Sanders, after repeating his call for an “unprecedented grassroots movement” and a wholesale transformation of politics in the United States, began bobbing on the dance floor, laughing, clapping and twirling a procession of partners to the sounds of “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “Dancing Queen” and “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” Channeling the anarchist and civil rights advocate Emma Goldman, the Vermont senator told the crowd, “Our revolution includes dancing.”

Four years ago, amid the inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s nomination and before Sanders and Donald Trump jolted the Democratic Party to the left, a President Bernie would have seemed unthinkable, even laughable. To many establishment Democrats—and, to hear Sanders’ complaints about it, the “corporate media”—it still is.

And he’s not totally wrong about that. But if the 2016 election taught the political class anything, it’s that the old limits of plausibility no longer apply, and the prospect of a Sanders presidency is worth taking seriously. Sanders is now running second nationally in the Democratic primary only to Joe Biden, slightly outpacing the other progressive behemoth in the race, Elizabeth Warren. He is first in New Hampshire, and second in both Iowa and delegate-rich California, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. And he continues to raise prodigious sums of money—more than $25 million in the last fundraising quarter, his most successful of the 2020 campaign.

Now, Sanders’ advisers and supporters are beginning to speak more often about how Sanders might govern the country—not just win a campaign. They talk loosely about potential Cabinet members and more concretely about the executive orders he would sign, primarily related to immigration and climate change. The idea of a Vice President Elizabeth Warren is getting air.

Larry Cohen, the former Communications Workers of America president who now chairs the pro-Sanders group Our Revolution, told me that when he spoke with Sanders about his presidential campaign in 2015, Sanders said to him: “Larry, I’m not doing this believing I’m going to be the next president. I’m doing this believing we can build a movement.’”

This year, Cohen said, Sanders told him, “I’m in this to win it.”

So what would the Bernie presidency really look like? During the past several weeks, I spoke with dozens of Sanders supporters, advisers and aides at events in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and California about what they would expect from a Bernie Sanders administration—and what’s already being discussed behind the scenes. Who’s in the Cabinet? How does he imagine his first 100 days? In terms of style, they envision a government driven by impatience, one that sees itself with a mandate to confront climate change vigorously, to shore up the nation’s labor unions and defend its immigrant populations. Maybe there won’t really be Medicare for All, thanks to Mitch McConnell and a Republican Senate, but they at least see less expensive prescription drugs and health care for more people than currently have it.

They know it won’t be easy. Just as they dream of Sanders bringing his Kohl’s suits and rumpled hair into the White House, they plainly understand the resistance he would create. Moderate Democrats would join Republicans in Washington to obstruct many of his initiatives, complicating his ability to use the full power of the party. So would much of corporate America. But Sanders’ supporters would start making noise, too, perhaps creating a newly potent political constituency from of the working class and disaffected young people.

People surrounding Sanders envision something new happening in politics—the “resistance” that marched against Trump in 2017 could turn out for Bernie in January 2021, giving the United States a force in politics it hasn’t seen for generations. “I was thinking about that day and smiling,” Cohen said. “People will be demonstrating all over the world.”

On inauguration day, he said, “Boy, will they be in the streets.”

Sanders’ advisers insist they are focused strictly on the campaign and haven’t started drafting lists of potential White House appointees. But they are at least discussing the possibilities.

The first way to approximate a Sanders administration is to look at the hints dropped by the candidate himself. When it comes to the vice presidency, nearly everyone around him believes that if he became the Democratic nominee, a likely choice would be Warren, his friend and ideological bedfellow. It is not a lock. But according to at least two people close to Sanders’ campaign, she would likely have the right of first refusal.

Sanders nodded in this direction on The Intercept’s “Deconstructed” podcast last month. When asked about the prospect of sharing a ticket with Warren, Sanders himself said, “If I am fortunate enough to become president, I would look absolutely to Elizabeth Warren as somebody who would play a very, very important role in everything that we’re doing.”

In other appearances, Sanders has hinted at his thinking about how to stock the rest of his administration. When Cenk Uygur asked him on “The Young Turks” in 2016 about the potential composition of his Cabinet, Sanders named five people: Cohen, who told me he does not envision himself in the White House, but “in the streets”; Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author; Robert Reich, the Clinton-era labor secretary; RoseAnn DeMoro, former executive director of National Nurses United; and Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

More recently, responding to a question this year from ABC News about whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York would play a part in his administration, Sanders replied, “If I am in the White House, she will play a very, very important role, no question, in one way or the other.”

The rest of the Cabinet—and how Sanders would piece it together—has, in progressive circles, become something closer to a fantasy draft.

In his interview with “The Young Turks,” Sanders said McKibben could be “head of the EPA or some other position.” Charles Chamberlain, the chairman of the liberal political action committee Democracy for America, which emerged from Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw somebody like a Bill McKibben becoming our secretary of state.” For shock value, that pick would equal handing Treasury to Ocasio-Cortez.

Jeff Cohen, a founder of the pro-Sanders online activist group RootsAction.org, listed a more traditional choice for secretary of state, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, on a list of “random ideas for Bernie’s cabinet” that he sent to me on Thanksgiving Day. Merkley was the first senator to endorse Sanders in 2016 and sits on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Former Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who in 2001 was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, gets floated by other progressive Democrats.

Rep. Ro Khanna, Sanders’ campaign co-chairman and his partner in an effort to cut off U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, is frequently mentioned by Sanders supporters as a potential secretary of defense. So is Andrew Bacevich, the retired Army colonel and longtime international relations professor. “I doubt that,” Bacevich said. “I’m 72-years-old and I’ve got other things on my plate.”

Sanders knows people who could cause corporate America discomfort. He told Bloomberg Politics in 2015 that for his Treasury secretary, “Somebody like a Bob Reich would be somebody who I think would be good.” He has praised Joseph Stiglitz, the economist and Nobel laureate. The economist Stephanie Kelton, a professor at Stony Brook University, is an economic adviser to his campaign.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, is introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a campaign rally, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019, in the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
At an October 2019 rally in Queens, Sanders is joined by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. | AP

“We are going to say to companies, whether it’s Honeywell or United Technologies, you shut down the Carrier plant or the Honeywell plant in South Bend, then you’re not getting your defense contracts,” Larry Cohen said. “I have no doubt Bernie will tell them that.”

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, has been discussed among Sanders’ allies as a potential chief of staff. So has Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and a co-chair of Sanders’ campaign.

After that, Sanders’ supporters toss out a wish list of names. Matt Duss, Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser and a progressive critic of much of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus, could be national security adviser. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose short-lived presidential campaign was built entirely around climate change, could helm Energy.

For attorney general: Former Rep. Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, or Zephyr Teachout, the former New York attorney general candidate, or Sen. Cory Booker. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has a shot at education. Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Miss., or Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president, could run Housing and Urban Development. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who introduced the House version of the Medicare for All bill, or Don Berwick, who was Medicare administrator under President Barack Obama and advised Warren on her health care plan, could land at Health and Human Services.

Most modern presidencies are hugely influenced by their political arms—think David Axelrod’s influence on Barack Obama’s presidency, or Karl Rove’s on the administration of George W. Bush. Similarly, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ longtime political adviser, and Shakir, his campaign manager, are widely expected to exert ongoing influence over Sanders’ political operation, whether formally or not. Weaver responded that he is “just a lowly foot soldier in the political revolution.”

“He’s probably met more interesting, crazy talented people than you ever have in your life,” said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders and an economic aide in his administration as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s. Or as Cornel West, whom Sanders has called “one of the most important philosophers of our time,”put it, the Cabinet would be “much more relaxed. It’d be less dogmatic, it’d be more flexible, and it would respect the life of the mind.”

A Sanders administration, he said, would have “Socratic energy.”

So, let’s say he wins. He wins Iowa or New Hampshire or both, then Nevada, then California, and it’s Bernie’s Democratic Party now. Then he beats Trump, who was deemed an even more improbable president than Sanders a year before Election Day 2016. Sanders has promised to introduce his “Medicare for All” bill during his first week as president. That would touch off a torturous pitched battle over the future of the nation’s health care system that uses up vast amounts of political capital—assuming McConnell doesn’t just shelve the plan somewhere in his office, maybe in a closet next to Merrick Garland.

But even before he brought a Medicare for All bill to Congress, Sanders would have begun structuring a post-Trump America in more direct ways.

“There are some things you do with executive order, and other things you do through legislation,” Sanders told a crowd at a Serbian Orthodox church in Las Vegas last week. Chants of “Bernie, Bernie,” went up when he said, “On our first day in office, through executive order, we will overturn all of Trump’s racist executive orders.”

On this topic, Sanders’ campaign does have a plan, largely spelled out in the candidate’s speeches and in the policy proposals he has released. He would sign executive orders that extend legal status to 1.8 million young people currently eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and provide protections to their parents and other undocumented immigrants. He would stop construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and he has said he would convene a “hemispheric summit” to address migration.

Sanders says his attorney general would open a criminal investigation into the fossil fuel industry, litigating over climate change as the government once did to the tobacco industry over smoking. He would use his executive authority to ban offshore drilling and fossil fuel extraction on public lands, and to revoke federal permits for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

He would direct his administration to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, , and he would end American support for the war in Yemen.

“Day One there would be a fundamental shift in foreign policy that emphasized restraint from intervention, that emphasized cooperation with other major powers on tackling climate change, that prioritized human rights and that aspired to make America a moral leader in the world and not just an economic leader,” Khanna said.

Weaver offered a metaphor: “I grew up in the countryside. And in the old days, you would have a 55-gallon barrel in your backyard where you burn your trash. And I think you would see on Inauguration Day bringing out the metaphorical burning barrel on the White House lawn and staff carrying out boxes of Trump executive orders and dumping them into the fire.”

Sanders’ campaign declined to make him available for an interview with POLITICO. He is skeptical of the news media, and that’s one thing a presidency is unlikely to change. But the full sweep of his legislative agenda can be felt plainly at any rally, where he paces in a sweater, railing against “the oligarchy.” He would need a cooperative Congress to pass his agenda, but he wants immigration reform, an “extreme wealth tax,” free college tuition at public colleges and universities and the elimination of $1.6 trillion in existing student loan debt.

And that is only skimming the surface of his varied interests. Discussing the “interconnectedness of nature” at campaign stop in Franklin, N.H., recently, Sanders said, “Right now, in New Hampshire your moose population, as I understand it, is suffering. You know why? Because with the warmer weather there are more ticks, and ticks are draining the blood out of moose.”

“Everything,” Sanders said, “is connected to everything.”

When Sanders talks like this, his devotees hear a president who is deeply aware – prepared to help them eliminate student loan debt, care for immigrants and save the moose. Moose for All!

When moderate Democrats hear Sanders talk like this, they reach for a Xanax.

James Carville, the former Bill Clinton strategist, said a magazine article like this one about a Sanders presidency belongs in the “fiction section.” Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way envisioned a failed presidency that splintered the Democratic Party. “I can imagine a world of almost pure stasis where nothing whatsoever happens, because he’s too radical for his own party, not to mention the opposing party,” Bennett said. “He is too ideological to govern.” You can envision moderate Democrats like him forming a noisy faction of the “Never Bernie” opposition.

Lobbyists and monied interests would rise up, too. If Sanders became president, said Wendell Potter, the former Cigna executive-turned-industry whistleblower who now advocates for “Medicare for All,” the insurance industry “would spend so much money” against Sanders’ health care agenda that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“They would pull all the levers they could,” he said. “They would absolutely redouble their efforts to influence, particularly Democrats. That would be job No. 1.”

And that’s just the opposition from Democrats. Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Biden supporter and former secretary of Agriculture in the Obama administration, said of McConnell, “I don’t know if his heart’s going to grow three sizes.”

As a president, Vilsack said, “You’ve got to be realistic about what you can do.”

In Sanders’ universe, the idea of limiting your ambitions to what is “realistic” is dismissed as a failure of imagination, an argument that Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’ deputy campaign manager, advanced while eating a small pizza—half mushroom, half pepperoni—on a stoop behind a red-brick church in Manchester one evening in November. He was wearing custom Vans that featured a photograph he took of a Sanders rally on the shoes’ sides.

“Six months ago, everybody in D.C. knew that impeachment was just not going to happen and was impossible,” Rabin-Havt told me while Sanders was inside the church, addressing a small crowd. Now impeachment is almost a certainty. It was the same for gay marriage, Rabin-Havt said, or for a $15 minimum wage or universal health care, which are now within the mainstream.

Sanders’ supporters often point to the recalcitrant establishment that Sanders encountered when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981, when the Democrat-controlled Board of Aldermen was so dismayed by the socialist’s victory that it blocked the new mayor’s initial appointees.

John Franco, who worked as an assistant city attorney in the Sanders administration, said Sanders was forced to work through city budgets and other business with a “shadow government, kitchen Cabinet, call it what you will.”

“It was like Omaha Beach,” Franco said. “They were up in the machine gun nest on the top of the cliff, and they were firing on us and trying to drive us back into the ocean.”

But Sanders’ victory was followed by elections in which he gained a more cooperative board. “It took a year,” Seifer said, but the public “got rid of the obstructionists.”

It can be easy to make too much of Sanders’ success in Burlington. The political tumult of a small city, Franco said, is “very different” from Washington.

But the experience Sanders had in Vermont did demonstrate that it is possible, at least, to be a sincere socialist and a canny operator.

If Sanders is elected, Weingarten, whose union has not endorsed a candidate, envisions him signing a compromise health care bill. And his foreign policy could turn out to be not much different than any other Democrat’s.

It’s true that foreign policy is an area where a president has significant control, and Sanders has increased his emphasis on it in his second presidential campaign. He advocates not just for non-intervention, but also an international movement of workers. Re-engaging the world on climate change, as Sanders would certainly do, would itself be significant.

If Sanders wanted to make other changes in foreign policy, Bacevich said, “The chance for early action, as it were, would be to curtail our military misadventures in the Middle East, withdraw from Afghanistan, withdraw from Syria and Iraq.”

However, he cautioned, “I think our political history says that serious reformers need to act quickly upon taking office if they’re going to have any chance of getting their program through.”

Absent a crisis, Bacevich said, “I would be surprised if upon taking office he would undertake major changes in U.S. foreign policy.”

“To unrig the rigged economy would require – I don’t know what it would require, but a lot,” Bacevich said. “It would really take up a lot of his political capital, I think.”

Derek Chollet, an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs during the Obama administration, said that on foreign policy, much of what has unnerved foreign governments is “the predictable unpredictability of the American president.”

“Sanders does not project that at all,” Chollet said. “He’s a quirky guy, but he’s a normal person.”

Sanders’ own view of the Bernie era appears to be that of one long campaign, reliant less on his ability to work within Washington than to bend the capital to his will by rallying the forces outside it.

During recent appearances New Hampshire, Sanders was introduced to audiences by Randy Bryce, the mustachioed ironworker from Wisconsin who ran unsuccessfully for Paul Ryan’s House seat. Bryce referred to Sanders as the next “organizer in chief.” Sanders’ advisers say that, more than former President Barack Obama, he would exert political pressure on uncooperative Democratic lawmakers in their districts.

Sanders would be “basically leading the Democratic Party while taking on the Democratic Party day by day,” said Chamberlain, the Democracy for America chairman. “We’ve already heard Bernie Sanders say that if he needs to go to West Virginia to pressure Joe Manchin at big rallies for Medicare for All, he will.” He predicted “the kind of shock and awe that the majority of Americans are really looking for.”

Larry Cohen said he expects that if Sanders won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, it would likely be on the first ballot at the convention, possibly after Warren—whom he imagines finishing second to Sanders in delegates—released her delegates to vote for him.

“That is how he gets the nomination,” Cohen said. “Read the traditional press: It’s like it’s A versus B … No, it’s not. It’s A plus B.”

Sanders’ pollster, Ben Tulchin, sees a more traditional path, in which Sanders assembles a coalition of younger, working class, diverse voters and wins outright in Iowa, then steamrolls through Super Tuesday. Sanders’ floor of support is artificially low, his advisers argue—depressed, they say, by the news media’s low expectations—so it can quickly grow.

“The press was saying, ‘Bernie can’t win,’ ‘Bernie can’t win,’ ‘Bernie can’t win,’ and he wins and shocks the world,” Tulchin said of this scenario. “The grassroots movement that the has built to date just explodes exponentially.”

And once it does, said West, the intellectual and activist, the transformation Sanders is promising would resemble those brought about by presidents Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“All three of them were thermostats, they were not thermometers. They didn’t just reflect opinion, they shaped opinion,” West said. “It’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

More than a union-banquet wedding, he imagined the music of Bruce Springsteen, John Coltrane, Sly Stone and Carole King playing at an inauguration that would spark what he called a “spiritual, moral and cultural awakening” across the country.

“Oh, man, we’re going to have a party, brother,” he said. “We’re going to have a party.”

Holly Otterbein contributed reporting.

That may be a dream, but God Damn, if it isn't a beautiful dream.

I'll say this for Bernie: he inspires people with the vision of something new and big and better- not the empty, hateful, self-aggrandizing change Trump offers, but something positive and hopeful, in a way that no other Democratic candidate does. He excites people, and that matters in a campaign, and it matters if we're going to restore a sense of hope and trust in American democracy. He makes people believe in a time when believing is out of fashion.

I'm still backing Warren for now, both because I feel that she has a better chance of being a compromise candidate and because she took a strongstand on some key issues, including impeachment, immigration, and Electoral College reform. And, frankly, I think it would be fitting for next year, the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote, to be the year we elect a female President to replace the misogynist rapist in the White House. But if Bernie does pull it off, more power to him (my personal hope is that he would pick Warren for VP, with her running to replace him in 2024 or 2028).

At this point my vote will be for one or the other, likely dependent on who has the best chance as of Super Tuesday, when I vote.

[The Romulan Republic]

A new national poll of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents has Bernie only two points behind Biden. Warren comes in third, Buttigieg in fourth. No one else breaks double digits-Yang is fifth at 5%.

Bernie is trailing Buttigieg narrowly in Iowa, and leading him narrowly in New Hampshire. Most strikingly, Bernie narrowly leads with non-white voters. So much for the "white male Bernie Bros" narrative.

https://npr.org/2019/12/16/788231791/np ... ratic-race

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders lead the crowded Democratic field, pulling in together about half of the support of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll.

Biden leads with 24%, followed closely by Sanders at 22%. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is third with 17%, followed by South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 13%, all together making up a clear top tier of four candidates.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang is fifth with 5%; former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker all pull in 4%.

Clustered together with just 1% support are former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, billionaire Tom Steyer, spiritualist and author Marianne Williamson and former Rep. John Delaney all get less than 1%.

Importantly, while two-thirds of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents say they are satisfied with the Democratic field, three-quarters (76%) say they could change their minds on whom they currently support.

So this is potentially a very fluid race, and it is why, despite Biden leading consistently in national polls, there has been so much movement in early-state polls.

While Biden continues to lead in national polling, when it comes to all-important state polls, Buttigieg has seen a surge of late. He narrowly leads Sanders in Iowa and narrowly trails him in New Hampshire, with Biden and Warren not far behind, according to RealClearPolitics' average of the polls.

"We're looking for late action, because it's so fluid," Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll, said of potential change before the first nominating states cast votes. "I think we're looking at the last surge" for who could win.

Different coalitions for the Democratic candidates

The top candidates draw support from different parts of the Democratic Party, the poll shows.

Biden does best with white women without a college degree (34%), older voters over 45 (33%), moderates (31%), those making less than $50,000 a year (30%) and voters in the South (31%), where many of the Democratic primary voters are African American.

Notably, though, Sanders is the candidate who narrowly leads with nonwhite voters, 29% to 26%, over Biden. This might be because of Sanders' strength with younger voters of color and Latinos. But the margins of error with these subgroups are too high to draw any definitive conclusions.

Sanders also leads with younger voters under 45 (37%), progressives (29%), people who live in big cities (28%), voters in the Northeast (27%) and men (27%). Warren is second with progressives (23%).

Buttigieg leads with whites with a college degree (23%), including women. Again, Warren is a close second with these groups. So Warren is competing on two separate fronts for support — with the progressives who might be inclined to the policies of Sanders and with Buttigieg for college-educated whites.

By a 54% to 44% margin, Democratic voters think it's more important to have a nominee who has the best chance of beating Trump than someone who shares their position on most issues.

And by a 49% to 42% margin, they say it's more important to have a nominee who will move in a different direction from former President Obama's policies. Among those who think it's more important to move past Obama's policies, Sanders leads the field with 28%, followed by Biden at 17%, Warren at 16% and Buttigieg at 9%.

But Biden leads handily when it comes to those who say it's more important to continue Obama's policies — 34% to Buttigieg's 19%, Warren's 17% and Sanders' 14%.

On the issues

Overall, Americans rated the economy (27%) as the most important issue to them, followed by health care (23%), climate change (16%), education (13%), immigration (10%) and gun policy (9%).

But, predictably, Democrats and Republicans believe very different things are important.

For Democrats, the poll found the top issues are health care (30%), climate change (29%), the economy (13%) and education (12%).

For Republicans, it's overwhelmingly the economy (41%), followed much further back by immigration (17%), health care (16%) and gun policy (10%).

Democrats have put forward a host of policy positions. Some — like "Medicare for All" as a replacement for private health insurance, decriminalizing illegal border crossings and a universal basic income of $1,000 a month — provide warnings for the party, as none is able to win support from a majority of the overall electorate.

But Democrats are on solid ground when talking about stricter background checks for gun purchases, stricter regulation of prescription drug prices, a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally, a Green New Deal that addresses climate change by investing in green jobs and energy-efficient infrastructure, and legalizing marijuana.

All are supported by 60% or more of Americans.

There is also majority support for forgiving student loan debt for lower-income people, a wealth tax on wealth above $1 million, keeping but making changes to Obamacare, a public option for health care, a ban on semiautomatic assault-style weapons, a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, taxing carbon emissions and offering free tuition at public colleges and universities.

But Republicans give majority support only for gun background checks and stricter prescription drug regulations.



Don't see the graphic above? Click here.

The survey of 1,744 adults was conducted between Dec. 9 and 11 by the Marist Poll using live telephone callers via cell phone and landline and has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points. There were 1,508 registered voters surveyed, and where they are referenced, the poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.7 percentage points. There were 704 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents surveyed, and where they are referenced, results have a +/- 5.4 percentage point margin of error.

Its still a four-person race, and every one of them has some qualities that appeal to me. But I can't deny a thrill, at the thought that Bernie might actually pull it off, and a strong sense of vindication. Bernie Fucking Sanders has a diverse base of support that's putting him in a neck-and-neck race with a Centrist former VP. Put him and Warren's base together, and they'd be winning in a fucking landslide.

The times, they are a-changing.

[LaCroix]

Sanders-Warren 2020 - This sounds like the GOP's (and every Million-and Billionaire's) most vivid nightmare

[The Romulan Republic]

Indeed.

On the downside regarding Bernie Sanders, however, he's made a very serious mistake in endorsing Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, who's running for a Congressional seat. The race had already turned into a complete cluster fuck, with the female Democratic incumbent who flipped the seat in 2018 being driven out of office by fucking revenge porn leaked from her allegedly abusive ex-husband to a Right-wing reporter, and another of the candidates being none other than first convict of the Mueller Probe George Papadopolous. Uygur himself has a very nasty history of virulently misogynist and racist remarks (though he claims to have disavowed some of them and changed his views)- which is all the worse in light of his running against a female candidate, to replace a female candidate driven from office by revenge porn. Irregardless, Sanders endorsed him, likely due to his support for things like Medicaid for All and the Green New Deal. Shortly thereafter, facing criticism from some of his supporters, Sanders withdrew the endorsement, and at the same time Uygur announced that he would not be accepting endorsements from any candidates, claiming he wants to be beholden only to the voters.

https://vox.com/identities/2019/12/13/2 ... california

Sen. Bernie Sanders drew criticism this week after endorsing Cenk Uygur, a California congressional candidate with a history of using racial slurs and making demeaning comments about women.

Uygur is running for the seat left vacant by the resignation earlier this year of Rep. Katie Hill. On Thursday, Sanders called him “a voice that we desperately need in Congress,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

But others say Uygur has been using his platform for years to make offensive statements about women, Jews, Muslims, and other groups. In 2016, for example, he defended the Harvard men’s soccer team for rating female students’ attractiveness in a “scouting report,” Michael Finnegan reports at the Times.

“We’ve been doing it for as long as humanity has existed, so they put it in a Google doc — not guilty,” Uygur said. In earlier blog posts, he also made crude jokes about women, calling them “poorly designed creatures” who don’t want to have sex often enough.

Uygur told Vox he was not actually defending the team’s scouting report, only people’s right to say things in private. He also said he has disavowed the blog posts, which he wrote before he made a transition from Republican to progressive. In general, he said, the criticisms of his comments “are smears against me done to distract from the issues.”

However, some see his statements over the years as disqualifying — especially since he’d be replacing a congresswoman who was forced to resign her seat after what she says was an act of revenge porn by her ex-husband.

Amid the controversy on Friday, Uygur announced that he would not be accepting outside endorsements, and Sanders withdrew his, saying, “I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns.”

.@BernieSanders retracts endorsement of Cenk Uygur after supporters push back, and, notably, Uygur said he would not be accepting endorsements. pic.twitter.com/TO9s30u5pY

— Tara Golshan (@taragolshan) December 13, 2019
Still, the episode brought back questions by some critics about Sanders’s commitment to issues affecting women. He’s been criticized in the past for arguing that the Democratic Party can’t exclude anti-abortion candidates simply because they “disagree with us on one issue.” Sanders has made efforts to address such concerns in the past, and has voiced strong support for abortion rights in debates. But the initial Uygur endorsement has revived doubts among some female voters about whether there’s room for discussions of sexism in his approach to politics.

Cenk Uygur is running for Congress. His past comments have become an issue in his campaign.
Uygur, 49, created The Young Turks as a radio show in 2002 and began uploading YouTube videos of the show in 2005. Today, the show describes itself as “the leading news and politics show for young, progressive viewers” and now has 50 million unique viewers a month, Uygur told Vox.

In November, Uygur announced his run for Congress in California’s 25th district. He’d be replacing former Rep. Katie Hill, a 32-year-old Democrat who announced her resignation in October after nude photos were published online, appearing to show her with a young female campaign staffer. Hill acknowledged and apologized for the relationship, but she also said that the photos were published without her consent after being leaked by her ex-husband, who she said was abusive. She also said she would devote her time after leaving office to fighting “revenge porn,” or the nonconsensual sharing of intimate photos with the intent to hurt someone.

Major liberal groups like Emily’s List, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have endorsed California state Assembly member Christy Smith for Hill’s seat. But Uygur is positioning himself as a challenger from the left, as Brittany Martin reported at Los Angeles Magazine in November.

A friend of Rep. Hill, Smith flipped a Republican state legislative district in 2018, and is campaigning on the issues of education, gun reform, and the environment, according to the Hill.

Meanwhile, Uygur told Vox he’s “the only major candidate for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and getting money out of politics.” Smith has not committed to Medicare-for-all, but says she supports a public health care option.

However, Uygur’s past comments have been an issue since he first announced his candidacy. In the past, he has written that women “are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully,” as Martin reported in November. And in a post on The Young Turks website about his “rules” for dating, he wrote that he must have an orgasm by the fifth date: “If I haven’t unloaded by this time, things are intolerably slow.”

But his past remarks about women have gained even more attention in recent weeks, in part thanks to a Democratic activist named M. Mendoza Ferrer, who highlighted some of them on Twitter, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In a 2012 segment of The Young Turks, for example, Uygur said he thought that Orthodox Jews and Muslims who wear heavy clothing are “wasting their lives.”

In a 2007 episode, he used the n-word multiple times after celebrity bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman used it. (Uygur told the Times that The Young Turks had followed a policy of using the n-word when criticizing racists for using it, but had stopped after conversations with black activists.)

And in 2016, he covered the Harvard soccer team’s “scouting report,” in which players rated female students, speculated about their favorite sex positions, and criticized their appearances. The report referred to one student as “manly,” and added, “Not much needs to be said on this one, folks.”

The Los Angeles Times has cast his remarks on the scouting report as a defense, but he told Vox he was only saying that if people are “making comments in private, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

“People for all of time have been making comments about the opposite sex privately, both males and females,” he said.

When it comes to his blog posts about dating, from the early 2000s, Uygur told Vox, “I don’t stand by them and they’re not right,” adding that, “I changed a long time ago.” He also said that the comment about women being “poorly designed” was meant to be a self-deprecating joke.

Overall, he said, he stopped being a Republican as “they became more and monstrous” over the years. “The question isn’t why I stopped being a Republican,” he added. “The question is why hasn’t everyone else.”

“If all you see is the old comments from me from back when I was a different person,” Uygur said, “I’m asking you to look at what I have done since,” adding that he “wouldn’t play second fiddle to anyone on aggressively fighting Republicans on the issue of women’s rights.”

The controversy could revive old questions about Bernie Sanders
Uygur’s past is receiving a new level of attention this week after the endorsement by Sanders. The senator, whom Uygur has praised on his show, called the Young Turks co-host “one of the outstanding progressive journalists in our country,” adding that he has “spent his entire life fighting for justice and the needs of the working people of our country.”

The Sanders campaign retracted the endorsement on Friday, but has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment on the controversy.

The Vermont senator has faced criticism in the past that he’s insufficiently sensitive to issues affecting female voters. In 2016, he responded to an audience member who said she wanted to be “the second Latina senator in U.S. history” by saying, “it is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina. Vote for me.’ That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big-money interests.”

To many, the comment felt belittling — female candidates, in general, have not made the argument that their gender (or their gender and ethnicity) alone are enough to elect them.

Sanders also drew criticism from abortion-rights advocates for his endorsement of Heath Mello, a candidate for mayor of Omaha who had sponsored or voted for several anti-abortion bills. In response, he said such endorsements might be necessary “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.”

“We have got to appreciate where people come from, and do our best to fight for the pro-choice agenda,” he told NPR. “But I think you just can’t exclude people who disagree with us on one issue.”

More recently, Sanders has drawn scrutiny for his handling of allegations of sexual harassment and pay discrimination in his 2016 campaign, as the LA Times notes. Earlier this year, he said he’d initially been unaware of the complaints because “I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case,” Later, he was more apologetic, saying that what female staffers experienced “was absolutely unacceptable and certainly not what a progressive campaign or any campaign should be about.”

Sanders also inspired skepticism among some feminists because of allegations that his 2016 supporters harassed women online, and because of a general perception that his campaign’s focus on economic inequality did not include enough acknowledgment of gender inequities.

That perception has lessened, to some degree, in the 2020 campaign, as Sanders has spoken out strongly on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Today, his campaign has an equal number of female and male supporters, as Esther Wang notes at Jezebel. Meanwhile, one of his competitors for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also took the position in a recent debate that the Democratic Party should not have a litmus test on abortion.

For Uygur, controversy over Sanders’s endorsement is just a way for critics to make the senator look guilty by association. “We’re taking quotes out of context by Cenk and trying to make all his political allies answer for quotes that they had absolutely nothing to do with.”

Still, the initial endorsement and subsequent retraction could revive old questions about whether the Sanders campaign is sufficiently committed to fighting sexism — or whether the issue takes a back seat to others in the senator’s mind.

The good news is that he withdrew the endorsement, even if his statement was very weak, and not the full apology it should have been. And I do not believe that Bernie Sanders intends to promote racist views (he's actually perhaps the strongest candidate on supporting the interests of Muslims and Native Americans in particular). I also think that he would work to protect the rights of women in many areas. And his strong support among female and minority voters shows that many woman and minorities see Bernie Sanders as someone who represents their interests (of course, there were also many women, and some minorities, who voted for Donald Trump, so...).

But I do think that Bernie Sanders does not bring the same passion or depth of understanding to issues of racism and sexism as he does to his core economic and political corruption issues. I've seen him make the effort to improve, or at least look like he's improving, but its just not something that he grasps as strongly, and its his biggest weakness as a candidate, especially in this day and age. I also think that he should have known well enough not to make such an endorsement in the first place, since these comments by Uygur did not come to light recently. Either Sanders knew, is being two-faced by withdrawing the endorsement now, or he wasn't fully aware, in which case he failed to adequately vet the guy he was nominating. Which is especially damning given that this is exactly the kind of association his campaign needs to avoid, and he's by no means a novice politician.

At the very least, this suggests that he needs to be a lot more careful about vetting who he endorses. Most crucially because it raises valid questions about what sort of people he might nominate for government offices or judges, were he to be elected President.

[Gandalf]

Sanders-Warren 2020 - This sounds like the GOP's (and every Million-and Billionaire's) most vivid nightmare

Given the ugliness that a black candidate inspired in them in 2008, and a female candidate in 2016, I wager GOP heads would explode if a Jewish person was on top of the ticket with a female veep.

The GOP convention would just drop all pretenses and be a tiki torch rally.

[The Romulan Republic]

Sanders-Warren 2020 - This sounds like the GOP's (and every Million-and Billionaire's) most vivid nightmare

Given the ugliness that a black candidate inspired in them in 2008, and a female candidate in 2016, I wager GOP heads would explode if a Jewish person was on top of the ticket with a female veep.

The GOP convention would just drop all pretenses and be a tiki torch rally.

Trump is going to be as viciously racist/misogynist as possible, and do everything he can to incite violence from his base.

I hope the Secret Service guys are loyal to their duty, not Trump.

Edit: Speaking of Sanders, when people talk about diversity in the election, I don't think nearly enough attention is paid to the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only openly non-Christian to ever win a Presidential primary contest in the United States.

[FaxModem1]

That depends, does Mormon count as Christian? If not, you could say that Mitt Romney has that honor.

[Gandalf]

That depends, does Mormon count as Christian? If not, you could say that Mitt Romney has that honor.

Why wouldn't they?

[Elheru Aran]

That depends, does Mormon count as Christian? If not, you could say that Mitt Romney has that honor.

Why wouldn't they?

Briefly, without getting into the theological reasons: most American Christians don't consider them Christian.

Theologically: Mormons believe that God was once a man and thus the ultimate culmination of the spiritual life is to become divine oneself. Additionally, they hold up the Book of Mormon and other texts as holy scripture and maintain that the Bible as understood by the Church since roughly the Catholic/Orthodox Schism has been contaminated by the church. On a more minor theological note, tithing is mandatory for Mormons, and they follow that scrupulously for the most part, whereas for most Christians it's more of a suggestion than a requirement. Mormons believe in baptism of the dead, which is an absolute no-go for most Christians; the orthodox view for the vast majority of people is that once you're dead you're done (Purgatory, if one believes in it, is a special case but there's nothing much we can do about it here).

For obvious reasons, Mormons energetically defend their status as 'Christians' and will generally elide the less orthodox aspects of their faith in public. Also for obvious reasons the various Christian organizations will hold their noses and make common cause with the Mormons, as typically their political goals align well for the most part. So in general for political and public purposes, they are pretty indistinguishable. Otherwise, you would be hard pressed to find a Christian (in the small percentage of the population that actually attends church) that actually acknowledges Mormons as fellow Christians.

[Gandalf]

So it's not so much, "are they Christian?" but "do people recognise their Christianity?"

It seems like a later version of Catholics and Protestants not recognising each other.

[The Romulan Republic]

So it's not so much, "are they Christian?" but "do people recognise their Christianity?"

It seems like a later version of Catholics and Protestants not recognising each other.

Yeah.

Personally, I've always just seen Mormons as yet another weird splinter sect of Christianity.

[Elfdart]

Indeed.

On the downside regarding Bernie Sanders, however, he's made a very serious mistake in endorsing Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks

Still, the episode brought back questions by some critics about Sanders’s commitment to issues affecting women. He’s been criticized in the past for arguing that the Democratic Party can’t exclude anti-abortion candidates simply because they “disagree with us on one issue.” Sanders has made efforts to address such concerns in the past, and has voiced strong support for abortion rights in debates. But the initial Uygur endorsement has revived doubts among some female voters about whether there’s room for discussions of sexism in his approach to politics.

Most female voters like most male voters know full well that no candidate is likely to be perfect or anywhere close -and are willing to hold their noses and vote for someone who might be terribly wrong on some issues, but right overall and certainly better than what the opposing party is offering. If Bernie and almost all his supporters could stomach supporting Hillary in spite of her support for the Rape Of Iraq, the putsch in Honduras and the reintroduction of chattel slavery to Libya, then it shouldn't be any great ordeal for Hillary's dead-enders to support someone who might be wrong on abortion, but right on most other subjects. If that's too rich, then I don't want to hear any whining about lefty purists.

By the way, Hillary being Hillary and all, she responded to Bernie campaigning for her in 2016 by going on the Howard Stern Show and in typical Hillary fashion, accusing him of being a Russian agent. I'm surprised she hasn't attacked Monica Lewinsky as a "Russian asset" too.

However, Uygur’s past comments have been an issue since he first announced his candidacy. In the past, he has written that women “are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully,” as Martin reported in November. And in a post on The Young Turks website about his “rules” for dating, he wrote that he must have an orgasm by the fifth date: “If I haven’t unloaded by this time, things are intolerably slow.”

Oh noes! Cenk wants to get laid after five dates! What a monster!

But his past remarks about women have gained even more attention in recent weeks, in part thanks to a Democratic activist named M. Mendoza Ferrer, who highlighted some of them on Twitter, the Los Angeles Times reported.

This "Democratic activist" is a troll account for a rather nasty Twitter troll named Sally Albright

A little over a year and a half ago, this same sock-puppet account was peddling a conspiracy theory about Bernie's wife being involved in a real estate swindle. Putting aside that an investigation by the feds showed that Mrs Sanders did nothing wrong, the fact that one of Hillary's dead-ender trolls accused the wife of a politician of being involved in a crooked real estate deal...

This couldn't have been more obvious if they had written PROJECTION all over it in fluorescent red paint! Next thing you know, one of Albright's troll accounts will accuse Bernie of having an affair with an intern and selling burial plots at Arlington National Cemetery to campaign donors.

The Vermont senator has faced criticism in the past that he’s insufficiently sensitive to issues affecting female voters. In 2016, he responded to an audience member who said she wanted to be “the second Latina senator in U.S. history” by saying, “it is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina. Vote for me.’ That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big-money interests.”

To many, the comment felt belittling — female candidates, in general, have not made the argument that their gender (or their gender and ethnicity) alone are enough to elect them.

They're kidding, right?

For Uygur, controversy over Sanders’s endorsement is just a way for critics to make the senator look guilty by association. “We’re taking quotes out of context by Cenk and trying to make all his political allies answer for quotes that they had absolutely nothing to do with.”

Still, the initial endorsement and subsequent retraction could revive old questions about whether the Sanders campaign is sufficiently committed to fighting sexism — or whether the issue takes a back seat to others in the senator’s mind.

Incoherent concern-trolling snipped.

One of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn went down in flames was because he accepted in good faith some pretty vile, disgusting and dishonest smears from his enemies within his own party -people who would rather lose to a racist fuckwit than win with a real left-winger. Instead of telling them to fuck off or as Truman used to say "If they want to lie about me, I'll just tell the truth about them", Labour threw quite a few innocent people under the bus, like Chris Williamson who just won his court case against the party for illegally suspending him. Since the DNC (in one of the e-mails Wikileaks got hold of) came up with the strategy to Jew-bait Bernie on Hillary's behalf in 2016, AND the effort to Jew-bait Sanders has already kicked off for this election, this would be a good time for Bernie's surrogates to nip it in the bud and point out which sewer this shit is oozing from.

[The Romulan Republic]

Jesus, Elfdart, not every criticism of Bernie is a DNC plot.

Do you deny that at least some of the things Uygur said were racist and misogynist? And that Bernie endorsed him? And that whatever reasons Bernie had for doing so, it may reflect badly on him (of which he is clearly aware, since he withdrew the endorsement)?

See, I mostly like Bernie. I am seriously considering voting for him on Super Tuesday, depending on how well he does compared to Warren in the early states. But that doesn't mean I am going to refuse to ever criticize him, refuse to post any criticism of him, or claim any criticism is a racist DNC conspiracy.

I don't do Cult of the Leader. Not for Bernie, not for anybody. Save that shit for the Republicans.

[Elheru Aran]

So it's not so much, "are they Christian?" but "do people recognise their Christianity?"

It seems like a later version of Catholics and Protestants not recognising each other.

Yeah.

Personally, I've always just seen Mormons as yet another weird splinter sect of Christianity.

I should note that I don't have any data on whether Christians outside the United States recognize Mormonism as a fellow denomination. I can be reasonably certain that most who are actually aware of the basic tenets of their faith and are able to compare theirs to Mormonism would probably disagree, but I won't speak for them. There have been arguments made along the lines that a more accurate representation of Mormonism would be as a fourth Abrahamic religion alongside Islam and Judaism, given its claim of common roots but divergent theology, but I don't really follow theological news very much.

For myself, while basically agnostic I remain involved in church mostly for my wife/kids/social reasons, and I would say that in my experience (the churches I have been involved in, in at least the last 15ish years) almost nobody I've known in the church community would've recognized Mormonism as Christianity mostly because its theology is ultimately too divergent. Catholicism and Protestantism at least agree upon God and Jesus and salvation for the most part; Mormon theology rests upon some ideas that are essentially absolutely incompatible with orthodox Christian theology.

But that's a whole other discussion for another place, and not one I'm really equipped to conduct, so, carry on with the election talk.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So I've been watching the Democratic debates and polls, and I'm getting a distinct sense of deja vu; in that this race is shaping up to be a repeat of 2016 ... i.e. a tired old Establishment also-ran versus a grumpy old man who yells at capitalists to "get off his lawn." Which leads me to fear that the Presidential contest will, likewise, be a repeat of 2016 ... i.e. the (re)election of Donald J. Trump.

For all the people running for the Democratic nomination, I feel there's been no real good answer to Joe Biden. There's Bernie Sanders, but every debate he's been in proves that he has exactly one answer to, literally, every question (i.e. "VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!") It's sad, because he's the one candidate I connect with on an emotional level; but I also know that the GOP attack ads practically write themselves with him.

The others are irrelevant, at this point. I can still smell roast mayor of South Bend, Indiana after all the sick burns Klobuchar laid on him. As for Klobuchar, I wonder where this Amy Klobuchar was six months ago, when it would've mattered? Warren's in a bad way if the chief target of her ire last night was the pile of ash formerly known as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (there's also that curiously durable entente between her and Sanders. There's not enough room on their end of the spectrum for two candidates. Warren isn't doing herself any favors by not going after Sanders.) The rest of the field seems to exist solely to convert O2 to CO2; except for useful idiot Tulsi Gabbard who exists as a fig leaf for people secretly intending to vote Trump in the Presidential election.

What am I missing here?

[The Romulan Republic]

So I've been watching the Democratic debates and polls, and I'm getting a distinct sense of deja vu; in that this race is shaping up to be a repeat of 2016 ... i.e. a tired old Establishment also-ran versus a grumpy old man who yells at capitalists to "get off his lawn." Which leads me to fear that the Presidential contest will, likewise, be a repeat of 2016 ... i.e. the (re)election of Donald J. Trump.

For all the people running for the Democratic nomination, I feel there's been no real good answer to Joe Biden. There's Bernie Sanders, but every debate he's been in proves that he has exactly one answer to, literally, every question (i.e. "VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!") It's sad, because he's the one candidate I connect with on an emotional level; but I also know that the GOP attack ads practically write themselves with him.

One thing we should not care about is picking a candidate based on GOP attack adds. Because they will attack any candidate we nominate, and if they don't have a real attack, they'll make up a lie and repeat it until people think its true. There is no candidate that has immunity to that, but Sanders does have a couple defenses:

1. He (and to a lesser extent Warren) are in no way "establishment", and so are a lot harder to make "Both Sides"/Whataboutism-type attack stick to.

2. Related to the above, Sanders excites people. The attacks worked on Hillary in part because she was already unlikeable and frankly boring to many.

The others are irrelevant, at this point. I can still smell roast mayor of South Bend, Indiana after all the sick burns Klobuchar laid on him. As for Klobuchar, I wonder where this Amy Klobuchar was six months ago, when it would've mattered? Warren's in a bad way if the chief target of her ire last night was the pile of ash formerly known as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (there's also that curiously durable entente between her and Sanders. There's not enough room on their end of the spectrum for two candidates. Warren isn't doing herself any favors by not going after Sanders.)

This is very, very wrong, and based on the false assumption that Sanders and Warren are as progressives competing for the same base. They aren't. Oddly enough, Bernie's base overlaps quite a bit with Biden's, while Warren is more appealing to the college crowd IIRC.

Also, they do not want to split the progressive movement, and wisely so, because they know that sooner or late one of this going to drop out and the other will need to unite people behind them. And while their bases do differ, they are closer on policy than any other major candidates.

Heck, given how many people are running, and the fact that no state is winner-take-all in the Democratic Primary, its entirely possible that we'll have a contested convention, where nobody has a majority- in which case, the congenial tone between Sanders and Warren will make it much easier for their supporters to unite on the convention floor to ensure that one of them is the nominee.

They are playing this very, very smart, despite the attempts by many in the media (and unfortunately some of their supporters) to create a feud between them.

The rest of the field seems to exist solely to convert O2 to CO2; except for useful idiot Tulsi Gabbard who exists as a fig leaf for people secretly intending to vote Trump in the Presidential election.

What am I missing here?

Yang is significant for two reasons- first, because he shows that the Democratic Party is not immune to outsiders with a populist streak gaining a surprise following, and second, and more positively, because he's putting the issue of UBI in the national spotlight.

[houser2112]

The rest of the field seems to exist solely to convert O2 to CO2; except for useful idiot Tulsi Gabbard who exists as a fig leaf for people secretly intending to vote Trump in the Presidential election.

Interesting that you point out Tulsi being a fig leaf for Trumpers. I recently drove from Charlotte to Orlando, which takes you through rural South Carolina and Georgia. Judging by the presence of very large billboards with her picture and "TULSI" in big letters, that's very consistent. You'd be forgiven for forgetting about her being a major candidate, but she seems to be very popular down there.

[The Romulan Republic]

New poll has the Bern outperforming Biden in a one-on-one race against Trump:

https://newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-out ... ll-1478891

You hear that? Its the one argument for Biden's candidacy bursting like a popped balloon.

[The Romulan Republic]

I'm going to make a tentative prediction now- it could be wrong, but I see the momentum, and I'm going to take a shot here and hope I call it right:

Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for President.

I'm still leaning Warren for my vote on Super Tuesday, unless her campaign totally collapses before then, because I feel she is stronger on some issues that are very close to my heart, and if you can't vote for who you really want in a primary, when can you, but this is where I feel the wind is blowing.