SUPERTHREAD: 2020 United States Elections

[The Romulan Republic]

Jesse Jackson endorses Bernie Sanders:

https://nytimes.com/2020/03/08/us/polit ... higan.html

[The Romulan Republic]

Kamala Harris endorses Biden:

https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51792561

Guess she forgave him for forgetting she existed while standing right next to him.

[Ralin]

I was pointing out what a shameless character Warren is, moron. She spent much of her adult life trying to pass herself off as a Native American. When people started calling bullshit on this, she went to the trouble of taking a home DNA test that showed she might have had an indigenous ancestor between 6 and 10 generations ago. The fact that she jumped through these idiotic hoops because Scott Brown and later, Trump called her "Pocahontas" would be hilarious were it not so pathetic.

So yeah, trolling and literally repeating a racist talking point from fucking Donald Trump himself. Your Anti-Shep title is dangerously in question.

[The Romulan Republic]

https://commondreams.org/news/2020/03/0 ... ses-bernie

Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. on Sunday endorsed 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and urged black voters to reject the "moderate path" in favor of a progressive agenda that aims to actually meet the needs and demands of their communities.

"With the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate."
—Rev. Jesse Jackson

The endorsement from Jackson, who sought the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, came just a day after the U.S. senator from Vermont held a rally in Chicago's Grant Park attended by about 15,000 people. Jackson spoke Sunday at a Sanders campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Registered Democrats in Michigan, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington are slated to weigh in on the party's presidential primary race on March 10, followed by voters in Illinois, Arizona, Florida, and Ohio on March 17.

The only way we will defeat Trump in November is by bringing in people who have given up on the the political process. We have the movement and agenda to do that. Live now from Grand Rapids with Rev. Jesse Jackson: https://t.co/WpDcJbCty8

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 8, 2020

Since Super Tuesday, political commentators have declared the contest a two-person race between Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden "for the future of the Democratic Party and the country." Jackson said in his endorsement of Sanders Sunday that "we have a right to ask and expect candidates who benefit from the African-American political firewall to deliver what we need under the potential leadership of Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden."

"With the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate," said Jackson. "A people far behind cannot catch up choosing the most moderate path. The most progressive social and economic path gives us the best chance to catch up and Senator Bernie Sanders represents the most progressive path. That's why I choose to endorse him today."

Today is a special day for our campaign. Rev. Jesse Jackson is one of the most transformative figures in modern American history and a hero of mine. It is one of the honors of my life to have his support. pic.twitter.com/CAszZIuKDT

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 8, 2020

"The Biden campaign has not reached out to me or asked for my support," Jackson noted. "The Sanders campaign has, and they responded to the issues I raised and the concerns I expressed." The civil rights leader shared a list of 13 comments and commitments from the Sanders campaign, which included addressing voter suppression; tax and trade reforms; advancing Medicare for All; providing high-quality, free public education; and promoting peace and ending endless wars.

The campaign also pledged that as president, Sanders will ensure that Black women are in his cabinet, at the highest levels of his administration, and on the U.S. Supreme Court; "work to create a market" for black farmers," who have historically faced discrimination; invest in specific educational needs of black, brown and poor communities; commit extra funding to rural and minority health centers; and support "more trade and fair trade between African Americans, Africa, and the Caribbean nations."

Sanders announced Jackson's endorsement on ABC News Sunday morning after being asked about former primary rival Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) endorsing Biden:

JUST IN: Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @GStephanopoulos that civil rights activist Jesse Jackson will endorse him later today.

"We have the support of virtually every major grassroots organization." https://t.co/omRqv4pvVR pic.twitter.com/eCoe3yD4uq

— ABC News (@ABC) March 8, 2020

The Intercept's Ryan Grim reported Sunday that the "Rainbow Coalition Comes Full Circle as Jesse Jackson Endorses Bernie Sanders," referring to the political organization that grew out of Jackson's 1984 presidential race.

In 1988, as Grim detailed, Jackson secured a significant victory in the Michigan primary and Sanders—then the Independent mayor of Burlington, Vermont—supported his insurgent candidacy:

After the Michigan victory, Bernie Sanders went all in, calling a local press conference and announcing that he would be participating in the April Democratic caucus to back Jackson. "I am the only non-Democrat, non-Republican, Independent progressive mayor in the United States of America. OK, it is awkward, I freely admit, it is awkward for me to walk into a Democratic Party caucus, believe me, it is awkward. I am not a Democrat. Period," he said.

But he said the stakes were too high, and the opportunity too great, to stand aside on principle. Jackson, he argued, could remake the Democratic Party in an image of social justice. "So while in fact, he may end up losing some conservative white votes, some racist white votes, I think there is a real chance that he could do what [Walter] Mondale couldn't do in a million years. That is to bring millions and millions of poor people and working people into the political arena who in the past never participated."

The embrace of Jackson's rise in Burlington was quite different from the reaction of "pandemonium" in Washington, D.C. As Grim put it: "Just as party leaders melted down publicly after Sanders' win in the Nevada caucuses, they did so after Jackson's triumph in Michigan."

Meanwhile, he noted, "Biden, then a senator from Delaware, had dropped out of the race following a plagiarism scandal and dismal polling numbers."

Grim was far from alone in regarding Jackson's endorsement of Sanders as a "full circle moment."

It's an incredible Full Circle moment.

1988: Bernie Sanders Endorses Jesse Jackson For President

2020: Jesse Jackson Endorses Bernie Sanders For President. #SuperTuesday2 #MichiganPrimary pic.twitter.com/yRRarlWX4J

— Andrew Jerell Jones (@sluggahjells) March 8, 2020

Read Jackson's full endorsement below:

The "Black Firewall" has changed the dynamics of the 2020 presidential campaign. The question is what has the firewall earned? What will be the return on the black firewall's political investment? And what difference will the political contribution that the firewall is making, make in the individual lives of African Americans and in the African American community?

When President Abraham Lincoln's back was against the wall he came up with a meaningful proposition—the Emancipation Proclamation. The issuing of that proposition allowed him to free the "colored troops" to fight to save the Union. And after the Civil War, the colored troops saving the Union allowed the Union to free the slaves and affirm their citizenship with the 13th, 14th and, 15th Amendments. What will the firewall mean for the black community under the leadership of Senator Bernie Sanders or former Vice President Joe Biden in 2021 and beyond?

President John F. Kennedy was slowly gaining concern and understanding of the black community when he was assassinated. Given LBJ's background and history it was not easy for the civil rights community to trust him.

But under LBJ the black community and the nation got a 1964 Public Accommodations Act, a 1965 Voting Rights Act, a 1968 Opening Housing Act, a War on Poverty, an Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, an EEOC, Head Start, a functioning U.S. Civil Rights Commission and more.

We have a right to ask and expect candidates who benefit from the African American political firewall to deliver what we need under the potential leadership of Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden?

With the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate. A people far behind cannot catch up choosing the most moderate path. The most progressive social and economic path gives us the best chance to catch up and Senator Bernie Sanders represents the most progressive path. That's why I choose to endorse him today.

The Biden campaign has not reached out to me or asked for my support. The Sanders campaign has, and they responded to the issues I raised and the concerns I expressed with the following commitments:

Voting rights! We have a states rights and local control voting system with few national standards that’s allowing states to engage in voter suppression. Senator Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna will introduce a right to vote constitutional amendment in Congress next week. The ultimate irony is that after Heller we have a fundamental right to a gun but not a fundamental right to vote in the U.S. Constitution.
Senator Sanders will support reforming and renewing an effective U.S. Civil Rights Commission as called for in HR 4.
Senator Sanders supports a wealth tax and at least $50 billion targeted to funding HBCUs
Senator Sanders agreed to support aggressive funding for Silicon Valley to create venture capital and hiring programs with HBCUs in order to diversify the lawyers and money managers they do business with. Senator Sanders will task Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, to push for making the tech economy more inclusive of the black community with concrete deliverables.
Senator Sanders supports a single payer healthcare plan that I advocated in 1984 and 1988 with his Medicare for All plan that will provide every American with universal and comprehensive healthcare, with extra funds targeting rural and minority hospitals and community health centers.
Senator Sanders is committed to a U.S. mediating role in a two-state solution; a mutually negotiated Middle East peace plan that includes Israeli security and Palestinian justice.
Senator Sanders supports more trade and fair trade between African Americans, Africa, and the Caribbean nations.
Senator Sanders has agreed to support a dramatic expansion of Pell Grants, a free public college education and supports forgiving existing student’s loans, where black women have the largest student loan debt.
Senator Sanders supports massive new investments in public education generally, including vocational education, but also funding that directly targets the special needs in black, brown and poor communities, and ensuring that every teacher is paid at least $60,000.
Senator Sanders supports an end to endless wars; supports reviving the State Department's role by massively increasing negotiations and diplomatic efforts to bring about peace and justice among the nations of the world; and spending the money saved on rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and launching a job intensive Green New Deal.
Senator Sanders will work to create a market for black farmers, given how they faced historic discrimination and were locked out of the agricultural market.
Senator Sanders has committed to putting an African American woman on the Supreme Court.
Senator Sanders acknowledges Rev. Jackson's challenge to put an African American woman on the 2020 Democratic presidential ticket and will give it the highest consideration. Senator Sanders has also agreed to make sure that black women are in his cabinet and are at the highest levels throughout his administration should he be elected president.
That's some of what the firewall needs and that Senator Sanders has committed himself to, and that's why I can enthusiastically endorse Senator Bernie Sanders today.

[FaxModem1]

Washington Post

Bullock throws his hat in the ring for Senator of Montana, thereby possibly making it another blue state for the US Senate.

[LadyTevar]

JUB. Romulan. Gandalf
You have stepped on the Moderator's Last Nerves. Take a break, don't post in this thread for at least a week, or until y'all can pay nice and not post things that get all of you reported for violating Debating Rules and/or Racist Speech. Am I Understood, or do we need the BanHammer applied?

[Gandalf]

JUB. Romulan. Gandalf
You have stepped on the Moderator's Last Nerves. Take a break, don't post in this thread for at least a week, or until y'all can pay nice and not post things that get all of you reported for violating Debating Rules and/or Racist Speech. Am I Understood, or do we need the BanHammer applied?

In which post did I do this?

[loomer]

I suspect she meant to tag me and got the Aussies mixed up.

[Elfdart]

Being Vice President counted for a lot.

This, combined with the Democrats' habit of playing political Martyball, is the reason the biggest winner of last Tuesday's vote was Cheeto Mussolini. Every time the Dems nominate someone on the grounds that they were a loyal #2 or that they were more "electable", or that it's their turn, they choke in humiliating fashion:

Stevenson
Humphrey
Mondale
Dukakis
Gore
Kerry
Hillary

I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.

As unlikely as it is we’d better pray something different happens

What's the definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over, hoping the next time will be different?

[Darth Yan]

That’s the problem. Trump may well win. If a coronavirus outbreak gets worse or the economy tanks Biden may be able to pull it off. Personally I’m hoping Bernie pulls off an upset today but if not Biden is like it or not our only hope

[FireNexus]

And, that’s it for Bernie.

[Darth Yan]

And, that’s it for Bernie.

Agreed. He’ll limp along, hopefully to the debates. But honestly it’s like eating a shit sandwhich.

And a hearty fuck you to everyone who said Sanders was Satan

[Elfdart]

All is not lost. Republican presidents usually mellow out some in their second term. Nixon and Reagan certainly did. Their Supreme Court appointees often become more enlightened too -like Earl Warren, Brennan and Blackmun. So maybe 15-20 years from now, justices Ivanka and Eric Trump will vote to overturn Citizens United.

[Mr Bean]

All is not lost. Republican presidents usually mellow out some in their second term. Nixon and Reagan certainly did. Their Supreme Court appointees often become more enlightened too -like Earl Warren, Brennan and Blackmun. So maybe 15-20 years from now, justices Ivanka and Eric Trump will vote to overturn Citizens United.

I know your being sarcastic but it is interesting to look back how Nixon's impeachment issues forced him to play nice and Reagan's Alzheimer's forced his advisors to take over a lot of day to day stuff meaning Regan became more moderate not because of a change of heart but because his folks did not want to risk rocking the boat so chose easy safe answers to tough questions.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Tonight's update will be short. On the Sanders side, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's words during her Instagram livestream sum up tonight far better than any amount of armchair punditry I could manage:

There’s no sugar-coating it. Tonight’s a tough night. Tonight’s a tough night electorally.

Sanders' campaign has stated that he will not address supporters tonight, and that he still plans to participate in the debate on Sunday.

Biden has spoken, basically making a "good effort, now it's time to come together" pivot towards the general election.

[Darth Yan]

All is not lost. Republican presidents usually mellow out some in their second term. Nixon and Reagan certainly did. Their Supreme Court appointees often become more enlightened too -like Earl Warren, Brennan and Blackmun. So maybe 15-20 years from now, justices Ivanka and Eric Trump will vote to overturn Citizens United.

Pessimism isn’t helpful. A lot of people turned out for Biden and the coronavirus/economy might tilt things in Biden’s favor

[loomer]

Posting this in good faith as the notice has not been amended. Apparently the evidence doesn't particularly back up the idea that 'Bernie Bros' are especially toxic:

There is hard data that shows "Bernie Bros" are a myth
Mainstream pundits and politicians continue to obsess over the stereotype of the "Bernie Bro," a perfervid horde of Bernie Sanders supporters who supposedly stop at nothing to harass his opponents online. Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens have all helped perpetuate the idea that Sanders' supporters are somehow uniquely cruel, despite Sanders' platform and policy proposal being the most humane of all the candidates.

The only problem? The evidence that Sanders supporters are uniquely cruel online, compared to any other candidates' supporters, is scant; much of the discourse around Bernie Bros seems to rely on skewed anecdotes that don't stand up to scrutiny. Many Sanders supporters suspect that the stereotype is perpetuated in bad faith to help torpedo his candidacy.

A few weeks ago I penned a story for Salon attempting to qualitatively disprove the Bernie Bro myth by pulling from psychological theory and the nature of online behavior. To summarize my conclusions: First, there is a general tendency for online behavior to be negative, known as the online disinhibition effect — but it affects all people equally, not merely Sanders' supporters. Second, pundits systematically ignore when other candidates' supporters are mean online, perhaps because of the aforementioned established stereotype; in this sense, the Bernie Bro is not dissimilar from other political canards like the "welfare queen." Third, Twitter is not a representative sample size of the population, and is so prone to harboring propaganda outfits and bots such that it is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion.

Now, to add to this qualitative assessment, there is quantitative evidence, too — reaped from studying hundreds of thousands of interactions online — that reveals the Bernie Bro myth as, well, a myth. Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist and graduate student at Harvard University, crunched the numbers on tweet data and found that Sanders' supporters online behave the same as everyone else. Winchell used what is called a sentiment analysis, a technique used both in the digital humanities and in e-commerce, to gauge emotional intent from social media data.

"Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower," Winchell says of his results. "There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don't seem to be aware of.... Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat's campaigns," he added, noting that this may be partly what helps perpetuate the myth.

I interviewed him about his work and his results over email; as usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

First, for those who haven't heard of this technique, what is a sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis summarizes human expression into various scores. Most commonly the score is how negative or positive it is. But it can also be used to evaluate subjectivity (for instance, is a politician's statement factual or mostly opinionated?). Even taking the simpler text analysis, there are multiple challenges due to sarcasm, negations (e.g "I don't like their service", "After what he did, this will be his last project"), ambiguity (words that are negative or positive depending on their context), and [the fact that] texts can contain both positive and negative parts.

How are sentiment analyses used? What are other examples of this technique being used?

The overwhelming application of sentiment analysis is in e-commerce (for instance, scoring how positive/negative customer feedback is). Customer service surveys are often analyzed this way. Marketing uses sentiment analysis to test product acceptance.

Other commercial applications are in recommendations. While a system may have the user given an overall rating, analyzing the comments they provide can identify the sentiment on subtopics within.

So tell me about the sentiment analysis script that you wrote to study online behavior among different politicians' followers. How did this work?

I downloaded all the followers of the Twitter accounts of the nine most popular Democratic presidential candidates and the president ([around] 100 million Twitter accounts). I then randomly chose followers from them and downloaded all their tweets from 2015 to the present.

I have run two different sentiment analysis algorithms on these tweets. So far, nearly 6.8 million tweets from 280,000 Twitter accounts have been analyzed out of the 100 million-plus tweets I currently have downloaded (I continue downloading more).

One sentiment analysis algorithm uses a well-regarded example of grammar/word dictionary sentiment rules that were popular 5 to 10 years ago before deep learning became popular. This one is identified by the Python libary's name, Textblob.

The other algorithm is Microsoft's supervised deep learning-based algorithm with default parameters. To those unfamiliar with deep learning, the number of parameters in this model is in the millions, and no human can be expected to understand them. The deep learning model learns/generalizes from examples of text given sentiment ratings by humans through millions of trials, each time evaluating how well it predicts the results and passing that model and accuracy to the next iteration.

The categories of negative and very negative are based on ranges of values in the two algorithm's outputs. Textblob generates a number from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). I classified scores of [below] -0.75 as very negative and -.75 to -.5 as negative. Microsoft's algorithm predicts the chance that some text is classified as positive. Based on the frequencies of a specific chance, I separated the lowest 1.5 percent of tweet ratings as very negative and the lowest 1.5 percent to 5 percent of all tweet ratings as negative.

What did your results find?

The chance that some tweet is negative when it comes from a follower of candidate X is pretty much the same as if it came from a follower of candidate Y.

This uses two different algorithms, once very sophisticated (Microsoft's supervised Deep Learning-based model), the other a good algorithm based on the algorithm standards of 5 to 10 years ago (Textblob's grammar/dictionary-based rules). Microsoft's algorithm calculates the chance a tweet is positive. Textblob's rates the tweet from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). But the variation of these measures changes little among tweets from followers from different candidates.

I deliberately round my numbers to 1 digit for smaller samples (negative or very negative percentage) or 2 digits if it's about an average over all the tweets. I don't like false accuracy and it is rampant in the political media. Any NLP [Natural Language Processing] expert will tell you that reducing a tweet to a single number denoting its negativity/positivity is not an exact science. So the rounding reflects that uncertainty.

Given this data, what do you think of the "Bernie Bro" narrative about his online supporters?

Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower. There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don't seem to be aware of. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat's campaigns.

People responding to hundreds of millions of people online tend to dehumanize others. They remember that someone is female/male or follows some candidate or is of some race, but they frequently don't pay attention to differentiate actions of one member of that group versus another. So rather than consider how frequently an individual of some group acts, they think of how frequently the group acts as a whole. If they interact with many more members of one group than another, that perception of the group is magnified by the number of members they see.

Interesting. Did your opinion change after doing this little analysis?

Yes. I believed that Bernie's followers are more likely to like him because they are more likely to experience the very negative life circumstances that Bernie Sanders wants to fix. People in a negative situation are more likely to interact negatively with people, particularly those anonymous online people that they have no in-person relationship with. So I had anticipated that Bernie's followers on average would have a much higher chance to be negative. This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV.

Is there actually any difference between different candidates' supporters online behavior, based on this?

As a data scientist, I am usually skeptical of any result. So I'll say maybe not or at least much less than claimed.

I still would like to dig deeper into this. This analysis looks at all tweets. I would like to look just at twitter interactions between candidate's supporters, look at tweets responding or mentioning media professionals. I want to use some algorithms in the research that evaluate hate speech, racism, sexism. I'd like to look at specific topics of discussion, and possibly evaluate the influence of negative tweets (eg. retweets and number of followers who could see a tweet/retweet).

What is your academic background?

I have a bachelor's degree in math from Northwestern. I then worked in healthcare analytics with very large databases, branched into other applications of large scale data analysis before recently returning to grad school at Harvard to study data science. While there my interest in psychology and sociology has led me to pursue applications of data science in the social sciences to help people.

Source

Obviously it's not exactly final and conclusive (and there are issues in relying too much on public facing social media interactions and sentiment analysis techniques) but it does seem to fit with what I've observed as a largely uninvolved third party - and it raises the disconcerting prospect that the argument around behaviour is ultimately more a convenient way of expressing a generalized discontent with Sanders policies or personality than with the actual behaviour of his followers.

[FireNexus]

Sanders’ own high-up campaign folks have a habit of signal boosting many of the worst offenders on Twitter. Like, Biden’s surrogates haven’t retweeted anyone who fixed a reporter that criticized Biden. I’ve also heard no reporters complaining about receiving death threats from Warren supporters.

So, I’m not sure about the Harvard study, but I can tel you a couple of obvious ways the Sanders’ issue is qualitatively different from other bubbles in their behavior and ways the campaign’s response to it is unacceptable.

[Darth Yan]

Sanders’ own high-up campaign folks have a habit of signal boosting many of the worst offenders on Twitter. Like, Biden’s surrogates haven’t retweeted anyone who fixed a reporter that criticized Biden. I’ve also heard no reporters complaining about receiving death threats from Warren supporters.

So, I’m not sure about the Harvard study, but I can tel you a couple of obvious ways the Sanders’ issue is qualitatively different from other bubbles in their behavior and ways the campaign’s response to it is unacceptable.

At least one Biden supporter told me to eat glass. And no you aren’t being objective. You think Bernie is Satan so you cheerfully ignore that Biden supporters can also be assholes (Hillary Rosen whitesplaining MLK Jr was a big example. Biden refusing to disown a racist state senator)

[LadyTevar]

I suspect she meant to tag me and got the Aussies mixed up.

NO, Gandolf was reported for Violating Board Rules, not you Loomer.

[Gandalf]

I suspect she meant to tag me and got the Aussies mixed up.

NO, Gandolf was reported for Violating Board Rules, not you Loomer.

Can I ask which one(s)?

[loomer]

Sanders’ own high-up campaign folks have a habit of signal boosting many of the worst offenders on Twitter. Like, Biden’s surrogates haven’t retweeted anyone who fixed a reporter that criticized Biden. I’ve also heard no reporters complaining about receiving death threats from Warren supporters.

So, I’m not sure about the Harvard study, but I can tel you a couple of obvious ways the Sanders’ issue is qualitatively different from other bubbles in their behavior and ways the campaign’s response to it is unacceptable.

I look forward to you publishing a refutation of the study, then.

[Starglider]

So to be clear, the Democrat's vision for the future of the country is a pale imitation of the Obama era helmed by a senile boomer empty suit, who was already a joke brought on solely to try and appease 'low-information' white boomers back in 2008, and has steadily declined from there. No meaningful policies other than 'reverse everything Trump did', not even Hillary's minimal level of pseudo-progressiveness (to be clear, not going all out SJW is objectively good, but subjectively uninspiring within a contemporary Democrat ideological frame). If this is the best the Democrats can come up with then honestly they deserve to lose the general election. It's just a shame that will leave the world stuck with Trump for another 4 years.

[Ziggy Stardust]

So to be clear, the Democrat's vision for the future of the country is a pale imitation of the Obama era helmed by a senile boomer empty suit, who was already a joke brought on solely to try and appease 'low-information' white boomers back in 2008, and has steadily declined from there. No meaningful policies other than 'reverse everything Trump did', not even Hillary's minimal level of pseudo-progressiveness (to be clear, not going all out SJW is objectively good, but subjectively uninspiring within a contemporary Democrat ideological frame). If this is the best the Democrats can come up with then honestly they deserve to lose the general election. It's just a shame that will leave the world stuck with Trump for another 4 years.

Welcome to neo-liberal capitalism.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So to be clear, the Democrat's vision for the future of the country is a pale imitation of the Obama era helmed by a senile boomer empty suit, who was already a joke brought on solely to try and appease 'low-information' white boomers back in 2008, and has steadily declined from there. No meaningful policies other than 'reverse everything Trump did', not even Hillary's minimal level of pseudo-progressiveness (to be clear, not going all out SJW is objectively good, but subjectively uninspiring within a contemporary Democrat ideological frame). If this is the best the Democrats can come up with then honestly they deserve to lose the general election. It's just a shame that will leave the world stuck with Trump for another 4 years.

I think the Democrats' view of this election is more pragmatic than visionary. This is evidenced by how the electorate mostly coalesced around the first guy who demonstrated that he had the support of the traditional Democratic base and wasn't running on anything more ambitious than "undo Trump" (which, will actually be a non-trivial task because the Senate map this election isn't exactly friendly to the Democrats, and the Trump-McConnell mark on the Federal judiciary is going to last at least two generations.)

Is an empty suit that only wants to undo Trump exciting? No. But it may encourage the center-right Trump-skeptical voters to either stay home, or hold their noses to get rid of Trump. Especially if the empty suit can hold the line on traditional Democratic bases of support. Again pragmatism (or fear of Trump masquerading as pragmatism) over vision.