2020 Democratic Party primary thread

[Totenkindly]

But I don't see Bloomberg being popular with minority voters. There are a lot of stories circulating now (in mainstream sources) about his policies as mayor that aren't going to endear him at all. I also can't see anyone really getting behind him enough to emerge as the sole "anti-Bernie" choice.

The main issue, I think, will be Bernie wining a plurality vs. a majority (I think 538 is a very reliable source if you keep in mind the fact that it's like a weather forecast). The most likely thing is that Bloomberg plays a role in that, but I also think he's propped up by having lots of money and not much else. He can spend lots of money in Super Tuesday states, but he entered so late in the game and wasn't even part of Iowa and New Hampshire. I think it's too late to make a difference. Has anyone really pulled off much success with the "wait till Super Tuesday" model? What seems to be important are Iowa and New Hampshire. I think the best thing Bloomberg can hope for is to split influence between him, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar (maybe Biden if South Carolina props him up a bit). It's hard to say at this point what that would mean for the plurality vs. majority situation.

Yeah, I think all he's really doing is ensuring that Bernie wins, at this stage.

It's still kind of wild to me how Biden was a "sure thing" despite being a question mark, but once he came into the race, then the reality of it all caught up with him and he has just regularly scanned as out of touch and/or a remnant of a prior political approach that isn't resonating -- he was more like an abstracted connection back to Obama that people felt good about. And then when he entered the race, he basically contributed to a bunch of minorities getting wiped out of the race because of his lock on that demographic, but now that he has to be seriously considered because few remain, people are getting edgy about him and starting to back off. It makes me wonder if Harris or Booker or Castro would have made more impact without Biden jumping in.

I'm not really sure he ever wanted to be president per se either -- as Hugo said of Ben in Lost, "You were a great #2", and that's how I felt about Biden. My perception is that he didn't want to run unless he was a sure thing, and he felt also like he would be a clear winner over Trump... so he "did his duty" and came back in the race and is now really confused that he's doing so poorly. I'm fine with him as a person, I'm not feeling much towards him as a candidate except as someone who at least return some maturity back to the office.

It all feels like a big mess to me at the moment. I'm not really particularly interested in any of them in terms of being excited; instead, I still feel anxious about the future within the next year. I feel like it's going to be a rehash of 2004 (and weirdly I was still a registered GOP back then, barely). I feel like things are slipping away overall and the next four years are going to be worse than the last four.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Yes, at this point Bloomberg appears to only split the moderate vote and help Sanders. But I think he's hoping ideological differences will be downplayed in primary voters' minds and that he can siphon enough votes from the other candidates to still remain as an obstacle to Bernie's wave. He's likely also hoping Biden and Amy drop out soon. Time will tell.

Suppose Bernie comes out of this with 45 percent of the delegates, and a moderate like Pete or Amy with another 45 percent of the delegates. Neither is a clear majority, but if Bloomberg (or some other candidate) remains in this until the convention and has 10 percent of the remaining pledged delegates, they might wind up deciding the eventual nominee. This is why Bloomberg could wind up being the most important candidate in this primary, and very well end up hated by either the progressive or moderate wings of the party (or both, possibly)

Bloomberg isn’t running to win a majority of delegates, just enough to decide the nominee. He doesn’t want to be the nominee himself

In fact had there been a prominent third candidate in the 2016 dem primaries, we might’ve seen them ultimately deciding whether Clinton or Sanders had emerged with the winning number of delegates

 

[Totenkindly]

Well, you just never know.

I mean, Lincoln wasn't the strongest Republican coming into 1860 either and ended up as the candidate after a few rounds of balloting and consolidations.

It seems like they've been trying to "automate" the selection via all the state elections but it is viewed as (arguably) being rigged; yet if there's not a frontrunner, all this game-playing has to occur at the national convention to select the strongest candidate for the actual run.

 

[Bush]

https://mobile.twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1227612058855800832

Hay 14 millones de trabajadores sindicales en Estados Unidos que han dado una gran lucha por beneficios de salud provistos por sus empleadores. Medicare for All Who Want It protege sus planes y su libertad de escoger la mejor cobertura.

Translated from Spanish by
There are 14 million union workers in the United States who have struggled for health benefits provided by their employers. Medicare for All Who Want It protects your plans and your freedom to choose the best coverage.

Mayo Pete is the only candidate who understands the plight of the working class and embodies the authenticity that is desperately needed in politics today

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Exactly. The primaries still don’t decide the winner, just who gets the delegates. Someone staying in until the convention with 20 percent or even less of the delegates could sway the shit out of the final outcome. In the event it’s very neck and neck between two front runners with a distant third getting a few of their own delegates, even 2-5 percent of delegates might decide this thing

I don’t think Bloomberg expects to “win” in the sense of being nominee but he still may end up winning in a completely different sense of the word

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Exciting stuff.

 

[Totenkindly]

How long was Dev Patrick in the race again?

I feel like some guy on fire just ran screaming through the primary and disappeared, and everyone is like, "Does anyone know who that was?"

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Yeah, I think all he's really doing is ensuring that Bernie wins, at this stage.

It's still kind of wild to me how Biden was a "sure thing" despite being a question mark, but once he came into the race, then the reality of it all caught up with him and he has just regularly scanned as out of touch and/or a remnant of a prior political approach that isn't resonating -- he was more like an abstracted connection back to Obama that people felt good about. And then when he entered the race, he basically contributed to a bunch of minorities getting wiped out of the race because of his lock on that demographic, but now that he has to be seriously considered because few remain, people are getting edgy about him and starting to back off. It makes me wonder if Harris or Booker or Castro would have made more impact without Biden jumping in.

I'm not really sure he ever wanted to be president per se either -- as Hugo said of Ben in Lost, "You were a great #2", and that's how I felt about Biden. My perception is that he didn't want to run unless he was a sure thing, and he felt also like he would be a clear winner over Trump... so he "did his duty" and came back in the race and is now really confused that he's doing so poorly. I'm fine with him as a person, I'm not feeling much towards him as a candidate except as someone who at least return some maturity back to the office.

I feel a little bad about dumping at him now because it seems obvious that he's a guy that just wants to retire but was talked into running by other people.

It all feels like a big mess to me at the moment. I'm not really particularly interested in any of them in terms of being excited; instead, I still feel anxious about the future within the next year. I feel like it's going to be a rehash of 2004 (and weirdly I was still a registered GOP back then, barely). I feel like things are slipping away overall and the next four years are going to be worse than the last four.

I was worried about that if Biden had early victories, but his poor performance makes me think things will turn out differently. Trump's approval rating (though allegedly impeachment helped him), is lower than that of both Bush and Obama. It's not low enough to make me think of a loss as "inevitable", but it's not that good. I think the thing needed to swing things is a candidate people are enthusiastic to vote for, and I think we can get that.

Check out the graphs below of approval ratings. The only

Trump's approval ratings (538)

Candidates don't seem to do that well with approval ratings that low. Bernie Sanders also isn't John Kerry, a bland centrist foisted on everyone by the establishment. Of course, I'm biased, because I don't particularly love the democratic establishment and I hold them partially responsible for Trump to begin with through pushing things like TPP.

 

[Totenkindly]

I'm not against Bernie winning the nom, but (1) i have no idea how that will really play out across the base in a general election, and (2) I've been pavlov'ed after 2016 to feel ill any time I am reminded of that election because it was such a crappy year, in part, due [aside from Clinton's various mistakes] to (3) rabid Bernie supporters who really turned me off from politics regardless of the candidate himself. (I'm still seeing it now on social media -- Bernie folks who are so intent on smearing how evil all the other candidates are that if Bernie loses, they will have painted themselves into a corner where to vote for any other Democratic candidate in the main election will be an immoral act for them. A bit of this happens from every group, but I see an abundance of material from that crowd.)

And (4) It would be nice to allow Gen X and younger to step up into positions of leadership. These Boomers should have been cultivating younger politicians to be leading the charge by now, and some seem hopelessly trying to lead a world that doesn't exist nowadays, and thus are out of touch.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

To be fair, Bernie has put a lot of energy and time into trying to get younger progressives running in congressional primaries since 2016. There has still been a lack of very progressive candidates in the democratic presidential field (I don't think Warren is as progressive as she paints herself to be). It's possible he'd have stayed out of this one had there been more progressive candidates in the field. Sure there was Yang, but he was always an outsider and a long shot. And while Tulsi has been a strong Bernie ally in the past, I wouldn't consider her a progressive voice of the party (I'd call her a heterodox moderate, still firmly in the moderate zone of democratic ideology, but differeing from many of the other moderates in that she doesn't really share their hawkish neoliberal foreign policy views, hence the popularity with some libertarians despite her economic views being counter to libertarian ideology). So he filled an obvious slot no one else was really filling in this race.

 

[Tomb1]

someone hand Biden a sword to kill himself with...

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I'm not against Bernie winning the nom, but (1) i have no idea how that will really play out across the base in a general election, and (2) I've been pavlov'ed after 2016 to feel ill any time I am reminded of that election because it was such a crappy year, in part, due [aside from Clinton's various mistakes] to (3) rabid Bernie supporters who really turned me off from politics regardless of the candidate himself. (I'm still seeing it now on social media -- Bernie folks who are so intent on smearing how evil all the other candidates are that if Bernie loses, they will have painted themselves into a corner where to vote for any other Democratic candidate in the main election will be an immoral act for them. A bit of this happens from every group, but I see an abundance of material from that crowd.)

I do think some of his supporters have been obnoxious, but I also think it cuts both ways. A lot of Clinton supporters, especially those in the media, liked to paint Bernie supporters as privileged, racist, sexist white boys. And that still has traction in some circles. It's not something that his supporters did exclusively.

I've been thinking of unsubscribing from a few subreddits because I'm getting really tired of a certain crowd of people going on about the evils of socdems and how supporting Bernie is dreadful compromise for them. To be fair, they're probably just college kids. They definitely sound like people I knew in college. If they're older, I'd have to wonder what their deal is if their career path hasn't had them cloistered in some college humanities department. Folks really gotta tone their 4ness down a notch.

And (4) It would be nice to allow Gen X and younger to step up into positions of leadership. These Boomers should have been cultivating younger politicians to be leading the charge by now, and some seem hopelessly trying to lead a world that doesn't exist nowadays, and thus are out of touch.

Well, you have to be 35 to be President, for one thing. There's certainly an intergenerational alliance between Bernie and folks like AOC. Not sure if you meant him as being out of touch.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

^^yeah, I mean let's see some younger progressives run for president. Maybe Bernie would've stepped aside for them (or maybe not, who knows). It's like Neil Young putting out an anti-war album back in the 2000s. He caught some criticism from some people for being an out of touch hippie, they asked why not let some younger voices in opposition be heard, but his response was that there really weren't a lot of younger anti-war musicians putting out mainstream anti-war music in 2006. So someone had to fill that niche.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Trump couldn't win the popular vote, and that was with a candidate who lots of people in the other party hated and underestimated him to begin with. I think a much better candidate could make a big difference. The nominee needs to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania from Trump. These places have voted for Democrats in all prior elections since 1992, I believe. I don't think it's a tall order at all, though people shouldn't be complacent. I have no hard polling data or anything, but I think the decisive factor in these places were trade. At the time of the election, Obama was really pushing TPP, and Hillary was behind it as well. I believe Trump capitalized on this in a big way. Sanders, on the other hand, never supported it. That's why Trump is on record saying that he was relived he didn't face him in 2016 or even have Clinton pick him as VP.

In short, I really think Sanders could win the states he needs to win to get an electoral college victory. I think the map is in his favor. He might not do well in Florida, but he doesn't need it. There's a good chance he could win Ohio, though.


The electability argument... I don't buy it because nobody actually knows what that means. Trump wasn't supposed to be electable; all the media pundits were and professional political consultants were going on about how he was going to destroy the Republican party when he just ended up remaking it in his own image. James Carville, for instance, said he was strategically not challenging and his nomination was political suicide for the Republican party. These people are pretty out of touch and that's why they had a mental meltdown when Trump won; too many of them are incapable of admitting that Hillary made any mistakes and blame everything on Russia. Rather than showing any evidence that they've learned anything, they've just doubled down.

 

[Tellenbach]

I don't buy it because nobody actually knows what that means.

I think it means someone bald and disheveled who wants to take away private health insurance from 185 million Americans.

or it could mean a bland billionaire dude who started "stop and frisk" and says 95% of the crime is committed by minority youths between 16 and 25 years of age. The last thing people on the left want to hear are crime statistics.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I think it means someone bald and disheveled who wants to take away private health insurance from 185 million Americans.

or it could mean a bland billionaire dude who started "stop and frisk" and says 95% of the crime is committed by minority youths between 16 and 25 years of age. The last thing people on the left want to hear are crime statistics.

or it could mean that Leo was actually still dreaming the whole time!

 

[Tellenbach]

or it could mean that Leo was actually still dreaming the whole time!

Is that a Titanic or Inception reference? I haven't seen Titanic yet.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Is that a Titanic or Inception reference? I haven't seen Titanic yet.

They're in the same cinematic universe. Inception is actually Leo's thoughts as he's dying of exposure.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Turnout in New Hampshire was higher than in 2008. Shockingly, the media hasn't said more about this, even though they mentioned that Iowa turnout (for a ridiculous time-consuming caucus) wasn't that high many times.

There were 300,954 total votes.

New Hampshire Democratic primary 2020: live results, vote counts - Business Insider

It was 253062 in 2016.

2016 New Hampshire Democratic primary - Wikipedia

And in 2008, it was 287,527

2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary - Wikipedia

If this reflects Democratic enthusiasm going into this cycle, (and there's no reason to think it wouldn't), Donald should be getting worried right about now.

 

[Jaguar]

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than nine in 10 Americans say they would vote for a presidential candidate nominated by their party who happened to be black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish or a woman. Such willingness drops to eight in 10 for candidates who are evangelical Christians or are gays or lesbians. Between six and seven in 10 would vote for someone who is under 40 years of age, over 70, a Muslim or an atheist.

Just one group tested—socialists—receives majority opposition. Less than half of Americans, 45%, say they would vote for a socialist for president, while 53% say they would not.

Socialism and Atheism Still U.S. Political Liabilities