Archive for the ‘Elections’ Category
Monday, March 30th, 2020
The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Delegates
Right now the delegate count stands at:
- Joe Biden 1,217
- Bernie Sanders 914
Elizabeth Warren 81*
Michael Bloomberg 55*
Pete Buttigieg 26
Amy Klobuchar 7
Tulsi Gabbard 2
*Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?
Polls
Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
“13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
Remember how all those Democrats swore off SuperPacs?
The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.
As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.
The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.
For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.
Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.
Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.
Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.
Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:
When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.
“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.
As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.
Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.
No, not that one.
It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.
What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:
For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.
Biden backed Pelosi’s obstructionism while millions lost their jobs:
Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.
“President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”
Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.
Pelosi’s busted power play hurts Biden:
Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.
But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.
As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.
The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.
Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.
Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “Biden’s First Coronavirus Shadow-Briefing Was a Disaster:”
Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.
In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.
“I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:
Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.
If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.
Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.
He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.
Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:
Joe Biden on China: A triptych:
This one, though, hey, we’ve all been there:
Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:
Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.
Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”
Snip.
Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”
Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”
Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:
Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.
Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.
Moreover, Cuomo’s various upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He won the Democrats abroad primary, netting an estimated nine delegates to Biden’s four. Is he staying in the race until June? More on that theme:
James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.
“We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”
Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.
“But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”
“Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020 and endorsed Warren)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Dropped out March 19, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Andrew Cuomo, Bernie Sanders, China, coronavirus, Democrats, James Zogby, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Pete Buttigieg, rape, Super-PAC, Tara Reade, Wuhan
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Monday, March 23rd, 2020
Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)
In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…
Delegates
Right now the delegate count stands at:
- Joe Biden 1,193
- Bernie Sanders 888
Elizabeth Warren 82
Michael Bloomberg 58*
Pete Buttigieg 26
Amy Klobuchar 7
Tulsi Gabbard 2
*Three less than last week. Some settling may occur…
Polls
Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, so not much point in listing them here.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
Biden wins Florida, Illinois and Arizona, padding his delegate count over Sanders.
“If elections can be bought so easily, why did Bloomberg and Steyer flop?”
The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.
It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.
Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”
But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.
How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…
…yep, one BILLION dollars!
Hey, remember how Elizabeth Warren ranted about dark money and swore up and down she was different? Yeah, about that:
Indiana moves its primary out to June 2nd due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic.
Hill pundit pushes Klobuchar as veep pick.
Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. With Biden’s rise, the establishment comes out of hiding:
As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.
Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.
Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.
The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.
Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.
With the win all but in the bag, Biden’s team doesn’t want to screw things up by letting him be visible to potential voters. “Three reasons Joe Biden will never be president.” Too long a tenure in the Senate (he spent 36 years there, and no one who served as long as 15 years there ever became President), the difficulty in moving from Vice President to President, and the 14 year rule. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden tries to become the Social Justice Warrior pandering grand champion by saying he’ll only consider black females for the Supreme Court. He was endorsed by “the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents 1.3 million workers in the health care, grocery, retail and other industries.” Everytown for Gun Safety, the latest head of the Brady Bunch Astroturf hydra bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, endorsed Biden.
This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”
Update: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 19 and endorsed Biden. Postmortem from 538:
Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).
But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.
There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.
By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.
Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.
Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie’s Whole Campaign Was Based On a Misreading of the 2016 Election“:
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.
On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.
Snip.
The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.
The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.
True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:
In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.
The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.
And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.
But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.
And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.
Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.
The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.
While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.
In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.
Any excuse will do, as long as it’s not “socialist ideas are unpopular even with most Democrats.” Sanders has entered the dreaded “considering many options” phase of his campaign. 538 wonders what concessions Sanders can wring from the Biden campaign. I have a pretty good idea:
Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.
Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?
Heh:
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 2020)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Arizona, Ben Tulchin, Bernie Sanders, coronavirus, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Everytown for Gun Safety, Florida, Gretchen Whitmer, gun control, Guns, Illinois, Indiana, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, Jonathan Chait, Karla Jurvetson, Michael Bloomberg, Super-PAC, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, unions, United Food and Commercial Workers, Wuhan
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Guns, unions | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 16th, 2020
Between almost everyone dropping out, Biden continuing to rack up victories, and the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, almost all the air has been sucked out of the Democratic Presidential race. So this is going to be a relatively short and subdued Democratic Presidential clown car update.
Delegates
Right now the delegate count stands at:
- Joe Biden 885
- Bernie Sanders 732
Elizabeth Warren 72
Michael Bloomberg 61
Pete Buttigieg 26
Amy Klobuchar 7
- Tulsi Gabbard 2
Polls
Eh, not posting any individual polls this week, as Biden is stomping Sanders in every single one of them, usually by just shy of a 2-1 ratio. The closest thing to a surprise is that Hill/Harris X has Gabbard at 5% nationally, which suggests that 4% is the level of “Operation Chaos”-type effects.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Biden’s first at a whopping 87.3%. However, second place is not Sanders, it’s Hillary at 5.1%. (strokes chin)(stops)(washes hands annoyingly long period of time) (strokes chin again)
Pundits, etc.
Biden won Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and Washington (where results were close), while Sanders won South Dakota.
Coronavirus is one of the topics that dominated last night’s Biden-Sanders debate, as well it should, as both Biden and Sanders are part of the target demographic most likely to drop dead of it. Plus coronavirus provides Biden the perfect excuse to run the first “front porch” campaign since Warren G. Harding.
Liveblog of the Biden-Sanders debate.
Another one from 538.
Older Democrats and blacks may have pushed Biden over the top, but young and Hispanic Democrats are going socialist:
The electoral patterns in Texas, which Biden narrowly won, were marked by divisions of age and ethnicity. Voters over 65 went for Biden nearly four to one, according to Washington Post exit polls. By contrast, among voters under 30, Sanders cleaned up, beating Biden 59 percent to 13 percent. African-Americans, who constitute 20 percent of the state’s electorate, gave nearly three-fifths of their votes to Biden, almost four times Sanders’s share. Carroll Robinson, who served on the Houston City Council for six years and is chairman of the Coalition of Black Democrats, notes that Sanders failed to connect, particularly with older black voters; he cites in particular his being the only major candidate not to attend the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as reflective of his “signaling problem” with African-American voters.
Black voters, Robinson notes, were critical to Biden’s small margin of victory, boosting his totals in Harris County, which includes Houston, and in Dallas County. In contrast, Latinos, already roughly one-third of the state’s Democratic voters, voted heavily for Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 40 percent of Latino voters, compared with about a quarter who opted for Biden. Sanders won easily in heavily Latino Bexar (San Antonio), Hidalgo (the Rio Grande Valley), and El Paso Counties.
Sanders also appealed to younger voters in Texas, as elsewhere, beating Biden among voters under 30—making up some 15 percent of the electorate—by almost four to one. He won hugely in Austin, the state’s epicenter of millennial culture, with its high concentration of tech workers. Sanders easily took Travis County over Biden, 83,000 to 52,000.
Moderate Texas Democrats can take heart in halting the momentum of a socialist candidate, but the broader trend is against them. According to exit polls, some 56 percent of Texas Democrats view socialism favorably. In Houston, voters elected an inexperienced 27-year-old progressive, Lina Hidalgo, as judge of Harris County in 2018. Despite its title, the role is nonjudicial; Hidalgo is actually the chief executive of the nation’s third most-populous county. This year, Christian Menefee, a young social-justice advocate, won the primary for Harris County Attorney over more mainstream opposition, on a platform of progressive criminal-justice reform. “There’s an incipient change among the grassroots activists,” notes Bill White, former Houston mayor and deputy energy secretary under Bill Clinton. “There’s a whole new group who are very anti-establishment and gaining influence.” White suspects that the ascendency of these forces may just be beginning. Sanders and Warren—before she dropped out of the race on Thursday—enjoyed a combined 40 percent support of the Texas Democratic electorate, running strongest among the fastest-growing demographic groups.
This leftward transformation is even further along in California. As Morley Winograd, a longtime Democratic activist and former aide to Al Gore, suggests, the state is not only “unique politically, but also big enough to have its own weather system. Democrats in the state feel the economy is strong enough to allow it to maintain its current high-tax, high regulation environment without causing a major downturn.” Socialism remains in vogue. At last year’s state party convention, when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, then a presidential aspirant, suggested that “socialism is not the answer,” he was lustily booed.
As in Texas, Sanders won biggest among Latinos and millennials, who represent the party’s future. He won an astounding 55 percent of Latino voters, according to New York Times exit polls, compared with a mere 21 percent for Biden. He won 72 percent of voters under 30 and 57 percent of voters in the 30-to-44 age range, beating Biden by wide margins. Biden did win older voters and among African-Americans, but blacks constitute only 7 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate, barely a third of their Texas share.
You may have wondered “With everyone else out, will Tulsi Gabbard start picking up protest votes?” Looking at the various vote totals, the answer appears to be “No.” She does not appear to have broken 1% in any state last week.
Here’s a piece that argues that Cory Booker could have been the nominee if only he hadn’t taken that hard-left turn. There’s a bit of truth to it, but Booker was already looking a little goofy before the pandering began, and primaries are littered with candidates who looked formidable on paper.
Bloomberg last month: Oh sure, I’m going to pay you campaign staffers through the end of the year whether I stay in or not. Bloomberg this month: Psych!
Heh:
Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. We need to talk about Joe Biden:
Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.
But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)
Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished.
I assume you saw my piece on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Speaking of which, welcome to the 21st century, Joe:
For some damn reason, Biden decided that he needed to put Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in charge of his campaign. Certainly the lackluster Biden campaign has needed a shakeup for a long time (current run of success notwithstanding), but why you’d hire the person who couldn’t even get their candidate to the primary is beyond me. (Who he should be hiring is Buttigieg’s head of fundraising.) In the debate, Biden promised to pick a woman as Veep, which is exactly the sort of pander you expect of Democrats these days:
James Clyburn and James Carville say the quiet part out loud, that debates should be shut down so Biden doesn’t embarass himself. Thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus, Biden’s fundraising is now being done on the intertubes. Also: “According to campaign finance records, Biden raised $11 million immediately after his South Carolina primary win and $7 million following his Super Tuesday victories. The victories helped alleviate some of the campaign’s money woes, but it’s unclear how a ban on actual campaign events and fundraisers may impact his ability to raise money.” Those are good but not out-of-the-park numbers. He got endorsed by the NEA. Also endorsed by Andrew Yang. Joe Biden’s “bioethics advisor” (and ObamaCare architect) Ezekiel Emanuel wants people to die at age 75 (i.e., younger than Biden is now).
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
I’m sure that will go over great with Biden’s core of supporters…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Tulsi have any chance in the race? I could say “if both Biden and Bernies keeled over dead,” but even then I would expect someone like Warren or Bloomberg to jump back into the race and do better than Gabbard. She goes full Andrew Yang in calling for a Universal Basic Income, which should douse any remain fires for her on the right. “Tulsi Gabbard Says Her Sick Friend and Three Others Were Denied Coronavirus Testing in Hawaii.” Interesting (especially since Democrats absolutely dominate Hawaii), but rather peripheral to the race.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. By and large, women don’t like Bernie. “Bernie Bros warn of ‘massive exodus’ if Democrats nominate Joe Biden.” Well, they would. But some said the same in 2016, and a “massive exodus” was not apparent. “Just Like Socialism, Bernie’s Campaign Collapsed Under Its Own Contradictions:
What can only be characterized, at best, as an election-year makeover campaign began to fall apart on Feb. 23 in an interview Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” Among other things, Sanders stated: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Right afterward, Sanders doubled down, which was really his only play, lest he come off as a flip-flopper. Despite his proclamation “Truth is truth,” his point wasn’t clear. Does improved literacy that occurred in the context of indoctrinating the population in communist ideology redeem Cuba in any way? Should the United States become more like such countries? Ultimately, these remarks went nowhere, perhaps because there wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Again, these remarks aren’t new and are entirely consistently with Sanders’ history. But, as even left-wing Vox conceded, it made for a bad look: “The other read, though, is more in line with Sanders’ past. Time after time, he has apologized for the actions of brutal left-wing dictatorships from Cuba to Nicaragua to the Soviet Union, partly out of a critique of America’s meddling in these countries but also – some argue – because of his ideological sympathies toward them.”
In a single interview, Sanders may’ve forever demolished the effort to convince the American electorate the 78-year-old career politician is a perfectly benign “democratic socialist” and not the hard-left socialist he’s always been.
Bernie’s ceiling shows that the limits of socialism in America, even among Democrats:
Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.
The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.
In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.
Bernie doesn’t let facts get in the way of True Belief:
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
li>Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Stated again and again she’s not running, but there’s still a cottage industry in predicting she’ll displace Biden at the DNC or be the veep pick. Not really seeing either, but stranger things have happened this year…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Andrew Yang, Austin, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, California, coronavirus, debate, Democrats, Ezekiel Emanuel, Harris County, Hawaii, Hillary Clinton, James Carville, James Clyburn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, National Education Association, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, socialism, Stephen King, Texas, Travis County, Tulsi Gabbard
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2020
Dubbed “Slow Joe” or “Sundown Joe,” there’s been an awful lot of discussion of Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline.
One or two senior moments on the campaign trail wouldn’t have hurt him (mainly because of the (D) after his name). But it’s not one or two a campaign, it’s one or two an appearance, it’s mistakes seguing into non-sequiturs seguing into a buffet of word salads.
“Biden’s handlers limited his exposure to speaking for a few minutes at each event.”
Chance the Gardener for President.
But Joe, despite his diminishing mental competence that leads him to make increasingly bizarre statements, some of which make little or no sense, is not quite Chauncey Gardener.
The original Chance was a sweet innocent. Biden always was an ambitious type with a dubious past. He has been a repeat plagiarist, even in law school.
Nevertheless, something cruel, even sadistic, emanates from the nomination of someone either over or on the edge of senility. Considering how Joe is now, think how he will be in two or three years in the midst of his presidency.
The potential for public humiliation is high, as is the necessity to surround him with “advisors” to prop him up to avoid catastrophe.
But that may be the point. A particularly mediocre group of candidates failed, but will get a second chance.
Some are asking how the likes of Corey Booker and Kamala Harris—both of whom had absolutely terrible things to say about Biden during the debates; Harris even implied he was a bigot—suddenly are lining up behind Joe as if he were the man anointed to unite a ruptured America.
Part of this is undoubtedly that they sense a vacuum to be filled. Nobody’s home. There’s no “there” in “Being There” and someone—Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, any of a number of people—will be calling the shots in reality from behind the scenes.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Last year in a debate, Biden claimed that “my deceased wife is a teacher,” conflating Neilia Hunter Biden, who died tragically young from a car accident at age 30 in 1972 and wasn’t (as far as I can determine) a teacher, with his very-much-still-living second wife Jill Jacobs Biden, who is a teacher.
And there’s just no shortage of video evidence out there:
This was just yesterday:
If Biden is bad now, what is he going to be like three years from now?
But the corrupt wing of the Democratic Party seems intent on denying Bernie Sanders the nomination at any cost, and Joe Biden is the vehicle they’ve chosen to do it. They also seem to feel that Biden’s cognitive decline won’t be an issue once in office, as they’ll have their own hand-picked people in the veep spot and important cabinet positions. But that assumes President Donald Trump won’t shred Biden in the general, that they can somehow keep Trump from ripping into Biden’s obvious declining faculties. Dangerous assumptions all around…
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Elections, Joe Biden, Twitter, video
Posted in Democrats, Elections, video | 2 Comments »
Sunday, March 8th, 2020
Young Turks host Cenk Uygur is having a very bad week.
Last week’s uproar over him fighting unionization hadn’t even died down before Ungyer lost his carpetbagger bid for the 25th Congressional District that Democratic incumbent Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill resigned from.
In fact, Uygur came in fourth in the jungle primary, behind not only Democrat Christy Smith and Republican Mike Garcia (who are in a runoff May 12), but also behind Republican Steve Knight (who had previously represented the district before losing to Hill in 2018). Ungyer didn’t just lose, he lost badly, garnering just 5.4% of the vote and coming in at one fifth of Smith’s vote total.
Then, on top of that, he had his flight delayed for four hours. How did he take that?
Not. Well.
I can understand being upset over a plane being delayed four hours. However, taking it out over service personnel isn’t going to make the plane magically appear. Moreover, filming yourself being a complete dick to those same service personnel isn’t going to help the plane appear either, or encourage normal, non-crazy people to watch your show.
Still another problem with the Social Justice Warrior left is how overt outbursts of anger are always seen as righteous and validating rather than a dangerous lack of self-control.
And the kicker is that Uygur uploaded this video himself, as though he would be the one who came off well for yelling at random employees. Oh, you get angry when you get hungry? Then pack some food, idiot!
The entitlement mentality of our left-wing media elites seems infinite.
Tags:2020 Election, airlines, American Airlines, California, California 25th Congressional District, carpetbagger, Cenk Uygur, Christy Smith, Democrats, Katie Hill, Media Watch, Mike Garcia, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Knight, video, Young Turks
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Saturday, March 7th, 2020
The headline isn’t strictly true, as a good deal of enlightenment happened before the event:
If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting.
You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call.
Once again we see social justice warriors spreading light and happiness everywhere they go.
You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.
But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.
That turned out not to be the case. The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle.
I started to discover (or perhaps rediscover) the #WalkAway movement. I had heard about #WalkAway when MSNBC told me it was fake and a bunch of Russian bots. But then I started to meet real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving. I watched town halls they held with different minority communities (all available in their entirety on YouTube), and I saw sane, rational discussion from people of all different races, backgrounds, orientations, and experiences. I joined the Facebook group for the community and saw stories popping up daily of people sharing why they are leaving the Democratic Party. This wasn’t fake. These people are not Russian bots. Moreover, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was not universal agreement in this group — some were Trump supporters, some weren’t — but they talked and shared their perspective without shouting or rage or trying to cancel each other.
I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?
Snip.
I headed over an hour and a half before the doors were scheduled to open—which was four hours before Trump was set to take the stage—and the line already stretched a mile away from the entrance to the arena. As I waited, I chatted with the folks around me. And contrary to all the fears expressed, they were so nice. I was not harassed or intimidated, and I was never in fear of my safety even for a moment. These were average, everyday people. They were veterans, schoolteachers, and small business owners who had come from all over the place for the thrill of attending this rally. They were upbeat and excited. In chatting, I even let it slip that I was a Democrat. The reaction: “Good for you! Welcome!”
Once we got inside, the atmosphere was jubilant. It was more like attending a rock concert than a political rally. People were genuinely enjoying themselves. Some were even dancing to music being played over the loudspeakers. It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.
I had attended an event with all the Democratic contenders just two days prior in exactly the same arena, and the contrast was stark. First, Trump completely filled the arena all the way up to the top. Even with every major Democratic candidate in attendance the other night, and the campaigns giving away free tickets, the Democrats did not do that. With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other. With Trump, there was a genuinely optimistic view of the future. With the Democrats, it was doom and gloom. With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom.
Snip.
They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws, because they believe he has their back.
As I left the rally—walking past thousands of people who were watching it on a giant monitor outside the arena because they couldn’t get in—I knew there was no way Trump would lose in November. Absolutely no way. I truly believe that it doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate: Trump is going to trounce them. If you don’t believe me, attend one of his rallies and see for yourself. Don’t worry, they really won’t hurt you.
Snip.
I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope.
Read the whole thing.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2020
Been a hell of a week. Monday’s Clown Car update will be yuuuuuuuugggggeeeeee! Also remember that the horror begins anew this weekend.
Trump Administration: Sanctuary city? No federal funds for you!
Democrats lie about coronavirus budget cuts.
How tranny pandering damaged the Labour Party:
“Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy have backed a 12-point plan put forward by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights group that calls for sex-based rights campaigners to be expelled from Labour. Angela Rayner and Dawn Butler, who are in the running for deputy leader, also backed the group’s pledges. The trans rights group is calling for long debated changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow people to formally self identify as the opposite sex without paying for a certificate or demonstrating that they have accessed transitioning services. It also vows to ‘organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance, and other trans exclusionist hate groups.’”
People were then asked whether they agreed with the pledge. Then they also answered the question about how likely they were to vote Labour.
The results show that being exposed to even this small snippet of news about the pledge seems to reduce support for Labour. As figure one reveals, the share of survey respondents who said they would likely vote Labour was 42.6 percent among those who read nothing and just 32.7 percent among those who read the paragraph about the Labour trans pledge.
One reason for the drop was the limited popularity of the trans pledge among many survey respondents. For instance, less than a third of this mainly left-leaning sample who read about the pledge agreed with it. Among Labour voters, agreement rose to 40 percent, with 18 percent opposed and the rest undecided. However, Green, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party (SNP) voters split fairly evenly between opposing and supporting the pledge, with many undecided.
It seems that most opposed the pledge or were undecided. Among the 40 people who agreed with the pledge, 70 percent said they planned to vote Labour. Among the 99 who either disagreed or were unsure about the pledge, just 20 percent planned to do so.
Democrats behaving badly: “Hawaii councilman led meth-trafficking ring, conspired with Samoan gang ‘shot caller,’ investigators allege.”
A Hawaii councilman pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges accusing him of leading a methamphetamine-trafficking ring, supplying weapons and conspiring with a gang leader while serving as an elected official, investigators said.
Arthur Brun, 48, operated the major drug-trafficking conspiracy involving 11 other defendants since at least June 2019, while serving as an elected member of the Kauai County Council and vice chairman of its Public Safety and Human Services Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged in a news release.
Also, another case of “name that party,” since Brun is a Democrat.
There are two middle classes: the yeomanry and the clerisy:
First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.
Snip.
The yeomanry’s distress can be seen in everything from falling rates of business formation as well as declining homeownership, particularly among the young, most notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.
Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.
Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.”
The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”
In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries.
Math is hard:
It’s indicative of a bigger problem:
This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.
But it’s not true. Not even close. Forget the million for a moment and make it Andrew Yang’s thousand instead. Would that be possible? Nope! If Michael Bloomberg were to try to achieve what Andrew Yang promised ($1,000 per American per month, forever), he would be able to give every American about $183 in the first month before he’d have $0 left. To make it through a single month, he would have to be five times richer than he is. And, after that single month, even at five times his current wealth, his fortune would be completely and permanently depleted. Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional wealth tax topped out at six percent. Filter Bloomberg’s money through that tax and you get $11 per American per year.
There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If Americans want expanded services — or a monthly stipend — they are going to have to pay for them themselves. There is no billionaire out there who can do it for them.
Iran is cheating on its nuclear commitments again. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
America doesn’t need more foreign workers.
Are we so “desperate” for more bodies to “fuel economic growth?” Let’s recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn’t include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign “students” now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
“We” ordinary Americans don’t need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They’ve been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation’s Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
I don’t agree 100%; I think it behooves us to get the very best in some fields, people with PhDs in science and technology, and masters of various arts. But that’s a far cry from “Hey, my cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint. Let’s write an H1B rec so we can get him over here.”
“Billionaire Republican buys major Twitter stake, may oust CEO amid GOP concerns of bias.”
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, Bloomberg News reported, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Singer, who opposed President Trump’s campaign in 2016, has since changed his tune, raising the prospect that some of the changes to Twitter could make the platform a friendlier place for pro-Trump users. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Singer donated $24 million to Republican and right-leaning groups in the 2016 election.
Defense contractor accused of passing classified human intelligence information to a Hezbollah-connected lover. “Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minn., was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 27.” Other reports have noted she herself was born in Lebanon. Who gave a foreign born contractor Top Secret clearance?
Fourteen Coronavirus cases in Texas, but only three in the wild (all in the greater Houston area), the rest evacuees in quarantine.
Heh:
Kinda news: Joyriding in a stolen car. Kicking it up a notch: Adler joyriding in a stolen police car.
Heh 2.
Dwight wanted this in the clown car, but since John “Whale Farker” McAfee isn’t a Democrat, I’m including it here:
Thew only problem is that once you install McAfee as your running mate, he slows your campaign down by 90%…
Come as you are:
Tags:Arthur Brun, Austin, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Hawaii, Hezbollah, homeless, Iran, Jihad, Labour, Lebanon, LinkSwarm, Mariam Taha Thompson, Media Watch, Paul Singer, sanctuary cities, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Texas, transexual, Twitter
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 5th, 2020
Didn’t have time for these yesterday, but here are a few interesting results from the Texas primary on Tuesday:
In Texas, being endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a one-way ticket to Palookaville:
The two far-left candidates backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lost their primary elections in Texas on Tuesday.
Ocasio-Cortez announced last month that she would be supporting the primary contests of several democratic socialists running against establishment candidates. The New York Democrat endorsed Texas hopefuls Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, a candidate for Senate, and Jessica Cisneros, a primary challenger to Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.
Ramirez lost to the establishment-backed Senate candidate M.J. Hegar. Hegar, an Air Force veteran, was endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to take on Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Ramirez came in third place in the primary with 13.3% of the vote. The divisive primary featured seven candidates who all received 5% or more of the vote.
Cisneros, a 26-year-old attorney, was gunning for the seat held by Cuellar, one of the moderate Democrats Ocasio-Cortez targeted for his pro-gun policy preferences and “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. Cuellar defeated Cisneros by 4 percentage points, carrying 52% of the vote compared to her 48%.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Evidently Hegar is going to face state senator Royce West in the runoff. I got half that bracket right, predicting West to make the runoff, but I was badly wrong on Hegar’s chances. I didn’t realize that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would endorse Hegar just five days after my roundup. Why the DSCC choose a candidate whose biggest achievement was losing a congressional race to John Carter in the Year of Beto is a mystery to me, but she’s in the runoff, albeit with only 22% of the vote.
Pierce Bush lost. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you run a carpetbagger bid in a Republican primary but go out of your way to alienate Republican voters. Instead Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls and conservative Kathaleen Wall will meet in the runoff for the retiring Pete Olson’s seat.
I hope the Texas has a solid, well-funded get out the vote effort for this fall, as there are a lot of incumbent Republican congressmen in seats where Democratic votes exceeded Republican votes, including the 2nd (Dan Crenshaw), 3rd (Van Taylor), the 10th (Mike McCaul), the 21st (Chip Roy), the 25th (Roger Williams), and the 31st (John Carter),
Tags:10th Congressional District, 25th Congressional District, 2nd Congressional District, 31st Congressional District, 3rd Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Chip Roy, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, Dan Crenshaw, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democrats, Jessica Cisneros, John Carter, Kathaleen Wall, M. J. Hegar, Mike McCaul, Pierce Bush, Republican Party of Texas, Republicans, Roger Williams, Royce West, Texas, Texas 21st Congressional District, Troy Nehls, Van Taylor
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 4th, 2020
All that “Bernie is the inevitable nominee” talk?
Yeah, not so much. They’re still counting, but it looks like Biden won:
Alabama
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Maine (though less than a point separates them there)
Massachusetts(!)
Minnesota
North Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
While Sanders won:
California
Colorado
Utah
Vermont
Also looks like Michael Bloomberg is going to pick up delegates in Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, while Elizabeth Warren will pick up delegates of her home state of Massachusetts (coming in third), Colorado, Minnesota and Maine. Bloomberg also won American Samoa, picking up four delegates, where Tulsi Gabbard also picked up one, which is more than Tom Steyer, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris or James Inslee will ever pick up.
Biden won all the states Hillary won in 2016, plus Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma.
Biden now has more projected delegates than Bernie, 397 to 356.
It’s now the Biden and Bernie show, with a side-order of Mini-Mike for as long as he wants to waste his money. Warren is toast, but right now she says she’s going to continue running.
Too busy this week to offer up much analysis than that. Likewise thoughts on Buttigieg and Klobuchar leaving the race and endorsing Biden, which will have to wait until Monday’s Clown Car Update.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alabama, Arkansas, Bernie Sanders, California, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Maine, Massachusetts, Michael Bloomberg, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Super Tuesday, Tennessee, Texas, Tulsi Gabbard, Virginia
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »