The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned Saturday evening.
Nothing is more important to the Register and its polling partners than the integrity of the Iowa Poll. Today, a respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered, which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.
While this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution, the partners made the difficult decision not to move forward with releasing the poll. The poll was the last one scheduled by the polling partners before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses, which are Monday.
J. Ann Selzer, whose company conducts the Iowa Poll, said, “There were concerns about what could be an isolated incident. Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll. The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.”
The New York Times reported that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained the former mayor’s name was left off the list of candidates in one interview, leading the media partners to throw the poll out entirely.
Again, who cancels a poll because one partisan complained something was off? More:
Underscoring the attention paid to the poll, CNN had planned an hourlong TV program around its release. Instead, at 9 p.m. Eastern, the network’s political director, David Chalian, went on the air to explain why the poll wasn’t being issued.
Something stinks here. My guess is they saw something in the poll they didn’t want the public to see, mostly likely that Bernie Sanders was clobbering the other candidates, and CNN told them to pull the plug.
Some tweets (usual rumor caveats apply):
So you're telling me that a single individual who was polled was responsible for cancelling the Des Moines Register poll? This reeks of censorship. #ReleaseThePollhttps://t.co/YGd9qK381r
The truth about the Des Moines Register poll. Bernie Sanders is up, and up YUGGEEE. We had the biggest rally of any presidential candidate today. We knocked on 500,000 doors in IOWA. Our surge isn’t even at its peak, we are going to take Iowa by a LARGE margin. #IowaForBernie
Andrew Yang: “We were all waiting in the back for a new Des Moines Register poll that was supposed to come out a few minutes ago, and then they said they’re not releasing it – so all these rumors are flying, and one of the rumors we’ve gotten is that we did really really well.”
lol. CNN can't find room on its front page for the biggest story in politics: the killing of their Iowa poll with the DM Register. pic.twitter.com/Jrt4QkzYQ6
I’m waiting for a video where he brags “So I said to the Dem Moines Register, I says there’s no way you’re releasing that poll…and sonuvabitch – what do know….”
Reminder: That same poll missed a late Ted Cruz surge four years ago. Given the way the DNC and media put it’s thumb on the scales for Hillary, and how consistently the media has destroyed what little credibility it still had left pushing every anti-Trump narrative that flowed down the sewer pipe, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen. Our default assumption now is that you’re lying for partisan advantage. Especially with CNN. You’re worthless garbage and we hope AT&T fires everyone and shuts down your entire network in embarrassment.
Right now this poll is 92% not believing the Register‘s explanation:
Do you believe the Des Moines Register when they say they are not releasing their poll bc of a problem with the questioning?
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! If you’re reading this, you haven’t died from the Coronavirus yet, despite China’s best efforts! And so many Babylon Bee slams of CNN that I couldn’t just pick one:
This morning’s contarvirus totals:
Total Infected: 9,776 (up from 2116 Sunday)
Total Deaths: 213
Total Recovered: 187
Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 22 (China (including Hong Kong), Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, South Korea, United States of America, France, Germany, United Areb Emirates, Canada, Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Finland, India, Napal, Philippines, Sri Lanka)
Thoughts: If that’s not quite exponential growth it’s a pretty good first cousin. A case in Mumbai is scary. 11 cases in Japan is scary for the opposite reason, in that the Japanese take hygiene very seriously and have been unable to prevent spread there. No confirmed cases in Indonesia, which is probably only a matter of time.
The Cornoavirus is the demon bedeviling Xi Jinping: “Yes, ‘demon’ is a metaphor for a pathogen capable of killing millions. However, it is a demon the dictatorship’s repressive policies animate and tolerate in lieu of free communication.”
2019-nCoV, however, is beyond Xi’s dictatorial control. China’s dictatorship may awe Free World idiots, but it cannot intimidate a pathogen.
The coronavirus and its potential consequences of mass death expose the dictatorship’s brittleness. If you prefer, substitute “incompetence masked by police intimidation and lack of free expression” for “brittleness.”
Brutal authoritarian political control exacts overt and covert systemic costs. Western commentators — The New York Times’ Tom Friedman is a particularly smarmy example — admire authoritarian China’s alleged skill at solving major problems that dithering Western democracies cannot. What really dazzles Friedman and his ilk is the regime’s one-command-solves-it pose. Information control, especially control of dissent, bolsters this fraud.
Since 1980, China has made extraordinary economic progress, but its government’s destructive decisions are telling. The notorious one-child policy produced a demographic devil. What Western admirers touted as a farsighted plan to promote zero population growth killed millions of baby girls, skewed female-male sex ratios and, as of 2010, began creating a worker shortage.
Doctors in China and several Asian countries — the virus is on the verge of savaging Thailand — advocate isolating infected patients. The Great Firewall of China isolates the Chinese people from global information access and sharing. Beijing demands its citizens use state-sponsored social media in lieu of global alternatives. Isolation from information sharing hinders angry citizens from criticizing the communist leaders.
But this system isolates Chinese leaders from bad news — like mass illness — that caring human beings must share….As the party bigwigs dither, a deadly pathogen kills.
It was an example of ‘No Borders’ but not in a good way. The pathogen got on a plane abetted by a delay in acknowledgement. “The Chinese government failed to act quickly enough to curb the spread of the Wuhan virus, risking further outbreaks,” Guan Yi, the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong told the Asia Times. The Chinese government’s own data, hosted on Wikipedia, confirms this. It shows how at the beginning the numbers were small, the infection still all in one place. After a week it blew up.
This illustrates how giant totalitarian governments like China’s can be at a disadvantage in dealing with emergent events. What it gains in ruthless response cannot always make up for lost response time caused by the official denial of embarrassing facts. That explains why establishments are often surprised by events like Brexit and Hillary Clinton’s shock loss. They are unexpected because they were not in the 5 year plan. They arrive like a bolt from the blue.
When the unexpected happens the official Narrative often increases the reaction time of the system. While events are slow moving there may be no penalty but in the fast moving global world threats like the coronavirus may hit the public even before institutions admit it exists. The old model of globalization has paradoxically both speeded up the rate at which events occur and slowed the rate at which behemoth transnational institutions can respond.
The result is a mismatch and failure of institutions is the theme which unites Brexit, the US impeachment and the repeated viral threats from China.
Back on January 1st, eight Chinese doctors tried to warn people about a “viral pneumonia” going around. Want to guess what happened? That’s right. They were punished for spreading rumors.
Kurt Schlichter thinks that President Donald Trump needs to get ahead of the coronavirus curve by communicating with the public, lest the impeachment-thwarted Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) make it into his “Katrina.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meet Dr. Peng Zhou a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group. You know, the same institute that posted a “help-wanted” ad to research Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats just before the local coronavirus outbreak there. What are the odds?
Speaking of China, I meant to blog this and forgot until Dwight reminded me: Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, “a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.”
Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. They said he had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.
The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. Prosecutors said she hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.
Know how the MSM keeps harping on President Donald Trump’s “unpopularity?” A deep dive into various poll metrics suggests “not so much.”
This is pretty interesting:
BREAKING: Eric Ciaramella,the CIA operative believed to be the "whistleblower," is captured in this 2015 photo taking notes b/t Biden adviser Michael Carpenter & NSC's Liz Zentos in WH meeting w Ukrainian officials.Carpenter later appeared w Biden in infamous "son of a bitch" vid pic.twitter.com/nq4JNgCsJq
63 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Are they all slack-jawed yokels motivated by hostility to geography, and facts? Do they all — or even most — have strong Southern accents? And, irrespective, is a Southern accent a predictor of stupidity? Many of my neighbors have strong southern accents. One of them is a surgeon. Whither nuance?
This particular clip has landed with such a bump because it also serves as an example of how inaccurately mediocrities tend to see themselves. Rick Wilson’s joke was second-rate and obviously pre-written, and yet Don Lemon reacted as if Wilson was Dave Chappelle — even going so far as to say he “needed” it. This behavior is learned. Since Donald Trump was elected, a certain set of political “strategists” — many of whom aren’t actually strategists, Ana Navarro — have come to see CNN as a clearing house for their bad one-liners, each sitting at home preparing zingers that they hope, once delivered, will go viral. This one has gone viral, of course, but for the opposite reason than its architects hoped: Because it is pathetic.
It’s about squishy prosecutors and judges who let repeat offenders walk free. It is about a city council that has designed this because anarchy will allow them to rebuild the city in a socialist image.
Today, a woman is dead and seven others are injured. A 9-year-old remains in the hospital. It is shameful but unfortunately predictable, given who we have running things around here.
Snip.
We do not let the cops do their jobs. The cops know who the gang members and drug dealers are. They also know that if they see a drug transaction and write it up for the prosecutor’s office, it’s going to get kicked because it’s not a serious enough crime. And when prosecutors pursue criminals, judges let them walk free.
The two suspects in this downtown shooting have been arrested 44 times with 20 convictions and 21 times with 15 convictions. Marquise Tolbert, the one with 20 convictions, had three felonies last year alone. You tell me how someone with three felonies in 2019 is walking around free and able to engage in a shootout that kills a woman and injures a bunch of other people, including a 9-year-old kid. Both Tolbert and William Tolliver, the other suspect, are just 24 years old. They both have previously been arrested and charged with drive-by shootings and unlawful possession of a firearm in 2018. So the courts knew full well that these were gun-toting gang members. Why did our justice system let them walk free? Why do we place criminals above law-abiding citizens?
Never Trump Republicans looked even more ridiculous at the end of the March for Life than they did that morning.
Trump was embraced by the largest gathering of pro-life Americans and Trump embraced them. Trump at the March for Life:
Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice.
Never Trump Republicans can’t imagine a man like Trump attending the March for Life.
Never Trumpism is built on a foundation of sanctimony.
These sanctimonious few don’t like how Trump speaks. They don’t like his bombast. They don’t like his past. He’s not George Bush.
Get over it. He’s winning.
That he is not George Bush might be Trump’s greatest transgression to Never Trumpers. Much of the hatred is mercenary, as so many have suffered financially from the end of their consultancy gravy train.
But Trump actually attended the March for Life. If you don’t think that matters to the 100,000+ who marched, then you can’t judge prevailing winds.
Snip.
What’s also striking about the Never Trumpers is how their hatred resembles a pathology, like some deep raw childhood memory. Trump is their aunt’s cat who used to viciously scratch them each visit. Trump is the playground bully who threw the football at their face. Trump is the twisted cousin who made you look at his dead animals in jars hidden in the back shed. He’s the bogeyman of their nightmares.
It all wells up in them, decades later, in outbursts, fears, and rage. It’s unhinged.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome is burning out the core audiences that made the media profitable. The Impeachment Eve rallies failed miserably with turnouts in the hundreds in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. A month later, turnout at the Women’s March had declined from the hundreds of thousands to the thousands. Even as impeachment was underway, the audience wasn’t there.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy produce a proposal to fix health care.
James Younger case ends with joint custody and crazy mom not allowed to inflict hormone therapy on her eight-year old.
Border agents find longest smuggling tunnel yet discovered in San Diego, over three-quarters of a mile. “It includes an extensive rail/cart system, forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance, and a complex drainage system.” (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.)
IBM replaces longtime CEO Virginia Rometty with Arvind Krishna. Probably a good move. The few people I knew who worked at IBM under her tenure had little good to say about the company, whose longterm trend has been offshoring and outsourcing rather than hiring fulltime U.S. employees. But every group in IBM seems like its own little fiefdom.
Dwight offers a moderately deepish dive into two fraud cases, including a celebrated social scientist and a celebrated organic farmer.
Congrats to Republican Gary Gates for winning the Texas House District 28 special election runoff over Democrat Eliz Markowitz. This is Gates’ first successful race in eight tries, and he supposedly threw a ton of money into it.
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Five months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Cory Booker, Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 71,730,827 followers, up an astounding 3,691,379 since the last roundup, so not only has Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined, the impeachment farce seems to have tripled the number of followers he usually gains. To put it another way, Trump gained more followers in a month than Warren has total followers. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,975,624 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Bernie is having a great month. In addition to now topping polls, he gained as many Twitter followers as his next three Democratic rival gainers (Biden, Yang and Warren) combined.
Biden’s follower gain rate picked up only slightly, but he moved into second because Cory Booker dropped out.
I expected Warren’s follower gains to tail off with the rest of her campaign, but it actually picked up a tick.
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
Bloomberg and Steyer’s upticks are also picking up slightly.
Given her previous rate of follower addition, for Klobuchar, endorsements from both the New York Timesand the Des Moines Register have gained her…maybe 12,000 followers.
Patrick, Bennet and Delaney are all dead in the water, and Gabbard is barely moving.
Weird statistical anomaly: Last month Bennet was up 799 followers. This month, he’s up 1,799 followers.
Everything’s coming up Bernie (including a Joe Rogan endorsement), Biden tranny panders, Buttigieg does a Jeb!, Bloomberg ops get sick bennies, Yang rises, and WaPo worries about screaming ghosts. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Also: The Iowa caucuses are next week. Our long national nightmare is finally coming to a middle!
Polls
Suffolk/USA Today (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. No link to crosstabs/sample size/etc.
Emerson: Biden 30, Sanders 27, Warren 13, Yang 8, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0. Yang in fourth here!
WBUR (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Buttigieg 17, Biden 14, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Stehyer 2, Bloomberg 1, Patrick 1, Delaney 0. Samples size of 426. Sanders has doubled his support in a month.
CNN: Sanders 27, Biden 24, Warren 14, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 4, Yang 4, Steyer 2. I think this is the first CNN poll that has Sanders over Biden.
Boston Globe/Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 16.4, Biden 14.8, Buttigieg 12.2, Warren 9.8, Yang 5.6, Gabbard 5.4, Klobuchar 4.6, Steyer 2.6, Patrick .6, Delaney 0.0.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 24, Warren 18, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 14, Klobuchar 11, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 1 Bennet 1, Bloomberg 1, Delaney 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 500 and heavily biased questions, which you would expect from a hard left interest group.
Emerson (New Jersey): Biden 28, Sanders 25, Warren 15, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6, Yang 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Delaney 2, Bennet 0, Steyer 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 388.
Up until this point, we’ve been pretty hesitant to read too much into any one of the post-debate polls — largely because for each poll that showed Sen. Bernie Sanders on the upswing, there was another poll that showed him on the downturn. But now with four more national polls and six early-state surveys (three from Iowa and three from New Hampshire) since we last checked in, we’ve got a much clearer picture of where things stand. And one thing that’s immediately obvious is that Sanders really has gained in the polls.
Sanders’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates has increased by 4 percentage points since Friday, up from 22 percent to 26 percent in our forecast. But notably, his gain hasn’t come at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden. In fact, Biden’s odds are unchanged — he still has a 42 percent shot at winning a majority of pledged delegates, which was also the case on Friday. Sen Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, slipped 5 points since Friday, and is now roughly tied with Buttigieg in our overall delegate forecast. (Buttigieg’s odds remain the same, and the chance that no candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates ticked up very slightly.)
The second thing that’s immediately obvious from this latest batch of polls is that the race in Iowa is still incredibly close. Biden has slightly better odds than Sanders in our forecast, but it’s probably better to think of the two of them as roughly tied, with Buttigieg and Warren not too far behind. That said, this weekend’s polls did change the picture in New Hampshire with Sanders vaulting into the lead, which at least partially explains some of his overall gains in the forecast.
Sanders is looking good in New Hampshire, but Iowa is a toss-up.
In a country where anti-Semitic attacks have spiked and the president has sometimes hesitated to condemn neo-Nazis, two men who celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the 1950s suddenly want to talk about their Jewishness.
“I know I’m not the only Jewish candidate running for president,” Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, told a packed synagogue here today, referencing his Democratic-primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. “But I am the only one who doesn’t want to turn America into a kibbutz.” For the first time in American history, this niche joke fit neatly into a campaign for the White House. And for the first time in American history, there’s a good chance that a Jewish candidate for president will beat another Jewish candidate to become a major party’s nominee.
Before this campaign, neither Bloomberg nor Sanders spent much time publicly discussing, let alone celebrating, their Jewishness. But a few weeks ago, Sanders was ice-skating during a Hanukkah party at a Des Moines rink, lighting a giant menorah with a blowtorch and mouthing the words to a few of the Hanukkah songs. And Bloomberg was here, making a direct appeal to Jewish voters complete with deli references and Catskills-style rim shots. He quoted Leviticus (a book he identified by its Hebrew name, Vaykira) in Hebrew and said, “Lo ta-amode, do not stand by idly while your neighbor’s blood is shed,” stumbling slightly over the pronunciation, much like how he misplaced the emphasis on the word kibbutz.
To those who know Bloomberg well and even spent years working for him, this is a surprising turn. As mayor, he was more of the stop-by-synagogue-on-Rosh-Hashanah kind of observer, not the guy who’d make a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump as “a pharaoh who knows not Joseph,” and speak about “standing together, rejecting demagogues who try to seduce us by playing us against each other, and uniting behind the only shield that can protect us: our common values as American citizens and our common humanity as God’s children.” Bloomberg went all in, going directly from “When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he smashed the golden calf and raised high a tablet of laws,” to noting that Monday is “the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation,” and recalling his own visit to the death camp a few years ago.
This wasn’t a speech like any presidential candidate has delivered before—and that includes Sanders. Before launching his 2020 campaign, Sanders rarely discussed his Jewish roots, publicly or privately. Sanders superfans know he spent a few months after college in Israel working on a kibbutz, but he’s talked about that more through his socialism than through any connection to the Jewish state. For years, Sanders referred to his father as a “Polish immigrant,” which some saw as a pointed erasure of his identity—when Eli Sanders arrived in America, after all, his passport from the Polish government would have listed his nationality as “Jew.” Jewish leaders have criticized him for decisions like speaking at the evangelical Liberty University in 2015 on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Obscure prediction: If Sanders sweeps the first three, there will be insane pressure on Klobuchar and Warren to stay in until Super Tuesday to keep him from racking up delegates in MN and MA.
Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. I know it seems crazy, but a lot of the voters we need – independents and people who might stay home – will look at Biden and Trump and say: “They’re all dirty.”
It looks like “Middle Class” Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans. Converting campaign contributions into legislative favors and policy positions isn’t being “moderate”. It is the kind of transactional politics Americans have come to loathe.
Joe Biden is locking down support from powerful New York donors who have spent the past year flirting with multiple candidates, setting him up for a major cash boost just as 2020 voting begins.
Biden’s campaign — sometimes with help from the candidate himself — has spent the last few weeks reaching out to big donors who have collectively raised tens of millions for past presidential campaigns and are not yet attached to 2020 rivals. The Biden camp, which suffered serious money problems in the fall, came to them with a message: The time is now to join up and back Biden to beat President Donald Trump, after the former vice president lasted the whole year as the Democratic polling frontrunner, despite frequent predictions that his campaign was about to collapse.
The message landed. And Biden’s campaign will cash in on those efforts in mid-February, when Biden will head to New York City for a pair of fundraisers hosted by a litany of Wall Street power players, many of whom previously helped Kamala Harris’ campaign or split their support among several candidates in 2019. Originally scheduled as one event, organizers had to split the Feb. 13 fundraising blowout in two because so many donors new to the Biden fold signed up to help.
Hosts for a cocktail-hour fundraiser will include financiers and former Harris supporters Blair Effron and Marc Lasry, both of whom were major donors to Hillary Clinton, as well as Jon Henes, a lawyer and Harris’ former finance chair, and Tom Nides, a Clinton donor and former State Department aide. Later that evening, another set of major donors will fete Biden, including former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, Blackstone president Jonathan Gray and PR executive Michael Kempner — another who was once a bundler for Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 race in December.
Biden succumbs to tranny pandering:
Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.
Billionaire presidential long shot Michael Bloomberg is trying to poach staff from other campaigns with outsized salaries and fancy perks like three catered meals a day, an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Pro, according to sources.
Bloomberg is paying state press secretaries $10,000 a month, compared to the average going rate of $4,500 for other candidates and state political directors are making $12,000 a month, more than some senior campaign advisers earn, sources said.
National political director Carlos Sanchez pulls in $360,000 a year. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s political director, made $240,000 in 2016.
Every Bloomberg staffer gets a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 11 on day one. They also enjoy three catered meals daily.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Various pundit sorts debate the effectiveness of Bloomberg’s billions. “Is there even a way to effectively spend another billion or $2 billion in a money-drenched election year? “There’s only so much airtime you can buy.'”
Jim McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked as a consultant on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, doubts Bloomberg will really spend nine figures this year, suspecting he is dangling the promise of the massive payout mainly to curry favor with Democrats.
“Do I think he can spend $2 billion? Of course. Do I think he will? No,” McLaughlin said.
And he questioned the impact of that money, either way.
After all, the most expensive presidential campaign in history was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, and she wasn’t able to stop Trump, though she did win the popular vote. She spent almost twice what Trump did per electoral vote won.
“Donald Trump was significantly outspent,” McLaughlin said, “and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.”
When Pete Buttigieg holds “big rally type events” in South Carolina, “it’s mostly white folks showing up,” he acknowledged ruefully Thursday night. And his struggle to fix that problem has become an existential threat to his presidential ambitions.
Buttigieg’s low standing with black voters has been a long-running theme, and as he and his campaign argued that he simply wasn’t well-known enough, it is one he has worked to correct. Over the past month and a half, he has invested more money advertising in South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are African American, than any of the non-billionaire Democrats running for president.
But the more than $2 million Buttigieg poured into TV and radio ads, some featuring black supporters touting the former South Bend (Ind.) mayor, hasn’t budged his stubbornly low poll numbers in the state — 2 percent among African American Democrats in a recent Fox News poll.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She really hates Bernie.
“I just don’t want him to get out there and say the revolution is working, [that] people ‘felt the Bern,’” she says, before quickly leaving the room to beat him to a speech. Clinton adds that she found his socialist proposals unrealistic and phony. “I had people in my campaign say, ‘Just say ‘‘Free college.’’ Millennials love it,’ ” she says. “And I said ‘no.’ ”
Whenever Sanders is onscreen, his underscoring is brooding and villainous, like Darth Vader just took off his helmet for a breather. In a hallway before a debate in New Hampshire, Sanders asks a tense Clinton how she feels about his suit. “Buttoned or unbuttoned?” he says. Irked, she tells him to undo the button as soon as he gets “worked up.”
Last week, it was revealed that Clinton said of her former rival in the doc: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
You would not believe how black that pot is! Here’s a Truthout commentator who thinks she’s running.
In the interview, Clinton is asked if she has considered jumping into the 2020 presidential race. “I have had so many people [urge me to],” she replied. “Every day. And I’m grateful for people’s confidence, but I did think it was right for me to step back. I’ll do anything I can to defeat the current incumbent, and to reverse a lot of his damaging policies. Thankfully, I still have a voice and a following.”
I can’t simply dismiss this as another example of a politician who doesn’t know when to recede. I don’t believe this is just Clinton acting out because Iowa can’t throw a party without inviting her. This interview, and that pointedly vicious quote about Sanders, will explode the rift between the progressive candidates and the establishment candidates on the doorstep of the season’s first caucus. It will exacerbate the tensions already in place to a clamorous degree.
I believe it is deliberate on two levels. First, this is the establishment standard-bearer jumping into the fray in a moment when the establishment is conspicuously worried about the campaigns of Sanders and Warren. I have been nursing a fear that the Democratic Party might prefer a Trump victory over losing control of the party, and this sudden broadside from Clinton has only exacerbated those concerns.
He may be right, but he omits the other probably-even-more-true side of that equation: The radical left may also view losing to Trump acceptable if it means gaining control of the party. This is precisely the scenario that played out in Texas as it went from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state.
Second, Hillary is slated for release in March, an enormously important month that will see 29 primaries and caucuses take place in both the states and the territories. Super Tuesday falls on March 3, and will include make-or-break primary votes in California, Texas, Virginia, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio….Hillary Clinton seems to be hoping for a brokered Democratic convention so she can offer herself up as the “reasonable” compromise candidate.
WHAT CHEER, Iowa—Don’t let the name fool you: What Cheer is a dreary little town. Other than the gas station, the most notable place in the city is an old building that apparently used to house the What Cheer Telephone Company, whatever that was. Today, cheap white curtains are drawn across the windows. It looks like someone is living there.
John Delaney is here at dusk on a Friday night in January because he’s still running for president. Did you know he was running for president? Probably not. If you did once know—Delaney was actually the first Democrat to declare his candidacy, way back in July 2017—you probably forgot. And if you did know he was still running, the question you’re probably asking is the one I am here to explore: Why? Why is a candidate who’s barely registering in any poll still traipsing across Iowa day after day when he has absolutely no chance of winning, or even of seeming like more than an outlying blip on the radar?
I’ve wondered that myself for months. But the Delaney campaign is like the This Is Spinal Tap of Presidential campaigns:
Today began with an event at a pizza place in the small central-Iowa city of Montezuma, which 12 people attended. This evening, the door-knocking starts at a house across the street from the old telephone-company building. No answer. At the second house, a light in the front hall illuminates a Christmas tree, but no one answers the door here either. Third house, also no answer. Finally, at the fourth house a man wearing pajama bottoms answers the door. After listening to Delaney make his pitch for six or seven minutes, he says that while he’s committed to voting for a Democrat in the general election, he’s not planning to caucus—and that if he was, he’d probably go with Andrew Yang, because he likes Yang’s proposed Freedom Dividend, his signature policy of providing a guaranteed basic income of $1,000 a month to all Americans.
“But that can’t happen!” Delaney says.
It’s quickly evident that Delaney can’t get this voter, but courtesy dictates that he now listen politely while the man talks about how he wants to fix up the shed across the road.
After that, Delaney’s small caravan, a big blue-and-red bus trailed by a car, rolls on. No one is home at the next two houses. When a woman pulls into the driveway of the second house, Delaney’s campaign manager tries to talk to her, but she walks in the back door and doesn’t come out again. Up a hill and around a corner is another house that the campaign staff have identified as belonging to a Democratic voter. An old man opens the door. He says he’s recovering from eye surgery but that he doesn’t like Donald Trump and is happy to talk. Finally—a prospect! He says the main thing he’s looking for in a candidate is honesty. Delaney makes his pitch, but the man is soon trying to wrap up the conversation. “Hope you do well,” the man says. Delaney invites him to a free dinner that the campaign is hosting the next town over. The man just smiles noncommittally.
At this late stage of a very long presidential campaign that has by any conventional measure been remarkably unsuccessful, this actually counts as a pretty good hour for Delaney. How, I asked him as he walked away from the old man’s house, does he keep his head up?
“I’m disappointed it hasn’t gone better, but I think it’s a privilege to do this,” he said. “I meet people who are really struggling. And I realize, you know, I have really no problems. And the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives is—what better way to spend my time?”
Has a Union-Leader op ed where he says that “Divisiveness is America’s biggest hurdle.” If only the political party whose nomination he’s running for could bring themselves to accept the results of the 2016 election…
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently it’s “Edward-Isaac Dovere interviews no-hopers week,” because he did the same for Patrick:
Pretty much everyone hates what the Democratic primary race has become. It’s gone on too long, cost too much money, and tended to reward people who’ve been repeating the same lines for years. Pretty much everyone also hates the debates. (How many people watched last week’s debate and saw a future president? How many people saw someone who they’re confident can beat Donald Trump?) And pretty much everyone hates what the process has churned out: A Des Moines Register poll three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and 14 months after the campaign started, showed that 60 percent of people still hadn’t made up their minds. The New York Times endorsed two candidates. “People like the field, but I don’t think they feel that great about the front-runners,” John Delaney, who is still winding down the final days of his own candidacy, told me a few weeks ago. New York magazine’s latest cover headline nailed the Democratic panic: “Well, Here We Are.”
And here I am, in the lobby restaurant of a Marriott, with a candidate who’s telling me it’s not too late to do something about all this. Deval Patrick says voters have been telling him directly that they like him, that they’re ready to go with him, or at least consider him. “I meet donors who say, ‘I am so there; I just want to see this in the polls, and then I want to bundle for you.’ What are you waiting for? If you already think I contribute something that the rest of the field doesn’t, why are you waiting for permission from pundits, pollsters, the party, somebody else?” Patrick said. I’ve heard the same thing from people who’ve been thinking about writing checks. More often, I’ve heard people tell me that they can’t bring themselves to be a part of this.
When the lights in the lobby keep swelling high and low, and the manager comes over to apologize, he doesn’t recognize the former Massachusetts governor. Neither does the waiter.
That’s the problem for Patrick. He got in a year later than he was planning to, because his wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2018. Then he spent this past fall stressing about how far off course the primary race seemed to be spinning, before deciding in November to go for it. That’s a whole year he didn’t spend getting better known, or building any kind of organization. By the time he did jump in, he had to argue with campaign staff he’d never met before about whether to spend days chasing the media exposure they said he needed or follow his gut and campaign more deliberately, one on one, the way he had in his first race, when he’d pulled off his out-of-nowhere win for the governorship of Massachusetts. He’s annoyed about old friends and supporters who’ve been smiling to his face—and then telling reporters like me that they’re heartbroken to see what a flop his campaign seems to be so far.
Not sure “flopping” is quite accurate, since flopping usually makes a sound. He announced support for slavery reparations, because of course he did. That worked out so well for Kamala Harris…
His rise clearly troubles establishment Democrats who are uneasy with his far-left agenda. Among Sanders’s most notable detractors are mainstream Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The former president, for instance, is reported to be so “anxious” about Sanders’s standing that he’s contemplating publicly repudiating him (although some Obama allies deny this account).
Obama and Clinton may have unwittingly contributed to Sanders’s rise, but they are right to be concerned. The man has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office — not even on a guided tour. The fact that the socialist senator is considered a national leader is a disgraceful blemish on the Democratic Party, a party once comprised by men such as John F. Kennedy, who fought communists, while Sanders defended them.
We’ve seen a rash of establishment-minded Democrats speak out against Sanders in recent weeks, but polls suggest it’s done little to stop his rise. The Vermont senator was at or near the top of several early state and national primary polls over the weekend. We’ve heard everyone from Pete Buttigieg to Rahm Emanuel raising concerns about Sanders’ ability to beat President Donald Trump and help vulnerable down-ballot Democrats this fall, even as passionate progressives rally behind him. For now, establishment Democrats are girding for a fight. And the ghosts of 2016 are screaming.
“The ghosts of 2016 are screaming” sounds like an impressive turn of phrase, until you realize that it’s either meaningless, or can mean any of a dozen contradictory things. Is Sanders going to wound Biden so badly he can’t win? Is Trump being underestimated again? Are the shades of Prince and David Bowie going to rise up to haunt the race? “Sanders Apologizes to Biden for Bringing Up Biden’s Corruption Problem.” Bernie takes on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for daring to dis socialism. He has Alexandria Ocasio Cortez out on the trail for him as a surrogate in Iowa. BoldMoveCotton.jpg.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s one of the few candidates still schlepping around Iowa a week before the caucuses, due to either the impeachment farce or other candidates having gone all-in on New Hampshire. Can you imagine the glorious screw-job Steyer would wreck on the race if he won or even placed in Iowa? Deeply unlikely, but stranger things have happened in politics. Can he win Nevada? Since Bloomberg didn’t make the ballot, possibly. And I love this photo of him:
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Heh: “So many people who have suicided themselves have been related to the Clintons. It’s f**king insane.”
It’s amusing that MSNBC isn’t far enough left for Jurek, and also how he wants to purge liberals first.
Nor is he fond of Elizabeth Warren: “Just because she has a vagina, that’s why you’re going to vote for her?” (More visible cracks between old school socialist revolutionaries and Social Justice Warriors.)
By now, everyone knows the way this works: The first Project Veritas video isn’t the worst, and there are more bombshells to come.
Though I do agree with Jurek on one point: I do believe that the DNC will do just about anything necessary to keep Sanders from winning the nomination…
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Four months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.
This month, we’ve had our first ever verified decline in Twitter followers for any candidate.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 68,039,448 followers, up 1,008,666 since the last roundup, so once again Trump has gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,370,155 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
The rate for most of the candidates adding followers slowed, which I attribute to the Christmas season.
Except Joe Biden, who gained some 30,000 more followers in December than November, bucking the trend.
However, Bernie Sanders still gained more overall, even if he gained half as many as he did in November.
Also gaining more: Andrew Yang, who gained more followers than Elizabeth Warren.
Marianne Williamson records the first verifiable decline in Twitter followers since I started tracking the race.
Steyer and Bloomberg are dropping huge amounts into ads, yet their Twitter counts are growing more slowly than Andrew Yang’s.
Biden leans on bundling billionaires, Steyer hits diminishing returns, Bloomberg takes up the “Most Widely Loathed” spot, Warren donations take a nosedive, Sanders 💘 commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
We’re also down to the last two days of the year, so expect Q4 fundraising numbers to start dropping later this week.
Keep an eye on the new faces, I sagely advised: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, plus former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
Sorry about that. Despite a fawning cover story in Vanity Fair, O’Rourke flamed out fast. Harris staged an impressive launch, but then fell to earth. Brown never entered the race. Only Booker is still running, and his campaign is on life support.
Next time I recommend a hot technology stock or a soon-to-be-famous restaurant, ignore the tip.
Snip.
I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg coming. The 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city? Inconceivable, I thought. Iowa voters may shortly prove me wrong.
I did see Elizabeth Warren coming. Her focus on plans to make the economy work better for the middle class was effective, I wrote.
Then Warren stumbled on healthcare. When she belatedly offered a plan, it proposed a government-run health insurance system, but only after a long transition period.
That seemed smart, I wrote. It’s not clear that voters agree.
To be fair, I did get some things right.
I figured out that the controversies over Biden’s verbal gaffes were really a polite proxy for questions about his age. He’ll be 78 on Inauguration Day; is he up to the job?
I noted that most Democratic voters aren’t Bernie Sanders-style socialists, and that the progressive “litmus tests” that dominated early months of the campaign — “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — weren’t a sure path to winning primaries.
Speaking of which, unions, they of the fat health benefits, are not wild about “Medicare for All.” It would be tough going from a Cadillac plan to the equivalent of Medicaid.
Ranking the campaign dropouts. This is a pretty crappy “Have you done the will of the party, comrade?” ranking. No way does Kamala Harris’ disasterous campaign rank at the top.
Joe Biden released the names of more than 200 people and couples who are raising money for his presidential campaign, a list that includes a number of big names in Democratic money like Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and LGBT rights activist Tim Gill and his husband, Scott Miller.
Biden’s list of fundraisers, each of which has brought in at least $25,000 for his presidential bid, includes many of the biggest names in Democratic fundraising. The list spans Wall Street, Silicon Valley and a number of politicians themselves.
The former vice president voluntarily disclosed the list as the Democratic field — and especially Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren — sparred with each other throughout November and December over how to have adequate transparency about money and finances on the campaign trail.
More than any other leading candidate, Biden is relying on big fundraising events to power his bid for the presidency, which makes these bundlers crucial to his success. Other big-name bundlers for Biden include New York venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof, and billionaire real estate broker George Marcus.
Biden is running for president on his longtime experience in public service, and his list of bundlers reflects the many high-powered connections he built over that time. Biden bundlers include current senators Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles is a bundler for Biden, as is Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A number of former ambassadors — who are often longtime bundlers and major political donors in their own right — are also helping Biden. They include Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal; Denise Bauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Anthony Gardner, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; and Mark Gilbert, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, and more.
It occurs to me that if there were a massive foreign aid kickback scheme funneling overseas money to longtime swamp creatures, Belgium and EU ambassadors would be perfectly situated to direct/skim off the graft. Evidently Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been have been feuding since the 1980s. (Worth reading for the many flip-flops in Biden’s career, including on the death penalty.) Remember how Biden is supposed to be the moderate, rational one?
More Hunter Biden dirt? Eh, it’s from a private investigator in the baby momma lawsuit, so caution is probably in order. But the “helping defraud American Indians” charge is new, though the names of Devon Archer, John Galanis and Bevan Cooney are not. Heh:
Just saw the new Star Wars. Wow! Never saw this coming, Rey turned out to be Hunter Biden’s kid! What a twist!
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late.
Yeah, let’s keep throwing money into a proven losing strategy. Can’t see how that one can possibly fail to beat Trump. And as long as we’re rerunning 2016’s Greatest Misses, have you tried expressing outrage over the Billy Bush tape? Bloomy is also dropping a ton of money on Texas for Super Tuesday:
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is ramping up his efforts in Texas, with plans to build a state operation that his campaign says will be unrivaled by anyone else in the primary field.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, his campaign said it will open a Texas headquarters in Houston and 16 field offices throughout the rest of the state between now and the March 3 primary. The offices will be spread across the Houston area, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Austin, East Texas, the San Antonio area, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and the Killeen area.
The campaign also named its first Texas hires:
Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, will serve as Bloomberg’s senior advisor.
Ashlea Turner, a government relations consultant who worked on Bill White’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, will serve as Bloomberg’s state director.
Kevin Lo, who worked on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Iowa campaign before she ended her campaign earlier this month, will serve as Bloomberg’s organizing director. (Update: On March 27, 2020, Texas Tribune sent out this correction via email: “*Editor’s note: Bloomberg’s campaign initially listed Kevin Lo as one of its first Texas hires. Lo later said he was incorrectly listed by the campaign and never worked for the campaign and has asked this story to be updated to remove his name.”)
Lizzie Lewis, communications director for 2018 gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez, will be Bloomberg’s press secretary.
Has anyone there ever run a successful campaign? None of the ones named were. Also:
While he’s only announced one hire, Biden has topped most Texas polls. There have not been many polls since Bloomberg declared his candidacy and launched a massive national TV ad blitz that prominently targeted the state. The one Texas survey since Bloomberg’s launch, released Dec. 11 by CNN, found Bloomberg at 5% — good enough for fifth place in but still far behind Biden, who placed a distant first with 35%.
Amy Keiderling is exactly who Cory Booker’s presidential campaign is looking for as he seeks to build momentum in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
The Waukee small business owner listened to Booker’s remarks in an Adel bowling alley recently — Booker’s first stop of a four-day bus tour across Iowa. She said he gives her the same feeling she had when she caucused for Barack Obama.
He’s the first candidate she’s seen in person this cycle, but before she left, she committed to caucus for the U.S. senator from New Jersey.
She isn’t alone. Tess Seger, a campaign spokeswoman, said Booker surpassed his 10% average of caucus commitments at each of his tour stops. Sometimes 20% or 30% of the crowd signed the commitment cards.
“We’re getting the people who are going to be caucusing for us, precinct captaining for us,” Booker told the Register on Monday. “It’s really exciting. This is how you win here.”
But, so far, Booker is a far short from the winner’s circle. In the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted in November by Selzer & Co., Booker earned 3% support among likely Democratic caucusgoers. He’s been at or below 4% in first choice preferences in the Iowa Poll since 2018.
One cruel explanation is that people are simply lying to the Booker campaign because Democrats don’t have the heart to turn down a black candidate. Alternately, his “10% of tour stops” simply isn’t translating into mass appeal. Another theory: People actually do like him, but no one thinks he’s tough enough to beat Trump. And if you haven’t already had your fill, here’s another “struggles for traction” piece.
Downtown underwent a dramatic transformation under Buttigieg’s leadership. One-way streets became two-way. Speed limits were reduced. Driving lanes were narrowed. Trees were planted. Decorative brick pavers were laid.
I hate him already.
Buttigieg and his supporters say the more pedestrian-friendly downtown has spurred more than $190 million in private investment, as several key buildings found new life, transformed into hotels, apartments and restaurants.
As the economy recovered from the recession of 2008-’09, some of that investment might have been inevitable, as Buttigieg benefited from a rebounding national economy. Supporters still credit the mayor for setting the tone and aggressively pursuing projects.
More than 500 apartments have been built or are under construction downtown, luring new residents to the city.
That’s, what, two whole complexes?
The street changes have also annoyed some motorists. Any news story about Smart Streets that’s shared on social media will draw complaints from residents pointing out there is too much traffic congestion downtown at peak travel times. Buttigieg has said the slowed traffic is worth the larger benefits.
There’s no end to Democrats willing to make life worse for people who drive cars.
There’s also Smart Streets’ roughly $21 million price tag, paid for with bonds that are being repaid with Tax Incremental Financing money, which comes from property taxes paid on the assessed valuation growth in an area. That project, combined with the city’s overhaul of its parks system, means the city could be limited in making other big investments in the near future, depending on their size.
Still, the assessed value of downtown property rose from about $132.8 million in 2013 to roughly $160.9 million last year, a 21-percent increase, according to a Tribune analysis of county property tax records.
Whole things sounds like a mixed bag at best. But since there are no reports of him luring an entire population of drug-addicted beggars to South Bend, it does sound like he did a much better job as a mayor than Steve Adler…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Headline: “Julian Castro sees lift in polls despite being knocked off debate stage.” Reality: He’s up to 4%. Break out the party favors!
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Michael Moore: Trump Will Win in 2020 if Democrats Nominate Another ’Centrist, Moderate’ like Hillary Clinton.” I understand all those words individually…
2. He’s criticized “Medicare for all” a lot. What is his health care plan?
He wants to keep Medicare for people over 65 and create a new government program for people under 65. Everyone under 65 would automatically be enrolled in that program — which would cover all “essential health benefits,” including pre-existing conditions — but people could choose to forfeit the coverage and receive a credit to buy private insurance instead. He argues that this would guarantee universal coverage without forcing people to use a government health plan.
So instead of an expensive, unworkable program, he offers a slightly-less-insane unworkable but expensive program.
Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:
Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.
Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly. Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. All the vaguely interesting Steyer news is also vaguely off target. First: “AOC accepted Tom Steyer contribution, despite accusing Buttigieg of ‘being funded by billionaires.'” (thisismyshockedface.jpg) Second: “Former Tom Steyer aide sues SC Democratic Party for alleged defamation.” Details: “A former aide for 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer who resigned amid allegations that he stole volunteer data from the rival Kamala Harris campaign is now suing the South Carolina Democratic Party, accusing the party’s chairman of defamation.” Being a former Tom Steyer aide must be like getting cut from the Washington Generals.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren’s campaign sounds the alarm as fundraising pace slows about 30% in fourth quarter.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign told supporters in an email on Friday that, so far, it has raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter, a significant drop from her fundraising haul during the third quarter.
The memo asks backers to step up in giving to the campaign.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” it says.
Warren finished the third quarter bringing in $24.6 million, which was much more than most of the other Democratic primary contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders – who, like Warren, shuns big-money fundraisers – led the field with more than $25 million during the third quarter.
If the $17 million total stands that would represent a 30% drop from the previous quarter. The quarter ends in four days.
Poll numbers and fawning media profiles are ephemeral, but cold, hard cash is a great measuring stick for a presidential campaign. Warren is in trouble and donors know it. After all that noise about the most women ever in a presidential field, it seems increasingly likely that it’s going to come down to Biden and Sanders. Warren had no problem taking high dollar donations until she ran for President. If you live in Iowa, own a phone and vote Democrat, there’s a decent chance Warren will call you:
Makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voice mail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials say she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Ms. Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial good-will dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Ms. Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Ms. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials, and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Ms. Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning — she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yet another NYTthree questions piece. “Power of love” question is vapid, and reparations is idiot Social justice Warrior pandering. On the third question, on her views on mental health, she “believes that antidepressants are harmfully overprescribed.” She probably has a point.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
As always, Pie’s shtick is a left-leaning reporter who nonetheless calls out his fellow lefties on their obtuse blindness in their own narrow, insular view of the world. Some quotes:
“How could we possibly have lost? Everyone I know voted the same way I did!”
“‘How could that be? Everyone I know spent election day same as me: Posting amusing pro-Labour memes on Instagram, and spending the preceding six weeks calling anyone who voted Leave, or was thinking of voting Tory, thick as shit! How could we possibly have lost?’ Once again, the strategy of calling everyone who was thinking of voting differently to me self-serving, inward looking, stupid, racist, Leave-voting scum, paid absolute dividends, didn’t it?”
“When are we going to get it into our thick skulls that the country voted to leave the European Union? Twice now!”
“Refusing to talk to people you disagree with whilst assuming the motives behind their voting decision is a recipe for disaster!”
And the real money quote that can’t be repeated too many times:
“When will we learn that the real world is not on your Facebook feed?”
About 3:15 in starts he repeating various talking Labour cliches rather than dissecting them, but it’s still worth watching.
“Black voters ‘abandoned’ by Democrats warm to Trump.
Former NFL player Jack Brewer once raised campaign money for President Barack Obama, but now he’s among the increasing number of black voters who support President Trump.
“There is an awakening going on right now in the country,” Mr. Brewer said of black voters who traditionally support Democrats. “I’m going to take the guy who’s actually putting in the policies that are going to make life better for my young black son and my young black daughter, versus somebody who gives me lip service — like, unfortunately, the Democrats have done for our community for years.”
Mr. Trump and his reelection team are aggressively courting black voters amid a strong economy that has reduced black unemployment to 5.5%, lowest in history. The Trump campaign launched its “Black Voices for Trump” coalition in Atlanta last month.
Snip.
There’s some evidence that the president’s policies and campaign outreach are making inroads with black voters. Three polls in November showed Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating among black voters in the 30% to 35% range, a significant increase over other surveys that have generally shown black voter support of less than 10%.
“I’ll remind you, the president received 8% of the black vote in 2016,” said a senior Trump campaign official.
The president and his campaign advisers know that poll numbers and approval ratings don’t always translate into votes, but they think Mr. Trump has a good chance to significantly increase the level of support he receives from black voters in 2020.
“If you look at how they attacked him for being a racist during the [2016] campaign, I think his policies have [produced] results for the black community that have been extraordinary,” the campaign official said during a recent briefing.
Said another Trump adviser, “One thing the president’s done is to try to govern for everybody. Even those who didn’t vote for him in the last election are now seeing a lot of results in their communities, and we’re seeing the poll numbers amongst all those groups grow in a way that creates a lot of opportunities.”
Trump advisers point to other policies that are helping, such as criminal justice reform that lets more offenders win early release from prison and a second chance, and increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Mr. Brewer, a lifelong Democrat and entrepreneur who played for three NFL teams, said Mr. Trump is working much harder than any Republican candidate in his lifetime to reach out to black voters.
“Donald Trump will get over 20% of the black vote,” Mr. Brewer said in an interview. “That is what’s going to win the election. Why? Because there hasn’t been a Republican to even try to go in and talk to the black community. They don’t go there. They don’t even try. I think he’s trying, finally.”
It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.
Snip.
Plenty of better writers than me—Douglas Murray, John Gray—have debunked the notion that the only reason low-income voters embrace right-wing politics is because they’re drunk on a cocktail of ethno-nationalism and false hope (with Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin taking turns as mixologists). It surely has more to do with the Left’s sneering contempt for the “deplorables” in the flyover states as they shuttle back and forth between their walled, cosmopolitan strongholds. As Corbyn’s policy platform in Britain’s election showed, left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss. Get woke, go broke.
Will the Democrats learn from Labour’s mistake and make Jo Biden the candidate—or even Pete Buttigieg? I wouldn’t bet on it. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face. As I said to a friend last night after the election results starting rolling in, fighting political opponents like Jeremy Corbyn is a bit like competing in a round-the-world yacht race against a team that thinks the earth is flat. It can be kind of fun, even exhilarating. But until they acquire a compass and learn how to read a map, it’s not really a fair fight.
The Babylon Bee explains impeachment. “Trump has committed some very serious offenses, from not being a Democrat to being a Republican. He also won the 2016 election, which rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Last week, a must-count indictment was unsealed against Ahmad Khawaja, the CEO of an online payment processing company. He and several others were charged with making and concealing improper and excessive campaign contributions, most related to the 2016 election cycle. Specifically, Khawaja is charged with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of making conduit contributions, three counts of causing excessive contributions, 13 counts of making false statements, 13 counts of causing false records to be filed, and one count of obstruction of a federal grand jury investigation.
Among the recipients: Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Adam Schiff and Amy Klobuchar. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Israel has a new laser system to shoot down incendiary balloons launched from Gaza.
Seattle waitress now unemployed thanks to minimum wage laws. “Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.” Just like conservatives predicted.
I think I’m gonna end up seeing Rise of Skywalker on an airplane at some point, on the back of the seat in front of me. That’s about my interest level. There were inklings of it in the first movie, if you want to go back that far, but it really seems like the new trilogy wasn’t conceived of as a trilogy at all. It’s genuinely hard to believe. And not just because of what Disney managed to accomplish with their Marvel project, making an ecosystem of movies in different genres and then somehow crafting a kind of metamovie to conclude it. Obviously, they can do it. That they didn’t – and that they expected us to go along with it – is incredible.
Star Wars isn’t Holy to me. Like a lot of people who grew up when I did, I do like it. But there’s a hard cap on precisely how disappointed I can be in it. Seeing the whole thing transformed into some kind of cultural shibboleth when it can barely hold itself together narratively film to film, it’s like… these movies aren’t up to the task. It doesn’t even matter what task you had in mind. A full-throated defense of these things is either unconscious, freelance PR, corporate ring-kissing, or invertebrate worship of a graven idol. They shouldn’t come back to theatres until they can deliver something that isn’t such a gruesome indictment of their hegemonic cultural control.
Speaking of Disney cultural hegemony, Hollywood box office is is down 4% from last year, despite Avengers: Endgame. Just imagine the horrific 2020 Hollywood is going to enjoy in 2020 without a big tentpole and TDS-suffering actors suppressing box office with wokeoffs during the 2020 election. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A Sydney resident came home to find a massive huntsman spider being dragged away by a spider wasp—and snapped this terrifying picture of the incident. https://t.co/NxcgV3DSqMpic.twitter.com/gGv4FWy9nP
This week’s debate is set, Biden’s back on top in Iowa, the Klobuchar boomlet continues, Delaney waits for the sweet release of death, and Castro is in sixth place…in Texas. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Fox News: Biden 30, Sanders 20, Warren 7. Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1. With Bloomberg already in fifth place with infinite money to spend, the other candidates may already be hearing the Jaws theme…
Post & Courier (South Carolina): Biden 27, Sanders 20, Warren 19, Buttigieg 9, Steyer 5, Booker 5, Gabbard 4, Bloomberg 3. Sample size of 392.
Marquette (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 19, Warren 16, Buttigieg 15, Booker 4, Yang 3, Klobuchar 3, Bloomberg 3, Gabbard 1. What I don’t understand is that they have Yang and Booker each receiving 12 votes, but they give Booker 4%, and Yang 3%. 🤔
Emerson (Iowa): Biden 23, Sanders 22, Buttigieg 18, Warren 12, Klobuchar 10, Booker 4, Steyer 3, Bloomberg 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 2. Biden back on top! But sample size of only 325…
WBUR (New Hampshire): Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Bloomberg 2, Booker 1, Williamson 1, Bennet <1, Patrick <1.
One barrier to making the stage: fewer qualifying polls. “Most debates have seen anywhere from five to nine polls released in the last two weeks, but for the upcoming debate, it seems as if there will be less than five.” Blame Thanksgiving.
“We wanted to propel others to jump in,” she said. “We cannot sit on the sidelines as we watch this primary play out and allow a neoliberal be elected. If we stay divided, the corporate Democrats will pick the nominee.”
That was the left’s nightmare scenario, and it was getting more believable at the worst possible time. The year began with a weak-looking Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posing no threat to Sanders; by summer, Warren had jumped past Sanders and the rest of the field. Now, with Warren’s momentum fading, the two Democrats most broadly acceptable to the left have been splitting endorsements and capturing separate swaths of the electorate.
Centrists who had worried about Warren romping in Iowa and New Hampshire are less nervous now, with South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg surging in those states and former vice president Joe Biden holding his lead in upcoming Southern primaries.
“The far-left bloc is smaller than the candidates expected,” said Jim Kessler, the co-founder of the business-friendly centrist group Third Way, which Sanders feuded with this summer. “They haven’t expanded their base. It feels a lot like 2018: The left was ascendant, and then suddenly, when voters came in, they voted for mainstream candidates.”
The primary debate has moved further left than Third Way wanted. No leading candidate has embraced the ideas, like a “small-business bill of rights,” offered at the centrists’ conferences. Buttigieg, who has been attracting most of the left’s fury recently, has embraced some of its less economically disruptive ideas, such as banning private prisons and legalizing marijuana while helping victims of the war on drugs. And both Biden and Buttigieg get big applause when they single out Amazon, a target of both Warren and Sanders, to argue for higher, fairer corporate taxes. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
But the left began this year with its eye on the nomination; the movement’s gatekeepers, strengthened during the Trump years, wanted to pick the nominee. That has been getting harder. Groups that grew out of electoral politics, and close combat with the Democratic Party’s establishment, have generally sided with Warren, who combined populist politics and good relationships with Democrats. The Working Families Party endorsed her. MoveOn members have preferred her to Sanders in their straw poll, as have readers of the Daily Kos. While the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has endorsed Warren, the similarly aligned Democracy for America has stayed neutral, explaining that its membership is enthusiastic about both candidates.
“A supermajority of our members support both Bernie and Warren,” DFA’s Charles Chamberlain said. “They’re competing against a corporate wing that has all the money and power and can’t get more than 25 percent of voters behind one candidate. Let’s be clear: They have more candidates than us splitting the vote. If I were Third Way, I’d be more concerned with their side than ours.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An Asian guy, two black guys, three white women (one of whom spent much of her life claiming to be Native American), a Pacific Islander woman, a gay guy, a Hispanic guy, two elderly Caucasian Jews (one a billionaire, the other a socialist), a self-styled Irishman, and a few nondescript white guys walk into a bar, and the bartender yells, “Get the hell out! We value diversity here!”
I didn’t say it was a good joke, but it’s kind of funny all the same, because some folks in the press and the Democratic party are freaking out over the shrinking diversity of the Democratic field.
The diversity panic was set off by the withdrawal of California senator Kamala Harris on December 3. In the words of Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, “The famously inclusive party wasn’t looking very inclusive anymore.”
The real issue is that not many people of color [Here’s an example of linguistic drift from Trump-skeptic Jonah Goldberg; “of color” is a SJW neologism designed to assign everyone who’s not white into a single category for the benefit of the Democratic Party, and is thus best avoided. -LP] qualified for the December 19 debate in Los Angeles. As New Jersey senator Cory Booker, an African American, complained, “There are more billionaires than black people who’ve made the December debate stage — that’s a problem.”
It’s debatable whether it’s a problem for anyone other than Booker himself, which is why he’s been raising this alarm vociferously. So has former HUD secretary Julian Castro, who is of Mexican descent.
“What we’re staring at is a DNC debate stage with no people of color on it,” Castro complained. “That does not reflect the diversity of our party or our country. We need to do better than that.”
Since Castro made his remarks, Andrew Yang, a Chinese-American entrepreneur whose parents immigrated from Taiwan, has qualified for the debate.
Perhaps a broader perspective would help. All of the first 43 presidents were white men. About half were Episcopalian or Presbyterian, most of the rest belonged to other prominent denominations, and three were Christians of no formal affiliation. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama (of the United Church of Christ, for what it’s worth) became the first African-American president, winning two terms. In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the Democrats’ first female nominee. She won the popular vote but lost the election to Donald Trump.
Given these facts, it’s hard for me to see a diversity crisis. The top four candidates right now are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Biden would be only the second Catholic president. Sanders would be the first Jewish president and the first socialist one. Buttigieg would be the first openly gay (and youngest) president. Warren would be the first female president (and if her DNA test had gone another way, the first Native American one).
What a devastating blow to diversity!
Chronicle of a death foretold:
One lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don't stop their hard-left slide, they'll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don't move off their support for mass immigration, they're toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.
On the same theme, see this piece from two days ago.
Veepstakes. Don’t think much of the list, because I doubt any likely candidate wants such a bad campaigner as Kamala Harris on the ticket. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. How Bloomberg created a network of friendly mayors through grants. Bloomy on Boris: “”Maybe this is the canary in the coal mine. I think that beating Donald Trump is going to be more difficult after the U.K. election. That to me is pretty clear. The public clearly wanted change in the U.K. and change that is much more rapid and greater magnitude than anyone predicted.” The change they wanted was for politicians to keep their freaking promises, which is, granted, a pretty radical change. #BloombergStyle:
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s scaling back his campaign in New Hampshire to go all in on Iowa and South Carolina. A rational decision, but he’s probably toast in Iowa; going all in on South Carolina would probably be a slightly-higher-percentage desperation play. Here’s a piece that outlines his “hail Mary” chance to win…but also discusses his “strong ground game in New Hampshire.” Oops! Gets a Chicago Tribune profile.
Three key attributes:
1) Big donor ties: Booker’s early candidacies for mayor and U.S. Senate were heavily backed form big-dollar donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Booker also famously reeled in a $100 million donation to Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that was announced on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”. Booker also drew criticism in 2012 when he defended Bain Capital against attacks during President Barack Obama’s reelection bid against Mitt Romney.
2) Hired Garry McCarthy: Before Garry McCarthy became former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial police superintendent in Chicago, Booker hired him to be Newark’s top cop. The two were stars in the documentary “Brick City,” whose production crew later would go on to produce the CNN series “Chicagoland” — a documentary largely in name only — that focused on Emanuel and McCarthy. In Newark, McCarthy favored the use of “stop and frisk,” which resulted in complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found illegal stops, searches and use of force. Booker cooperated with the investigation and agreed to a federal consent decree. Former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Booker in an early presidential debate for hiring “Trump’s guy” to run his police department, a reference to Trump calling McCarthy a “great guy” at a political rally. Emanuel used the footage of Trump in attack ads against McCarthy in 2018 before abandoning a run for a third term.
3) Bachelor candidate: Booker has never been married and, if elected, would become just the third U.S. president elected unmarried. He has, however, confirmed he is dating actress Rosario Dawson.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She tops an online Harris poll for which candidates Democrats want. Key word there is “online.” “I guess a bit of me hopes Hillary does run to muck up the Democratic primary even more and the fact that Trump would easily cruise to a second term.” She has a new look and it’s ghastly.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a Chicago Tribune profile. They finally found an unflattering photo of her to run (closeup from below). She’s pledged to skip the December debate even if she met the inclusion criteria (she didn’t), choosing to spend the time in New Hampshire and South Carolina. BoldMoveCotton etc. It would have made a bigger statement if she had actually qualified, or done it after she qualified for the last debate. Could she oppose impeachment? Do the Afghanistan Papers justify her antiwar stance?
In the past two weeks, she has doubled her number of [Iowa] field offices to 20, with the possibility of more expansion. She has about 60 staffers on the ground, up from 40 in late August but about half the number reported by Warren, Biden and Buttigieg. Still, she has made key hires, including Norm Sterzenbach, a former Iowa Democratic Party executive director and expert on caucus turnout who previously worked for former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s campaign.
Klobuchar’s rise comes as moderate Democrats have reasserted their power in a presidential race that for months was dominated by sweeping liberal ideas, including Sanders’s call for a political revolution and Warren’s pitch for big, structural change. Democratic Party leaders and voters here have openly worried that expensive policies such as Medicare-for-all could prove to be too polarizing and lead to Trump’s reelection next year.
Klobuchar has made the same unwavering argument for months on the campaign trail, describing Medicare-for-all as a “pipe dream” and criticizing proposals such as free college as something the nation can’t afford. She has criticized other Democrats in the 2020 race, arguing that their liberal policies will doom them in the general election. She presents herself, in contrast, as a political realist and, during her stump speech, often ticks through a litany of bills she has passed as a member of the Senate, many with the support of Republicans.
She’s peaking at the right time, but she’s also starting waaaaaay far back from the frontrunners. Is her boom significant? This piece brings up some painful historical analogies:
Klobuchar had previously received at least five percent support in each of the four public polls of Iowa Democrats released in November by Monmouth University, CBS News, Des Moines Register/CNN, and Iowa State University.
But will hitting this double-digit mark ultimately be a big deal, little deal, or no deal for Klobuchar with less than two months before the caucuses?
To be sure, in recent election cycles there have been many presidential candidates who at some point reached the 10 percent mark in an Iowa poll, but ultimately did not carry a single state in the subsequent primaries or caucuses:
2004 (Democrats): Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt
2008 (Republicans): Fred Thompson, Rand Paul, and Rudy Giuliani
2008 (Democrats): Tom Vilsack and Bill Richardson
2012 (Republicans): Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry
2016 (Republicans): Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ben Carson
In the 2020 cycle, Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris can be added to that list and each has already suspended their campaign.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Lefties accuse Steyer of running a donor scam: “He has spent $47 million of his own money in what amounts to a scam. Since he needs donors only to meet the DNC’s bizarre debate criteria, he has essentially purchased his donor base, through tactics such as selling $1 swag with free shipping—usually items worth far more than $1—that has nothing to do with him or his presidential campaign.” This leaves out that the natural demand for Steyer swag is zero. Now, if Make-A-Wish Tommy started stapling a $20 bill to every shirt he sold…
In Iowa and nationwide, they are the leading second-choice pick of the other’s supporters, a vivid illustration of the promise and the peril that progressives face going into 2020: After decades of losing intraparty battles, this race may represent their best chance to seize control from establishment-aligned Democrats, yet that is unlikely to happen so long as Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders are blocking each other from consolidating the left.
For center-left Democrats, that’s exactly their hope — that the two progressives divide votes in so many contests that neither is able to capture the nomination. Moderates in the party fear that if Mr. Warren or Mr. Sanders pull away — or if they ultimately join forces — the ticket would unnerve independent voters and go down in defeat against President Trump.
Interviews with aides from both camps — who spoke on the condition they not be named because they warn their own surrogates not to criticize the other — produce a common refrain. The two candidates are loath to attack each other because they fear negativity would merely antagonize the other’s supporters. The only way to eventually poach the other’s voters, each campaign believes, is by winning considerably more votes in the first caucuses and primaries.
Liberal leaders, acknowledging the mixed blessing of having two well-funded, well-organized progressive Democrats dividing endorsements and poised to compete deep into the primary calendar, are now beginning discussions about how best to avert a collision that could tip the nomination to a more centrist candidate.
At informal Washington dinners, on the floor of the House and on activist-filled conference calls, left-leaning officials are deliberating about how to forge an eventual alliance between Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, and Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts. Some are urging them to form a unity ticket, others want each to stay in the race through the primary season to amass a combined “progressive majority” of delegates, and nearly every liberal leader is hoping the two septuagenarian senators and their supporters avoid criticizing each other and dividing the movement.
“Investors could pay twice as much in capital gains just to raise the funds for Ms. Warren’s levy.” I’m sure there’s no way that would damage the economy…
Yang launched his quixotic quest for the presidency more than two years ago. At the time, he was a fairly successful but little-known entrepreneur. The New York Times described his bid, which he bolstered with the marquee issue of a universal basic income, as having a “longer-than-long” shot. As recently as this spring, Yang couldn’t crack a single percentage point in most national polling.
He’s now polling around 3%, good enough for fifth or sixth place nationally, and at more than 3% in the Granite State as well as in Nevada and California. Now, this virtual unknown and political neophyte has already outlasted three senators, three governors, five representatives, and two mayors in the less-and-less-crowded Democratic presidential field. Couple that with surging fundraising — Yang’s campaign is on track to beat his $10 million third-quarter earnings for the end of this year — and he’s a genuinely impressive candidate.
Perhaps the most important asset to the campaign has been the Yang Gang.
Joe Rogan, the massively popular podcast host, introduced Yang to most of the pundit class and plenty of his most vocal eventual supporters. Yang’s February appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the same show that landed Yang-endorser Elon Musk in hot water with NASA for smoking marijuana on air, earned more than 4 million views on YouTube. His Twitter following went from 34,000 to more than a quarter million. It’s now well over a million.
Yang proudly deems himself a Democrat. He supports unfettered abortion access and financial giveaways. But his central message, that the government must temper the effects of the automation revolution with a universal basic income rather than socialist safety nets, has resonated with some on the Right.
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 recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
