Posts Tagged ‘Amy Klobuchar’

« Older Entries

BidenWatch for June 22, 2020

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Exploring the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden (plus the equally huge campaign technology gap), some fundraising analysis, more Veepstakes, and a majority of Americans think Biden is a few tacos shy of a combo plate. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Fundraising update:

    Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.

    Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.

    But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.

    Some Trump numbers snipped.

    A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.

    During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.

    The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.

    Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.

    Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.

    But Unite the Country says it’s still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.

  • For all these polls that say Biden is ahead, doesn’t there seem to be a big enthusiasm gap?

    Team Trump has a legendary data program. Even Democrats have expressed concern over the campaign’s digital prowess and collection methods. Trump rallies are key to this strategy for a number of reasons. And according to Brad Parscale, it seems a return to the road is generating unprecedented enthusiasm.

    This is for a rally in an arena that holds 19,000. If the campaign holds true to form, there will be large screens for those unable to get a seat to watch from outside. But the key to the operation is in Parscale’s tweet. It is the biggest data haul to date.

    What does this data give them? The opportunity to register people who are interested in the rally to vote who are not already registered. The ability to contact these potential voters throughout the rest of the campaign with updates and fundraising efforts. The information to ensure absentee ballots and in-person voting happen right through the close of the polls on Election Day.

  • That piece also cites this Dave Weigel piece, which discusses the significant difference between campaign contact touches:

    On the 48th day of quarantine, as traditional presidential campaigning became a gauzy memory, I immersed myself in the worlds created by the campaigns of Joe Biden and President Trump. I downloaded both campaigns’ apps — TeamJoe and Trump 2020, respectively — and agreed to get notifications. I created a Twitter list consisting of nothing but official campaign accounts and checked in a few times a day. What I found: The Republican effort was designed to keep supporters energized, inspired and sometimes angry. The Democratic effort was genteel and gave me much less to do.

    Signing up for the Trump app subscribed me to not one, but two automated text chains. The first came in from the Trump campaign within seconds of sign-up, informing me that I had just gotten “Reward Access Unlocked,” thus qualifying me to “earn points & meet Pres Trump during the campaign in fall.” One minute later, the Republican National Committee thanked me for joining the “team,” and asked whether I could let the president “know what you think of this week’s accomplishments.”

    Following the first link took me back to the Trump campaign page; following the second gave me a yes or no poll on whether I approved of the president, with space to write about why. I didn’t go further than that, but two hours later, the RNC texted with news: “You were 1 of the 25 President Trump selected for a 5X-MATCH EXTENSION! The other 24 patriots already donated, now it’s your turn.”

    Not wanting to be left out, I clicked through to a page powered by WinRed, the newish Republican donation portal. A photo of the president pointing at me like Uncle Sam was displayed next to a pitch that had become even more urgent: “This offer is only available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast. Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT HOUR and your gift will be 5X-MATCHED!” A $100 donation button was already colored in, and a box that would have made this a “monthly recurring donation” was already checked. When I tried to click away, a window popped up warning me, in vain, that the offer was about to expire.

    All of that happened within two hours. The Biden campaign did not contact me until seven hours after I’d downloaded the app, finally texting me in the late afternoon. “It’s Joe Biden and I owe you my sincere thanks, David,” the account wrote. “You all have been so great to this campaign.” (You all?) “I’ve been calling donors and it’s so great to thank people personally. I’m calling more this week who are helping us start May strong. If you aren’t a May donor yet, you can chip in here and I might be calling you soon.”

    Following that link, I was offered a shot at “a video call from Joe” and told that the “average gift is only $25.” A form to fill in an exact donation amount was left blank; a box that would make this a one-time donation, not a recurring one, was already checked.

    Over the next few days, it was easy to forget that the Biden app existed. Push texts were infrequent, and unlike the Trump app, the Biden app didn’t let me track virtual campaign events. (That was on the website.) TeamJoe offered me a few options and news items, all of which directed me from the app back to the campaign website. For 24 hours, the top news item was a new Biden campaign pledge, which I could take, committing myself to “empathy,” “keeping the faith,” “humility,” and “no malarkey,” among other nice things. If I wanted to volunteer, the app made it easier, but not addictive.

    Trump 2020 did not let me go so easily. A news feed let me read the latest messaging, just as it would appear to a reporter on the media list, or the campaign’s curated tweets, which prioritized big names like campaign manager Brad Parscale. An “engage” button educated me on ways to “fight with President Trump,” from hosting a “MAGA Meet Up” to joining the campaign finance committee as a high-dollar bundler. Sharing the app with a friend would award me 100 points, while sharing any news item to Twitter or Facebook would give me a single point. A good prize, like expedited entry at any to-be-scheduled rallies, cost 25,000 points.

    The “gamified” Trump app has made some Democrats nervous, not least because Biden hasn’t tried to compete with it. Everything that came from the Trump campaign had an act-fast, as-seen-on-TV feeling; nothing from the Biden campaign did. Biden’s campaign texted me a poll (“Are you planning to vote for Joe Biden in the general election in your state?”) and a longer “strategy survey,” asking if I wanted to volunteer and what issues I cared about.

    The Trump campaign and the RNC, in the same time period, invited me to “the Trump 100 Club” (“offer permanently expires in SIX HOURS”), a “2020 sustaining membership” with the campaign, and a poll that claimed the president had closed “ALL borders to Keep America Safe.” (While citizenship applications have been halted, and while resources have been sent to the Mexican border, the nation’s borders are not closed.)

    All of this fit snugly with the rest of the campaign’s other media and messaging. The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.”

    Snip.

    I had more company watching Trump content than I did watching Biden content. As of Thursday morning, the Biden campaign’s Cinco de Mayo broadcast had clocked 7,000 views on YouTube and 180,000 on Facebook, while the Trump campaign’s had clocked 11,000 and 900,000 views, respectively. Trump’s campaign has 29 million followers on Facebook, while Biden’s has less than 2 million. Biden got a higher percentage of his active supporters to tune in, but Trump had exponentially more supporters to draw from.

    In some ways, the Biden campaign is years behind on this kind of engagement. By this point in the 2012 campaign, Obama’s team had established a popular video series in which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter shared good news and debunked Republican attacks. There’s no such block-and-tackle effort from the Biden social media experience, apart from the occasional tweet responding to the Trump campaign — and no Trump-style points for helping get the message out.

    Gee, Biden is running an old-fashioned campaign decades behind the state-of-the-art? What are the odds?

  • It’s been 76 82 days since Biden held a press conference. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Poll: 55% Believe That Biden Potentially Has ‘Early Stages Of Dementia.'”

    “Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”

    Takeaway: Almost a third of Democrats and over half of independents think Biden is already a few Cocoa Puffs shy of a full bowl. (Hat tip: Ian McKelvey.)

  • Daniel Pipes offers a guide for deciphering the Bidenese. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden hasn’t just lost a step, he’s lost a lap:

    Vote for President Trump and you are voting for the Constitution, military strength and robust economic growth.

    Vote for former vice president Joe Biden and you are voting for bureaucrats, appeasement abroad, and economic entropy.

    These are the policy choices embedded in each candidate. There is also a temperamental choice to be made.

    Trump is chaos theory contained in a man, an explosive combination of complete candor as to what he thinks and feels, a willingness to brawl, an almost animal energy for the fray.

    Biden is clearly not that. He is mostly invisible these days, but he hasn’t just lost a step. He’s lost a lap. His White House would be marked by echo-chamber enthusiasts and the control of the appointees he brings along with him, a haphazard and dangerous step for the republic.

    With Trump, all will be well in the country and all will be in upheaval inside the Beltway, Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

    With Biden, the deep-blue centers of genuine privilege will have their restoration. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will regain its luster.

  • Amy Klobuchar’s veep chances just flew out the window like a stapler hurled at a staffer’s head:

    “Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”

    This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”

    But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.

    If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting.

    And if Biden crashes and burns, it won’t be her fault!

  • BBC writer does a Veepstakes roundup. In addition to the usual names he includes Kyrsten Sinema (would never happen, because she’s strayed from the party line too much) and Michelle Obama (who so many on the left are pining for).
  • “Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe faced backlash and has apologized for his comments about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate choice, saying that when Biden picks his running mate, he should do it based on each contender’s qualifications and reputation, not skin color.”

    via GIPHY

  • Michigan Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell doesn’t believe Biden’s lead:

    “And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”

    Real Clear Politics currently shows Biden to have a 7.3% lead over President Donald Trump in its average of recent polling in Michigan and an 8.1% average polling lead nationally.

    Four years ago, when polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to have leads over Trump, Dingell voiced concerns before Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988. Trump won the state by 10,704 votes against Clinton, his closest margin of victory nationally.

    “Four years ago, many of you on this phone call thought that I was nuts,” Dingell said. “I was in enough communities and heard enough people talking that I was very worried about the outcome of that election.”

    Dingell said Democrats should take nothing for granted in 2020.

  • Biden will accept the Democratic nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Stop the presses!
  • You know those “Bolton is voting for Biden” stories? More fake news.
  • “Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?” “Under Biden’s own understanding of gender and his own proposed policy, it is entirely up to him what gender he identifies as after the election.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    BidenWatch for June 1, 2020

    Monday, June 1st, 2020

    More Ukraine news, China and Iran compete to see who can buy a bigger piece of Slow Joe, Biden’s staff bail out antifa rioters, and he confuses D-Day and Pearl Harbor. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Roger Simon on why Biden’s Ukraine problem won’t go away:

    “Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach on May 19 made public leaked audio recordings of phone conversations held by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry with ex-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.

    “At a press event held in Kyiv on Tuesday, Derkach said U.S. officials asked that Petro Poroshenko ensure the dismissal of the-then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

    “One of the conversations on the said issues was allegedly recorded on December 3, 2015, where the voice that’s purportedly John Kerry’s is heard saying: ‘I just wanted to try to urge you to see if there’s a way to get by this problem of replacing the prosecutor general, you know, [Viktor] Shokin because per my perception, he’s blocked the cleanup of the Prosecutor General’s Office,’ said Kerry.”

    There’s another recording from March 22, 2016, in which Derkach claims the voices of Biden and Poroshenko are heard again. In it, Biden reiterates his quid pro quod demand for change in the prosecutor general’s office and “the government” (unspecified) in return for $1 billion.

    Not surprisingly, Derkach is being accused of being everything from a KGB agent to a Trump shill, but it should be fairly easy to authenticate those voices. Just don’t look for The New York Times to do it.

    Meanwhile, also on May 20, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and its chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have finally subpoenaed Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-leaning Washington firm that was doing public relations for Burisma, attempting to burnish its tarnished image. Blue Star’s CEO denies any wrong-doing but for reasons unknown had refused to turn over documents to the committee for months.

    Anyway, it’s certain that Biden’s “Ukraine problem” isn’t going to go away. Ditto his China problem, which also involves Hunter.

    Many claims were made that Trump would be in Putin’s pocket were he elected U.S. president. The reality is, for similar reasons with considerably more actual evidence, electing Biden would be far more dangerous to our country.

  • Iran’s Mullah’s want Biden to win:

    Iranian state-sponsored hackers are looking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections in November, say senior U.S. intelligence officials.

    “Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, the current U.S. president, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections,” one official told Just The News.

    In addition to hacking the election, the Iranians are looking to sow discord about the pandemic. “Iran is targeting U.S. and international health organizations for COVID-19 information” and selectively release information that would stoke divisions, the official said. This seems unnecessary when the liberal media is already doing that.

    Iran is also targeting U.S. electric utilities, and oil and gas companies.

    “It’s fairly well known that the Iranian government has invested considerable resources into cyber hacking, and have done so for some time,” said Fred Fleitz, former NSC chief of staff and CIA analyst.

    As for their goals in hacking the U.S. elections, can you guess who they want to win?

    “Iran’s attempt to interfere in U.S. elections must be analyzed in the context of its deep trouble domestically,” Ramesh Sepehrrad, a cybersecurity executive, explained to Just The News. “With three rounds of major nationwide uprisings calling for regime change, widespread corruption added to the public’s anger, and mismanagement, the cash-hungry regime is extremely vulnerable.”

    According to Sepehrrad, the mullahs believe a change in leadership in the United States will benefit them. “Tehran’s strategy is to buy time and survive until November, hoping that a potentially Democratic U.S. President would save them,” she said. “Therefore, given their absolute desperation to survive domestic unrest, economic disaster, and U.S. pressure, Trump’s reelection is a nightmare for the ayatollahs.”

    What do you want to bet that our beloved news media suddenly won’t treat election interference by a hostile foreign power as The Worst Thing Ever anymore? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of foreign powers with a Piece of Joe, The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania accused of taking “over $70 million from China, of which $22 million were listed as ‘Anonymous.'”
  • Kurt Schlichter has related thoughts:

    It’s pretty clear who the commie bastards known for their shoddy lab practices and their weird fetish for gnawing on pangolins badly want to win in November, and it’s not Trump and the Republicans. The Chinese communists want their money’s worth, and they will go all-in for the Democrats who find the chance to hurt Trump at the same time they hurt America too delicious to pass up. Plus, the Dems heartily approve of what Mao’s Pals are doing to freedom-loving Hong Kongers, seeing it as a template for what they would love to do to freedom-loving us.

    We need to understand and accept that a vote for anyone with a “D” is a vote for Xi.

    Snip.

    Let’s look at Joe Biden for a moment, though it will have to be on video since the Geppettos holding his strings are not letting him out of his Delaware dungeon unless a miracle happens and he becomes a real boy.

    This is the guy that went publicly incontinent when the Great Wall Gang was shipping Typhoid Mulans over here and Trump cut off that insanity. Travel bans were racist, you know, until they weren’t. And this guy wants to be president, when he remembers he is running for president, though his priority was not saving American lives but not vexing Beijing. This guy is so far in the Red Menace’s pocket that he’s risking lint poisoning.

    They channel the digital Dem, asking, “Come on man, is it too much to want a president who takes America’s side?

    Well, to the Democrats, the answer is a responding, “Yes, and don’t assume my gender.”

    Now, Biden always sides with the PRC because, like the elite whose Guccis he slurps, he’s totally comfortable with the Chinese supplanting the USA as the world’s preeminent nation – that’ll show those flag-waving flyover rubes who’s not boss! The totally-not-senile politician opposed Trump’s tariffs and his attempts to level the playing field, and Hi-Bidder Biden would sign agreements to lock in the former Deliverance trade model. His response to the People’s Liberation Army arms build-up that threatens our Pacific Fleet would be, “Hey man, I believe in building-up arms! I work out and I am strong and I can do more push-ups than you, fat!”

    Here’s the other thing. Remember all that idiotic babble about the Russki kompromat of Trump? That somewhere, Putin had this video library of Trump water-sporting with Muscovite rent girls? Well, we all know Joe’s pride n’ joy Hoover went to China and did a big-bucks deal, probably because he’s such a super-achiever who got where he is on his own talents and not at all drafting after his daddy. So, what else do you think he did when he was there? Explored the Great Wall? Marveled at the Forbidden City? Cavorted with every skeeze the ChiCom intel guys could throuple him up with on video?

    Did it happen? You want to bet it didn’t? We know the guy got booted from the Navy for dope. We know he got zillions from some Ukrainian oligarch. We know he was accused of forgetting his crack pipe in a rental car. We know he impregnated a stripper. We know he was voted “Least Likely to be the Centerfold of Good Judgment Monthly.”

    What are the chances the Chinese Gestapo didn’t try to honey-trap the guy who’s the Winnie the Pooh of hookers n’ blow? What do you think they probably caught him doing on Candid Commie Camera? It’d be like a home movie from Memorial Day weekend in Lake Havasu on Bob Crane’s houseboat.

  • Joe Biden is his own toughest opponent:

    That Biden is the Democrats’ presumptive nominee is truly remarkable when you think about it. He’s all but abandoned his native tongue. He had one mediocre debate performance while the rest ranged from awful to disastrous. He’s off-script more than Robin Williams during his peak cocaine years on Mork and Mindy, yet everyone over on that side keeps giving him a pass.

    As many have noted, this pandemic shutdown has been a boon for Biden and is probably the reason he’s doing well in the polls. Time away from the public eye has been Biden’s friend, train wreck video appearances notwithstanding.

    My latest “Democrats want the shutdown to continue” theory doesn’t have to do with tanking the economy, which I still believe is their primary objective. I believe their secondary objective is to leave as little time as possible between the return of the candidates to the campaign trail and the election. Biden is barely able to navigate the tightly scripted affairs that his handlers have him doing from his basement, they’re petrified of the thought of him being out in the wild, off-leash and babbling.

    So, the longer Democratic governors can keep things at least in partial shutdown, the more the economy tanks and hurts Trump and the more reason Team Biden has to keep their guy away from cameras where he might eat a booger or sniff a stranger.

    I’ll admit, this is the first presidential election since 1984 where I was looking forward to the general election debates. The thought of seeing Trump’s extemporaneous wizardry going head-to-head with Biden’s word salad factory will probably come off as something more akin to British comedy than American political theater. Must-see TV for sure.

    There is little doubt that Biden’s biggest gaffe is just waiting for his grand return to campaigning in public. You know it, I know it, and his handlers all have bleeding ulcers because they know it better than anyone. Once he is back out in public, Joe Biden becomes the greatest weapon against Joe Biden. President Trump could go on autopilot and win the election.

  • “Reeling From ‘You Ain’t Black’ Comments, Biden Accuses Trump of Racism.” When is a Democrat not accusing a Republican of racism? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Wow, it was awfully convenient that antifa launched their riot spree right after Biden made his “You ain’t black” comment, wasn’t it?
  • Any questions about the Mueller Investigations impartiality?

  • And, after all that, the Biden campaign cancelled the fundraiser anyway.
  • Biden in Minneapolis: Riots? What riots? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden staff to bail out antifa members.
  • Looks like Biden’s race problems may require him to select Kamala Harris.
  • On the other hand, the Harris reputation for being “top cop” may rule her out.
  • And the riots may spell doom for Amy Klobuchar’s campaign as well, given that she declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin or other police who had complaints against them.
  • The Biden campaign makes some more hires. “Mr. Biden’s campaign is designating Addisu Demissie, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, as a senior adviser responsible for coordinating the convention. It is also naming Lindsay Holst, who was Mr. Biden’s digital director when he was vice president, to lead special projects for the convention, including its digital side, according to people familiar with the appointments.”
  • Ilhan Omar says that she believes Tara Reade but will vote for Biden anyway. Why let a tiny detail like rape get in the way of taking power?
  • “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden confused D-Day and Pearl Harbor—as well as the date that Delaware declared its independence from neighboring Pennsylvania—at a Wednesday campaign event. ‘We declared our independence on December the 7th. It’s not just D-Day.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit, who notes “Was it over when the Germans landed at Pearl Harbor?”)
  • 37% of Democrats want Biden replaced. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Is this Creepy Joe video unfair? Probably.
  • When it comes to the press, Biden has always been testy.
  • KanyeWatch:

  • Science!

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    BidenWatch for May 25, 2020

    Monday, May 25th, 2020

    Senile Joe became Racist Joe this week, with one of the most amazingly ill-considered answers since Gerald R. Ford said Poland didn’t suffer from Soviet domination. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

    Warning: This week is going to be Twitter-heavy.

  • Let’s jump right into the controversy that may convince DNC insiders that they can’t afford to go into the general election with Biden as their candidate:

  • Charlamagne tha God (AKA Lenard Larry McKelvey), the black radio host who interviewed Biden, did not find his apology compelling. “It has to come to the point where we stop putting the burden on black voters to show up for Democrats and start putting the burden on Democrats to show up for black voters.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Twitter reactions were…robust:

  • How is the media spinning Biden’s huge gaffe? Either the tried to gaslight us that it was a “joke” or says the real story is, as always, Republicans pounce.
  • Is this Biden’s “Northam in Blackface” scandal? Let’s hope not, since Northam is still in office. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Heh: “Ancestry.com Revokes Genealogies Of African Americans Who Don’t Support Biden.”
  • Of course that’s not the only bad news to befall the Biden campaign this week. The Ukraine scandal continues to look worse and worse for Biden and his spawn:


    

  • Dan McLaughlin analyzes ever aspect of Tara Reade’s rape allegation against Biden.

    None of this necessarily means that Tara Reade’s story is true. But the evidence is fairly convincing that Reade’s story is not just a campaign-season invention.

    One point in Reade’s favor, in contrast to Blasey Ford, is how she has handled her accusation. She made (as Young notes) a few edits to one of her blog posts to tailor it more closely with her current story, but unlike Blasey Ford, she did not delete her social-media history to erase all traces of political rants (even the embarrassing Putin stuff) before coming forward. She was not initially rolled out by a public-relations firm and a partisan lawyer (though she has since retained an attorney who is a Trump donor). She has not hidden behind her representatives to carefully stage-manage who could talk to her, and under what conditions; while she has canceled a few interviews and seems hesitant to appear on Fox News, she has sat for lengthy questioning on and off air by a diverse array of outlets ranging from left-wingers such as Halper, to ex-Fox personality Kelly, to the Times, Post, CNN, the Associated Press, Vox, and National Review. Maybe Reade is enjoying the publicity, but she is not hiding from questioners.

  • Biden wants to tax you till you bleed. Hiking taxes during a recession: What could possibly go wrong? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden wants to kill Charter schools:

  • The (D) after Biden’s name absolves him of all sins:

    One columnist declared that former Vice President Joe Biden could boil babies and she would still vote for him. Feminist leaders have said they believe Biden raped a Senate staffer but they still endorse him. Good government advocates have opposed any investigation into prior sexual harassment or corruption claims against Biden. It seems politicians and pundits alike have discovered the glory of the “presidential bull.” In this instance, Biden is akin to a papal indulgence that allows writers, members of Congress and journalists to forgive any sin in a holy crusade to retake Washington.

    In the 11th century, Pope Urban II formalized the use of indulgences, which could be purchased to forgive sins. A papal bull of the Crusade accompanied those who fought in the Holy Land and committed atrocities in the name of a higher order. The practice was defended as essentially drawing from the “treasury of merit” created by Jesus Christ, the saints and the faithful.

    Now the 2020 election has become the ultimate crusade, and President Trump’s critics seem to be enjoying indulgences in tossing aside moral and ethical considerations. The freedom that is Biden is nowhere more evident than in a recent column by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the allegations of sexual assault made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade. Pollitt dispensed with any struggle over feminist or moral qualms, declaring, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.”

    As Pollitt explained, “We do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen.” Otherwise, Pollitt would have to deal with her column during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which she denounced “some of his defenders [who] seem to be saying that even if the allegations are true, it shouldn’t really matter.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Heh:

  • The word salad continues:

  • Joe Biden pledges to beat Joe Biden. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Your modern technology frightens and confuses me!”

  • Yep:

  • “Poll: 28% of Democrats believe Biden will be replaced as party’s nominee.”
  • I’m sure that those shock at every single thing President Donald Trump does will be shocked at this as well:

  • Amy Klobuchar gets her turn in the veep vetting barrel. For those that wanted all the personal warmth of Hillary Clinton without the purported body count.
  • But actually having won election as U.S. Senator, Klobuchar clearly has a more plausible case than Stacey Abrams:

    Her attempt to leverage a failed Georgia gubernatorial bid into a spot on the Democratic ticket is so brazenly absurd that it’s hard to think of precedents.

    But the 46-year-old African-American activist isn’t one to be constrained by standard political practice — or reality. She refused to concede her narrow but clear 2018 gubernatorial loss, instead alleging she’d been undone by a massive voter-suppression scheme.

    As she put it at a recent event, “malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent, who was a cartoon villain, stole the voices of Georgians.” Usually, candidates who won’t acknowledge defeat are written off as sore losers. Such is the ­inflamed, paranoid state of Dems in the Trump era that rather than being embarrassed by the Georgian’s graceless and unsubstantiated claims of electoral theft, they have embraced and parroted them.

    Abrams could be forgiven for thinking that if she could get her party to accept she is the rightful governor of Georgia, she has a chance to convince it that she ­deserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency in the administration of a 78-year-old man.

    By her own estimation, she’d be an “excellent running mate.” She has no doubt that she’s prepared to be president on Day One and touts her foreign-policy credentials of having visited more than a dozen countries.

    President Trump has rewritten the rules of political experience, yet it’s still a stretch to imagine someone who has only served in the Georgia legislature — and as a state representative, not even a senator — is ready to become leader of the Free World. Even Pete Buttigieg has more executive experience.

    Snip.

    Abrams can reasonably boast of an ability to stoke turnout among minority and young voters — she won more votes than any state-wide candidate in Georgia ever. But given her high-octane progressivism, she’d have limited appeal to working-class swing voters and suburban women. By picking her, Biden would also be undermining one of his chief arguments, namely, that he’s a low-risk, experienced, steady hand.

    This means that Abrams is likely to be passed over — and, if the past is any guide, conclude that she got robbed.

  • Meta-heh: “To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim.”

    • Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, unions | 1 Comment »

    BidenWatch for April 20, 2020

    Monday, April 20th, 2020

    The rape allegation against Biden slowly percolates out into the mainstream media, Biden’s brain melts (more), Slow Joe stumbles through interviews (again), and more memes than you can shake a stick at. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden won the Wyoming caucuses. Try to contain your shock.
  • Vanquished foe Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden. Insert your own fourth house joke here.
  • I’m sure Sanders was filled with enthusiasm when he did it:

  • The New York Times is not fooling anyone with it’s sexual assault double-standard:

    A remarkable thing happened Monday: The New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, actually had to answer questions about his paper’s very different coverage of sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh. It did not go well. It is simply impossible to read the interview and the Times coverage of the two cases and come away believing that the Times acted in good faith or, frankly, that it even expects anyone to believe its explanations. The paper’s motto, at this point, may as well be “All the News You’re Willing to Buy.”

    For all their lectures to the public about transparency and fearless independence, prestige journalists tend to be very reluctant to face accountability of their own. Ben Smith, who only recently left his position as editor in chief of BuzzFeed for a perch as media reporter for the Times, deserves credit for putting Baquet to some tough questioning. Let’s walk through the Times’ very belated report on the Biden allegations and Baquet’s defenses of that reporting. The article, blandly titled “Examining a Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden,” ran on page A20 of the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. On the same day, the Times opinion page ran a much more visible op-ed by Biden himself on his proposals to reopen the country.

    Snip.

    Tara Reade was one of the women who accused Biden in early 2019, but at the time, she did not accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her by penetrating her with his hands under her skirt, as she has now. Biden has never been asked personally to respond to Reade’s allegation. The Times assigned multiple reporters to the story but printed his campaign’s formal denials without addressing whether it had asked Biden himself to comment. Its report expressed no concerns that there has been inadequate investigation of the charge.

    Smith started off by asking Baquet why it took until April 12 for the Times to even mention the allegations, which were made in a podcast interview on March 25 and reported at National Review and elsewhere within days:

    Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. . . . Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee. Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.

    So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” This does not pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does any sentient being believe that the Times would have waited more than two weeks to even mention such an allegation against a Republican or conservative figure, while it tried to figure out how to tell its readers what “he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing”? Recall its wall-to-wall instant coverage of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape, which by the next day had a full news analysis by Maggie Haberman asking why Trump had not apologized yet.

    In Kavanaugh’s case, on September 14, 2018, before Christine Blasey Ford had even put her name to a public allegation against Kavanaugh, the Times published a 31-paragraph story on the then-anonymous charge. Two days later, the very day that Ford agreed to come forward publicly, the Times blared out a Sheryl Gay Stolberg story, which opened

    President Trump’s bid to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was thrown into uncertainty on Sunday as a woman came forward with explosive allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago.

    Unlike here, the story led with the most inflammatory line in Ford’s allegations (“I thought he might inadvertently kill me”) and contrasted that with what it described as “a terse statement” from the White House, terms it did not use in framing the allegations against Biden. Then, the Times complained that “some of the president’s allies on the right excoriated Ms. Ford — a registered Democrat — as a partisan.” Here, regarding Reade, the Times reported its reasons for skepticism of her political motivations (supporting Marianne Williamson, then Elizabeth Warren, then Bernie Sanders) without putting those accusations in the mouths of people primed to be disliked by Times readers.

    Snip.

    It got worse: When undeniably disreputable figures came out of the woodwork to offer lurid and preposterous tales of Kavanaugh’s supposed predations (many of which have since been recanted or thoroughly debunked), the Times ran with them. As Smith notes, when since-convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti pushed forward the charges by Julie Swetnick of Kavanaugh’s involvement in gang rapes, “The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that ‘none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated.’” Baquet’s response:

    Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment. . . . Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I don’t think it’s that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.

    This is entirely circular: If the media make something a story, it becomes newsworthy; if it’s not reported, the readers don’t know about it, so it’s not newsworthy. No purer distillation can be found of the idea that the media set their own agenda.

    How on earth do you pretend that Joe Biden’s character is not instantly newsworthy? He’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president. He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. He’s been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the Hill–Thomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing?

    We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were “a job interview” and he’d be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isn’t this Biden’s job interview?

  • “Harvey Weinstein Investigator Says That Tara Reade’s Story Has More Evidence Than Most Allegations.”

    Rick McHugh previously reported on Weinstein’s many victims, so he’s not new to this rodeo.

    In the interview below, he says the following:

    * Tara Reade says she told her mother, her friend, and her brother about the sexual assault just after it happened. The mother has passed, but the friend and brother confirm they were told about this at the time.

    * He further says his interviews of the friend and brother were “not short conversations,” but long ones, where he “drilled down” to discover if their recollections matched the story Reade was telling now. He says they do in fact match.

    * He notes further that the timing of this claim tracks with Reade’s sudden demotion at the Senate.

    * Tara Reade says she also filed a complaint with the Senate about sexual harassment (not assault, which happened later) after her complaint to the Biden staff was ignored. McHugh cannot find this document, but says it seems to be located (assuming it exists) at the University of Maryland’s collection of Joe Biden’s papers — which is conveniently under seal.

  • “NYT: We Looked Into the Accusations Against Joe Biden and Determined He’s A Democrat“:

    “While the charges of sexual assault by Biden’s former aide, Tara Reade, are something we would call extremely credible in any other situation,” reads the article, “our investigation revealed that legitimizing them would be politically unhelpful to Democrats. Thus we conclude the allegations are false for reasons we will fill in later — unless we can just go back to not talking about them and not give any reasons at all. We also find it absolutely necessary to consider Biden’s habit of inappropriately touching women to be ‘charming.’”

    (Hat tip: Regular commenter Howard.)

  • “Cracks in the Wall: CBS, PBS Finally Cover Joe Biden Sexual Assault Accuser.” How nice of them to bestir themselves to cover something as trivial as a rape accusation…(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • NPR also reported on the allegations.
  • CNN? Not so much. The published over 700 articles on Christine Blasey Ford, but as of April 16 had yet to mention Tara Reade.

    CNN’s political campaign against Kavanaugh included sympathetic articles toward Blasey Ford, hostile articles about Kavanaugh, supportive pieces about the importance of believing women even when they provide no evidence, hostile pieces about the danger of due process and empathy for men, and targeting of key Republican senators. CNN’s work culminated with their award-winning efforts to sway Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, broadcasting a confrontation between a professional activist and the wavering senator.

    It’s a low bar but Tara Reade’s accusation is undoubtedly stronger than the one made against Kavanaugh. Unlike Blasey Ford, she told multiple people about the alleged incident at the time it happened, not three decades later. And unlike Blasey Ford, she has evidence she met the accused, in her case when she worked for him in the U.S. Senate.

    Since then they’ve done one article on her April 17, then mentioned her in another.

  • Former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t think Biden has the stuff. “It’s hard to see. It’s like a suicide march with them. But they’re pretty stubborn people.”
  • Former Bernie Sis Shoe0nHead on the hilarity of watching a Biden-Trump election. “Biden’s brain is melting. He doesn’t know where he is half the time, he loses his train of thought, he wanders off camera, and Trump is like a 12 year old on Xbox Live. The combination of these two these two titans coming together will be hilarious! Trump will beat Joe Biden like a pinata, an old, senile pinata, and the DNC will be forced to watch helplessly as their golden goose gets boiled alive right in front of their eyes! Hilarious!”
  • Speaking of Biden’s brain melting:

  • More on the theme:

  • Still more:

  • Lacking such a ring, Stephen Green tries unsuccessfully to decode from the Bidenese. “When most politicians speak, audiences have to suspend their disbelief. When it’s Biden speaking they have to suspend their incomprehension.”
  • What happens if Biden (or Trump) croaks before election day? Depends on when they croak…
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is reportedly in talks with Biden.

    OC makes this comment and then poof, just like that, Biden calls her up and they are in talks for an endorsement. It’s almost as if the #metoo movement has been turned into a complete joke, able to be covered up at will via political agreements.

    Joe Biden obviously wanted no part of having AOC and her wing propagating the sexual assault claim against him. He’s succeeded in having outlets like the Times and the Post run interference for him, even trashing Tara Reade along the way, but he has no such control over Bernie’s fanbase. Getting an endorsement from their biggest star gives him that.

    I have to give it to her though. AOC is nothing if not cunning. She’s managed to go from a nobody freshman congresswoman to the upper echelons of Democratic party influencers in a very short period of time. We can make fun of her all we want, but that takes skill and a lack of shame usually relegated to the Adam Schiff’s of the world.

  • “Pro-Trump PAC hits ‘Beijing Biden,’ cites China cheerleading.”

  • Hey, remember that Chinese company Hunter Biden says he’s no longer affiliated with? Well, guess what?

    Hunter Biden received wall-to-wall media coverage and praise from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, in October when he announced he would resign from the board of a Chinese private equity firm by the end of the month.

    But six months after Hunter Biden pledged to relinquish his position with BHR Partners, no evidence has surfaced to prove he actually followed through on his promise.

    Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in early November that his client had resigned from BHR’s board, but he did not provide any evidence of his departure from the Chinese private equity firm at the time.

    Chinese business records the DCNF accessed Tuesday still name Hunter Biden as a director of BHR. He also retains a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, business records for the Chinese private equity firm show.

  • Related tweet:

  • Is Sen. Amy Klobuchar the frontrunner to be Biden’s running mate, if only by process of elimination?

    A global plague has shut down much of American society. The virus is particularly deadly to the elderly, and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will turn 78 later this year. In November, voters will want more than anything a VP who is ready on a moment’s notice to lead the country out of a crisis. So the Democratic veepstakes is suddenly much more important than it otherwise would be.

    Joe Biden has pledged to name a woman as his running mate, and he has indicated that he would very much like that woman to be an African American. Stacey Abrams checks both boxes, and she is auditioning for the job. But while she might excite the Democratic base, a failed gubernatorial candidate who has never held a public office more powerful than state legislator obviously has no chance of getting the nod during the present pandemic. Maybe the coronavirus will, against all odds, abate in the coming months. But it would be an act of political insanity for a geriatric presidential nominee to select a former state legislator as his running mate under the current circumstances.

    If Biden wants his VP to be a black woman, then, he is left with only one real choice: Kamala Harris. While the California senator has three years of experience as a senator and six years more as her state’s attorney general, her presidential campaign was a disaster, doomed by vacillation and equivocation on important matters of policy. She proved herself capable of delivering scripted attacks during debates, but her most famous such attack came at Biden’s expense: She hit him on his past opposition to forced busing, practically calling him a racist. That would be difficult, to say the least, for her to explain away were Biden to choose her. It shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle, and she still makes sense on paper. But her primary performance failed to generate much enthusiasm among Democrats, and her indecisiveness made her seem unready to step up in a crisis.

    What about Elizabeth Warren? If Biden wants ideological balance on the ticket, the senator from Massachusetts makes the most sense. But does he really need ideological balance?

    For most of the left, Biden’s pledges to lower the Medicare-eligibility age to 60, establish a public option for health care, and defeat Donald Trump will be enough. Bernie Sanders’s most alienated, angry, hardcore supporters are not going to turn out because of Warren; they hate her just as much as they hate Biden. The greater number of 2016 Sanders voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton in key Midwestern states could be swayed by Warren, but my hunch is that they were turned off more by Clinton’s persona than her ideology, and it’s hard to see how Warren would connect with them on a cultural level. More importantly, Warren’s pledges to radically transform the nation’s economy could scare away the moderate suburbanites who powered Democrats’ successful 2018 effort to retake the House — and Biden really can’t afford to lose those voters in 2020.

    All of which suggests that a relatively moderate woman from the Midwest would make much more sense as Biden’s VP.

    Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, but a fair amount of it has been negative. Whitmer only has one year of experience as governor, and voters may come to view Michigan’s especially stringent lockdown restrictions as arbitrary and excessive in the coming months. She seems like a long-shot for the second spot on the national ticket.

    The darkhorse VP nominee from the Midwest is Tammy Baldwin, who has been a senator from the potentially decisive, perpetually polarized swing state of Wisconsin for the last seven years, and won re-election in 2018 by eleven points even as GOP governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a fourth term by just one point. The existence of Baldwin–Walker voters, plus the fact that Baldwin was the first openly gay women in Congress, must be attractive to Democrats. The major drawback is that Baldwin has never endured the national spotlight.

    That leaves just one name: Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who is still the leading contender for the job. She won’t scare away crucial suburban voters the way that Warren would and Harris might. She is serving her 14th year in the Senate, so she has experience, and having run for the presidency this cycle, she has survived the scrutiny of a national campaign.

  • Politico also has a veepstakes roundup. Toward the end we have this from an unnamed Biden adviser: “Anyone who is telling you about who’s leading in the so-called ‘veepstakes’ is full of shit and doesn’t know anything.” Well then, I guess you don’t need to click that link…
  • People have been having too much fun with https://avatar.joebiden.com/:

  • What the hell:

  • Flashback to 2015:

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Dems Rush To Defend Kavanaugh After He Puts On Joe Biden Mask.”
  • Biden after Obama endorsement: “I’m Delighted To Have The Endorsement Of My Old Pal Corn Pop.”

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 23, 2020: And Then There Were Two

    Monday, March 23rd, 2020

    Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)

    In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,193
    2. Bernie Sanders 888
    3. Elizabeth Warren 82
    4. Michael Bloomberg 58*
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    *Three less than last week. Some settling may occur…

    Polls
    Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, so not much point in listing them here.

  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Biden wins Florida, Illinois and Arizona, padding his delegate count over Sanders.
  • “If elections can be bought so easily, why did Bloomberg and Steyer flop?”

    The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.

    It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.

    Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”

    But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.

  • How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…

    …yep, one BILLION dollars!

  • Hey, remember how Elizabeth Warren ranted about dark money and swore up and down she was different? Yeah, about that:

  • Indiana moves its primary out to June 2nd due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic.
  • Hill pundit pushes Klobuchar as veep pick.

    • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. With Biden’s rise, the establishment comes out of hiding:

    As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.

    Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.

    Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.

    The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.

    A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.

    Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.

    With the win all but in the bag, Biden’s team doesn’t want to screw things up by letting him be visible to potential voters. “Three reasons Joe Biden will never be president.” Too long a tenure in the Senate (he spent 36 years there, and no one who served as long as 15 years there ever became President), the difficulty in moving from Vice President to President, and the 14 year rule. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden tries to become the Social Justice Warrior pandering grand champion by saying he’ll only consider black females for the Supreme Court. He was endorsed by “the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents 1.3 million workers in the health care, grocery, retail and other industries.” Everytown for Gun Safety, the latest head of the Brady Bunch Astroturf hydra bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, endorsed Biden.

    This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”

  • Update: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 19 and endorsed Biden. Postmortem from 538:

    Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).

    But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.

    There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.

    By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.

    Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.

    Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie’s Whole Campaign Was Based On a Misreading of the 2016 Election“:

    Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.

    On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.

    Snip.

    The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.

    The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.

    True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:

    In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.

    The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.

    And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.

    But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.

    And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.

    Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.

    The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.

    While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.

    In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.

    Any excuse will do, as long as it’s not “socialist ideas are unpopular even with most Democrats.” Sanders has entered the dreaded “considering many options” phase of his campaign. 538 wonders what concessions Sanders can wring from the Biden campaign. I have a pretty good idea:

    Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.

    Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?

    Heh:

    • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 2020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)

    • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Guns, unions | 1 Comment »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 9, 2020

    Monday, March 9th, 2020

    EVERYBODY DROPPED OUT, except Grandpa Simpson, Grandpa Commie, and…Hot Surfer Girl? It’s Clinton-Sanders II, except Biden isn’t as widely loathed and Hillary was only physically decrepit. It’s no longer a clown car, but I’m going to keep the name because, you know, tradition. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 664
    2. Bernie Sanders 573
    3. Elizabeth Warren 64
    4. Michael Bloomberg 61
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    Polls

    Only one from Sunday:

  • Data for Progress (Washington): Biden 47, Sanders 44, Warren 5, Gabbard 3.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Biden’s at a bracing 85.8%.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • 538 covers the obvious: “After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden Is A Clear Favorite To Win The Nomination.”

    After a huge night on Super Tuesday — and with all his major opponents except Sen. Bernie Sanders having dropped out — former Vice President Joe Biden is a strong favorite to win the Democratic nomination, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

    Snip.

    Things don’t look good for Sanders. He has several compounding problems:

  • First, he’s already behind by around 70 delegates, according to our estimates, based on returns in each state as currently reported. That deficit could get worse because there are some signs that late-returned mail ballots in California will help Biden — a reflection of the fact that Biden surged in the race in the final few days before Super Tuesday.
  • As mentioned, Biden will probably get a bounce in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday wins. The model’s guess (accounting for its projected Super Tuesday bounce for Biden and the effects of Bloomberg and Warren dropping out) is that he’s currently ahead by the equivalent of 6 or 7 points in national polls. So although momentum could shift back toward Sanders later on, it may get worse for him in the short run.
  • Some of Sanders’s best states (California, Nevada) have already voted, and the upcoming states generally either aren’t good for him or have relatively few delegates. In fact, given how broadly Sanders lost on Super Tuesday — including in northern states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Maine — it’s hard to know where his strengths lie, other than among young progressives and Hispanics, who are not large enough groups to constitute a winning coalition in most states. Conversely, it’s easy to identify places where Sanders will likely lose badly to Biden. Our model has Biden winning a net of about 85 delegates over Sanders in Florida on March 17, where Sanders’s polling has been terrible, and a net of about 35 delegates in Georgia, which votes on March 24.
  • There aren’t that many delegates left after March. Some 38 percent of delegates have already been selected. And by the time Georgia votes in two-and-a-half weeks, 61 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. So even if Sanders did get a big, massive momentum swing late in the race, it might not be enough to allow him to come back, with only about a third of delegates still to be chosen.
  • Finally, even if Sanders does come back, it might merely be enough to win a plurality rather than a majority of delegates. We project that roughly 150 delegates — or about 4 percent of the total of 3,979 pledged delegates available — belong to candidates who have since dropped out or to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, even after accounting for the fact that statewide delegates are reallocated to other candidates once a candidate drops out.2 That creates an additional buffer that will make it harder for Sanders to win a majority.

    • So basically, Sanders has to come back quickly when the momentum is currently against him in a bunch of states that are not very good for him — or it will be too late. It’s not impossible. But the chances are low. The model gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates, with most of the remaining outcomes being “no majority” rather than a Sanders majority. It also gives Biden a 94 percent chance of winning a plurality of pledged delegates, and Sanders a 6 percent chance.

  • Is the great liberal freakout over?

    After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.

    Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.”

    Democrats were experiencing a political Murphy’s law, in which everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. The Senate voted to acquit Trump of impeachment charges, Democrats botched the vote count in Iowa, and the only “mainstream” candidate who seemed capable of challenging Sanders’ momentum was Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old homosexual mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Because African American voters are such a crucial demographic for Democrats, and because pundits believed black voters would never support a gay candidate, the chance that Buttigieg could win the nomination was dismissed out of hand. If Biden could not regain the lead, the “Anybody but Bernie” crowd seemed to calculate, the best hope of stopping Sanders was Bloomberg.

    An ex-Republican and former three-term mayor of New York City, Bloomberg had entered the campaign too late to be on the ballot in any of the first four states but was spending lavishly on Super Tuesday states. While the Bloomberg alternative was being explored, establishment Democrats experienced another shock in New Hampshire, where Biden placed fifth — zero delegates — behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. With Sanders leading the polls ahead of the February 22 Nevada caucus, the Democratic apocalypse was clearly at hand, and if the cable-news pundits had been worried after Iowa, they became utterly unhinged after New Hampshire.

    But the Great Liberal Freakout had not yet reached rock bottom. That nadir of panic came on February 19, when Bloomberg completely bombed his first debate appearance. Having become the default Plan B for “mainstream” Democrats, Bloomberg blew it so badly in his Las Vegas debate debut that the pundits suddenly found themselves searching for Plan C. Was it possible Klobuchar could contend for the nomination? Did Buttigieg deserve a second look? Or maybe Warren, whose debate attacks had inflicted the most damage on Bloomberg, might be capable of a resurgence? After Sanders scored another victory in Nevada, however, establishment Democrats evidently decided to go back to Plan A.

    Key to this desperate last-ditch strategy was the fact that black voters are a majority of Democrats in South Carolina. Four days after the Nevada primary, Rep. James Clyburn — known as the “godfather” of the South Carolina Democratic Party — delivered his endorsement of Biden, making an emotional appeal to unite behind the former vice president. Coming on the heels of a February 25 debate in Charleston, which many observers called Biden’s best performance of the campaign, Clyburn’s endorsement proved to be the turning point. Biden racked up nearly half the vote Saturday in South Carolina, more than doubling Sanders’ total, which immediately brought the capitulation of billionaire Tom Steyer. This was followed Sunday by Buttigieg’s announcement that he would suspend his campaign, and on Monday, both Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsed Biden.

  • Kurt Schlichter says that the race just got even more hilarious:

    The battle is really for the shriveled heart of the Democrat Party, and no one better represents the yin and the yang of that dying collection of power-hungry elitists and grasping greedos than the doddering socialist Sanders and that Biden guy who should by all rights be chasing that damn know-it-all squirrel around the park.

    Biden reps the establishment, with his last fifty years of failure in Washington tracking exactly his party’s last fifty years of failure in Washington. And Sanders represents the fresh face of a 150-year-old murder cult that only people as dumb as Hollywood stars, college kids, and kale-gobbling hipsters would be stupid enough to let near power. If you’re not seeing anything for you between them, there’s a reason why – whichever loser they choose, you can be sure that you’ll be the enemy. With Sanders, you’ll be a Kulak, and with Biden, you’ll be a Kulak Lite. So, basically, you’ll be Ted Lieu-ed either way, but under Joe, your end might come a little slower, as is his won’t.

    The establishment is probably right about Sanders when they heed the injunction to “Never go full Red Guard.” A lot of people try to draw an analogy between Sanders’ anti-establishment populist insurgency and Donald Trump’s anti-establishment populist insurgency and warn that we’re likely to feel a third-degree Bern in November. And while the nominee of a major party always has a theoretical chance to win, the fact that Trump beat the odds does not mean the weirdo from Burlington is destined for victory. If you are normal, he wants to take your money, your guns, your doctor, your border, and even job if you are one of the American heroes who helped make us energy independent. Trump wanted to do the opposite. A better analogy is Sanders’s fellow garbage commie jerk, Jeremy Corbyn, who all the best people on Twitter told me was going to win and instead ended up taking the Labor Party down into the figurative Pulp Fiction pawn shop basement to channel Ving Rhames.

    Snip.

    Now, Biden is an inanimate object and everyone can see that he’s the Trojan donkey the establishment hopes to use to sneak back into power. That means he can’t very well capture the change zeitgeist. Sanders is a danger to the establishment because he actually believes the nonsense he’s spewing. He’d provide genuine change, but the problem is that with him, it would be changing us into his beloved Cuba.

  • “Lifelong Democrat Says Biden, Sanders Can’t Convince Him to Not Vote for Trump.”
  • The master at work:

  • “Nation Optimistic About Future Now That All Presidential Candidates Projected To Die Of Old Age Before Election.”

    • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden just had the best week for a politician running for President possibly ever. First he wins South Carolina, then two of his biggest rivals drop out and endorse him, then he wins most of the Super Tuesday states, takes the lead in delegates, and has still another deep-pocketed rival drop out and endorse him. (Long-vanquished rivals Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke also endorsed him.) Edward-Isaac Dovere has the long-winded, flattering, fed-to-my-by-Biden-insiders “comeback kid” version:

    Ducklo sidled up to the reporters, one by one, with the same mischievous smile. “Have you seen the video?” he’d say. “You gotta watch the video.” And then he’d stand and wait for each reporter to pull it up on his or her phone: a one-minute-and-40-second-long ad that snarkily compared Biden’s record with Pete Buttigieg’s. “Both Vice President Biden and former Mayor Buttigieg have taken on tough fights: Under threat of a nuclear Iran, Joe Biden helped to negotiate the Iran deal,” the narrator says. “Under threat of disappearing pets, Buttigieg negotiated lighter licensing regulations on pet-chip scanners.”

    The ad was harsh and petty, and the Biden campaign didn’t have money to put it anywhere except on Twitter—and thus on reporters’ phones. But that was enough. By the time Buttigieg did his rounds on the Sunday shows the next morning, he was getting asked about his experience at every turn.

    To survive long enough to become the unity candidate, Biden first had to be persuaded to rip into his rivals. Between his disappointing finishes in the first three states and his blockbuster victories that followed, the campaign made tweaks like this one. It didn’t overhaul its strategy or upend its structure. What his team did was try to redirect, in specific, targeted ways, a 77-year-old candidate who doesn’t take direction particularly well—and hope the electorate would notice.

    Note the classic “Oh, my oh-so-high-minded candidate needed to be convinced to go negative” spin.

    Biden at first resisted going negative, aides say—he doesn’t like attacking fellow Democrats. But after a fourth-place finish in Iowa, he went after Bernie Sanders, whom he genuinely likes and had resisted taking on in the debates, by smacking down socialism every chance he got. And although he’d been touched by Buttigieg’s defense of his family during the impeachment fight—and had come to see shades of his late son in the young mayor—he started attacking his moderate rival. He had no choice, his closest aides told him. This was a Do you actually want to be president? moment.

    “He did not love taking a sharp swing at another Democrat,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told me on Wednesday, recalling the conversation she’d had with him after the campaign decided to release the Buttigieg video. “He did not love taking it at Pete, whom he likes and respects. But he also understood and knew it was necessary to interrupt the narrative and shift some of the dynamic in the race, which he knew desperately needed to happen.”

    The Biden campaign wasn’t just broken. It was broke. Biden had no money for ads or internal polling, leaving his team to rely on publicly available numbers in order to get a feel for his performance. But it didn’t take a grand master to see that they were about to get checkmated. So, after denying rumors that the campaign planned to leave New Hampshire early, the morning of the primary it did just that. Aides rushed Biden to South Carolina and shoved talking points in front of him about how minority voters—including the black voters who form the backbone of his support—hadn’t been heard from yet. The move helped the speech get prominent TV coverage, which aides thought wouldn’t have been possible if he’d stayed in New Hampshire.

    What followed Biden’s early finishes—including a second-place spot in Nevada—was the fastest turnaround from flub to front-runner in modern Democratic politics.

    The basics of Biden’s campaign didn’t change. He kept a schedule with only a few events each day. He made new gaffes and generated new questions about whether he can consistently tell the truth.

    But he stepped up his rhetoric on health care and guns, and at every moment he could, his team urged him to repeat one word: Obama. “This guy’s not a Barack Obama!” he said of Buttigieg. Sanders, he said repeatedly, had wanted to primary the former president in 2012.

    Decisions about campaign spending and Biden’s schedule were handed over to Anita Dunn, an experienced Democratic operative (and former communications director in the Obama White House), who was pulled off the road to help run the show out of the Philadelphia headquarters. Greg Schultz, the campaign manager, was dispatched around the country to lean on donors not to jump to other campaigns—or start leaking to reporters about how much trouble Biden was in.

    They needed to get to the South Carolina electorate—the black and more moderate voters who weren’t well represented earlier in the primary. And in order to make the most of it, the campaign needed to change how the rest of the country was thinking of him too.

    At first, as Biden campaigned in South Carolina, he appeared to be feeling down, as though he thought the race was over. “There were times when you could feel his spirit a little diminished,” said Eric Garcetti, the former Los Angeles mayor. Garcetti had helped gin up Latino support ahead of an important second-place finish in Nevada, even as his allies teased him for throwing himself into a campaign that, at the time, looked like a lost cause. Biden, Garcetti said, “didn’t wallow in it. He kept on plugging.” Eric Ortner, a Biden friend and bundler, described Biden this way: The former vice president has “faced real darkness in his life,” and “it’s hard for anyone [who] hasn’t been on his journey to know the spectrum that he measures light on.”

    However, Biden, who is one of the most extroverted politicians around, was soon feeding off the largely African American crowds in Charleston and Orangeburg—crowds that hadn’t shown up in Cedar Rapids or Ottumwa during the long Iowa days. He started smiling more. Fletcher Smith Jr., a former state representative who introduced Biden at his final event in South Carolina last Friday, was optimistic about what the crowds meant for his candidate. “When you connect as a white guy with black people, it convinces white people too,” he told me after the rally at a college gym in Spartanburg.

    “All over America, this same kind of conversation is going to help him punch through,” he predicted, a comment that seemed, at the time, more wistful than realistic.

    By the time Biden showed up for a quick stop at a Greenville polling location the morning of the South Carolina primary, he and his staff knew that they’d win, aides told me, though they didn’t know by how much. Public polls showed a tight race, and they had no other data to go on. The endorsement of Representative Jim Clyburn had been key, earning Biden the kind of media attention he couldn’t afford to buy. (“If we had been before South Carolina, then Alabama would have delivered the big victory, and I would be the kingmaker,” Representative Terri Sewell, an enthusiastic Biden backer from Selma, told me Wednesday. Biden would go on to sweep her district on Super Tuesday.)

    Before the polls closed, his aides settled on the opening line for his victory speech: “To all those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind: This is your campaign.”

    It wasn’t a coronation, but a rebound—the kind of story Biden himself tells on the stump, about a man who is beaten down but refuses to give up and scratches his way back. “Fighting as an underdog is comfortable for him, and it’s also comfortable for a lot of Americans,” Ducklo said. “The message resonates because of the message and also because of the messenger.”

    Biden won South Carolina by 30 points. He raised $400,000 in the 20 minutes after the polls closed, before the campaign had sent any texts or emails asking for support. This was almost as much as the team had raised online in the week leading up to the Iowa caucuses. It raised more money in the subsequent three days than it had in the entire third quarter of 2019.

    Left out of this praise is how clearly the DNC must have orchestrated significant portions of the narrative to boost Biden. Getting Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out and keep Warren in to siphon votes from Sanders and having Bloomberg drop out having dropped tons of money into running negative ads against Sanders reeks of at least some degree of orchestration by the “anyone but Bernie” DNC. Indeed, it would not shock me if this was Buttigieg’s assigned role from the very start. Biden is now the prohibitive favorite if he can avoid full onset senior dementia. “Stop. Pause. He can’t be President.”

    More:

    Never forget Biden’s long history as a proven liar:

    Not sure if tacking left is a good move if it alienates so many potential voters:

    Then again, California already cast its votes, so Biden can afford to alienate Uber users to curry favor with unions. Joe claims he loves ObamaCare but structures his taxes to avoid ObamaCare taxes. Weekend at Joe’s:

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped Out. Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden. Bloomberg got in late and spent over half a billion dollars to garner 64 delegates. At some $7.8 million per delegate, it isn’t as bad as Steyer ($200 million+ for no delegates) or John Connally ($11 million for one delegate), but it isn’t good. (It is, however, slightly more efficient than the $8.75 per delegate Jeb! spent in 2016.) His relentless ad bombardment seemed to drive away more people than it convinced:

    But he’ll always have American Samoa:

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? At this point it’s clear that she’s not going to jump into the race proper, so I’m going to move her back to the also rans, despite widespread speculation that she’ll replace Biden at the top of the ticket due to Slow Joe’s obvious mental deterioration.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yep, she’s still running:

    Tulsi Gabbard is still running for president.

    The congresswoman from Hawaii hasn’t garnered much support in primary elections and she’s falling short of winning enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. She has two so far.

    But Gabbard appears set on continuing.

    Gabbard won her first pledged delegates on Super Tuesday, when 14 states and the territory of American Samoa voted. Gabbard, who was born in Leloaloa, American Samoa, came in second in the U.S. territory to former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

    She campaigned in Super Tuesday states including Colorado, California and Utah. And she spoke at a town hall in Detroit on Tuesday, ahead of the March 10 primary in Michigan. But she had not been traveling nearly as much as other candidates. Her campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment over several days.

    She has remained in the race as numerous candidates with far more support nationally — including most recently Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have dropped out. Now former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are contending for the nomination.

    Snip.

    Her home state of Hawaii will hold its primary April 4.

    Gabbard remains the only prominent person of color and woman left in the race.

    This would theoretically be inconvenient for Democrats mouthing social justice platitudes, were it not for the fact they’re hypocrites. But since Gabbard is widely loathed by Democratic Party activists, the “woman of color” bit is simply irrelevant to them.

    And in visual form:

    She asked for Biden and Sanders to help get her on the debate stage, since the DNC’s new thresholds (of course!) exclude her. Well, people in Hell want ice-water, too. Is Gabbard the John Kaisch of 2020? Maybe, except for the fact that she’s actually much more interesting than the candidates still running, and she has issues that seem orthogonal to DNC gospel. Does she have any chance whatsoever? Maybe…if both Biden and Sanders dropped dead in the next couple of weeks (a non-zero possibility). Plus she evidently still has $2 million cash on hand, which is enough to run an insurgent campaign all the way to the convention. Jerry Brown ran an effective (albeit losing) insurgent campaign in 1992. (Granted, even then he was a much more important political figure than Gabbard is now.)

  • Update: Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped Out. She dropped out and endorsed Biden on March 2. Her primary achievement was pushing Biden down to fifth in Iowa and outlasting Gillibrand and Harris, and the biggest impression she made was mistreating staffers.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Tough week for the old commie. One minute everything’s coming up Bernie then BOOM!, the DNC yanks the chains hard enough to make the stars align just right for Biden to all but run the table on Super Tuesday. A look at Bernie’s problem:

    The campaign released an ad featuring an audio clip of former president Barack Obama praising Sanders, a clear attempt to undercut the benefit that has accrued to Biden, particularly among black voters, as the loyal lieutenant to the country’s first African American president.

    The flurry of activity amounted to the clearest acknowledgment yet that the coalition Sanders has built — which is composed largely of young people, liberals, working-class voters and Latino voters — has failed to expand since Sanders’s upstart 2016 bid, all as the rest of the party has coalesced behind Biden.

    The Tuesday results, in which Sanders led in California while winning Colorado, Utah and Vermont, offered a reminder that he retains a forceful position in the party — win or lose the nomination — with support from a quarter to a third of the base.

    But much of his team’s focus Wednesday was on the need for improvement.

    Exit polls showed that the struggles Sanders experienced among black voters four years ago against Clinton were largely unchanged. Black voters boosted Biden across Southern states on Super Tuesday, with exit polling showing that he won the votes of roughly 7 in 10 black voters in Virginia and Alabama, and did nearly as well in North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, getting roughly 60 percent of the black vote.

    Sanders’s push to broaden the electorate with scores of new voters rallying behind him hasn’t been realized. And he has struggled to persuade voters that a leftist political revolution is the best way to beat President Trump.

    Now, Sanders is confronting a radically different political landscape from 11 days ago, when he was flying high after a decisive win in Nevada seemed to put him in the driver’s seat in the Democratic race. Divisions in the moderate wing of the party that enabled him to succeed with a limited, if loyal, base have been resolved.

    He picked up an endorsement from Jesse Jackson, which might indeed help with old black people, but is it enough to overcome Biden? Probably not.

  • Update: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 5, 2020, having failed to win a single state Super Tuesday. “Voters didn’t reject the Massachusetts senator because of her policy positions; they rejected her because of her penchant for lying about herself.”

    How did Warren, flush with cash from a wildly successful grassroots-fundraising operation and atop all the national polls in mid October, fail to translate that lead into actual votes? Why didn’t her string of successful debate performances make a difference? And most importantly, why is her very like-minded socialist colleague, Senator Bernie Sanders, still standing while she’s finished?

    Unlike others who’ve failed in their bid for the nomination this cycle — Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — Warren was not undone by a lack of funds, campaign infrastructure, social-media following, or work ethic. She had all of those things, plus a campaign team stocked with high-level talent from past Clinton and Obama campaigns, yet she lost anyway.

    And in the end, she has no one to blame but herself.

    Snip.

    Warren fell apart not because of her agenda but because her utter dishonesty about her personal life eroded her credibility as policy wonk. Her decision to double-down when called on lying about her Native American ancestry, her debunked allegation that she’d been fired from a school job for being pregnant, and her false claims that her kids had never attended private schools all shattered her persona as a thought leader and ideologue. Her personal opportunism, as well, made it easier to argue that her platform was opportunistic. So when voters got to pick between Sanders’s socialism and Warren’s, the choice became very easy.

    Warren’s embarrassing performance in her home-state primary — third place, behind Biden and Sanders — suggested that the public airing of her iniquities had even taken its toll with her own constituents. The relative popularity of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in select far-left enclaves of Massachusetts did not boost her, despite her convictions on those issues and her reasonably articulate (if economically and logically lackluster) advocacy for them. Warren was able to rise to the top of the field, even when it had more talented candidates still in it, with her entire policy portfolio on the table. But once she became the most visible candidate, her penchant for lying about herself became impossible to ignore.

    She was sincere only in wanting bigger government, higher taxes and herself in charge, but she backtracked and hemmed and hawed on the details, plus went full Social Justice Warrior. Warren: The final days:

    “Warren Returns To Tribe In Shame After Failing To Take Land Back From The Pale Faces.”

    • 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:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020)

    • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Jihad | No Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 2, 2020

    Monday, March 2nd, 2020

    Biden’s back, Bernie’s coronation is postponed, Buttigieg and Steyer are Out, Bloomberg sucks up to China, Super Tuesday looms, and Biden seeks help from the Holy Roman Empire. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates
    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Bernie Sanders 58
    2. Joe Biden 50
    3. Pete Buttigieg 26
    4. Elizabeth Warren 8
    5. Amy Klobuchar 7

    Polls

    Omitting anything older than Sunday:

  • Emerson College (Texas): Sanders 31, Biden 26, Bloomberg 16, Warren 14, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2.
  • Emerson College (California): Sanders 38, Biden 21, Warren 16, Bloomberg 11, Buttigieg 7, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1.
  • USA Today (California): Sanders 35, Bloomberg 16, Biden 14, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 3, Gabbard 3.
  • CBS (Texas): Sanders 30, Biden 26, Warren 17, Bloomberg 13, Klobuchar 6, Buttigieg 6, Steyer 1, Gabbard 0.
  • Dallas Morning News (Texas): Sanders 29, Bloomberg 21, Biden 19, Warren 10, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
  • East Carolina University (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 25, Bloomberg 14, Warren 11, Klobuchar 5, Buttigieg 4, Gabbard 1. Evidently both the Carolinas love them some Biden…
  • Boston Globe (Massachusetts): Sanders 24.2, Warren 22.2, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 12.4, Biden 11, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2.4, Gabbard .8.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Biden back above 30% this morning.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Sanders is cracking the Democratic Party the way Trump cracked the Republican Party in 2016:

    But from a broader perspective, the emergence of Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner mirrors the rise of Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party in 2016, and for many of the same reasons. In both cases, a significant swath of each party’s voter base rejected the party establishment after years of being pandered to or ignored altogether.

    Populism cuts both ways, right and left, and the impending takeover of the Democratic Party by a left-wing populist should have been anticipated by party leaders four years ago—and maybe it would have been, if they hadn’t been busy gloating over the GOP’s apparent misfortune of being taken over by Trump.

    But Trump’s triumph was a necessary corrective to a party that had lost its way. When Trump cinched the nomination in 2016, it was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Gone was the mild-mannered GOP of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner. Gone were the empty platitudes, repeated ad nauseum for decades, about comprehensive immigration reform and defunding Planned Parenthood. Gone was the slavish devotion to global free trade deals regardless of the toll it took on American workers. Gone, too, was the subtle deference toward the liberal media that belied the Republican establishment’s ambivalence about the issues rank-and-file Republicans really cared about.

    Trump swept all of that away. Before he went to war with Democrats and the media, his candidacy was an all-out assault on the Republican establishment, which had drifted so far from its base that GOP leaders didn’t take him seriously until it was too late. They couldn’t see what he saw: Republican voters—and not a few independents and moderate Democrats—were tired of being ignored by their leaders, whom they had grown to despise. Trump was able to topple the edifice of the GOP because he saw it was rotten underneath.

    Now, Sanders is poised to do the same to the Democratic Party. The media is aware of this, but only vaguely, tending to frame Sanders’s rise as a contest between a radically leftist base and a more moderate Democratic electorate at large. That’s one reason the press has so quickly glommed on to the candidacy of Bloomberg, treating him as a viable contender for the nomination and a real rival to Sanders.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • It’s your weekly “Democrats are freaking over having Sanders at the top of the ticket” piece:

    “If [Sanders] is the nominee, we lose,” said one Democrat.

    That lawmaker indicated that a Sanders primary win would cost Democrats their state in the fall. The lawmaker suggested that many voters could leave the top of the ticket blank. Two other vulnerable Democrats indicated that a Sanders nomination would almost certainly cede their states to President Trump, to say nothing of the impact on races down the ballot for Democratic House and Senate candidates. One Democrat said they would try to hyper-focus on local issues to serve as a counterbalance. But the lawmaker conceded it’s hard to compete with the Sanders narrative and the reverberations of impeachment.

  • A counterpoint from Andrew Malcolm: Beware of wishing for Bernie to be the nominee:

    Here’s what’s dangerous about enjoying Bernie’s early success and Dems’ early troubles: Most people say he can’t win and he’ll hand four more years to the other party. Many of those people include the alleged elites of his own party.

    Sanders has a cadre of hardcore nobodies who feel alienated from both parties, especially the establishment types who inhabit the once uninhabitable swamp that Maryland so generously donated to the new nation back in 1790.

    Those cadres, many of them young, ignorant and inspired, get excited at the mere mention of the name of the man who’s lived off taxpayers virtually his entire career and still managed to acquire three homes.

    He’s grumpy, often angry but he is what he is, an authentic, angry grump. His disciples pack the rallies to the rafters or the farthest street corner, cheer everything he says, especially the angry stuff.

    The candidate talks about implementing a most ambitious program of reforms that no one thinks can get through Congress. Many fellow party officeholders are already running for fear he’ll drag them down to defeat.

    Any of this sound familiar? It’s a parallel phenomenon to the Trump Train of 2015-16. A rich guy from Queens (Bernie is a Brooklyn native) who instinctively tapped into the anger and frustrations of millions of overlooked Americans he has nothing in common with and harnessed that power to a surprise upset ticket into the White House.

    The parallel is, of course, imperfect. Sanders is older, Jewish, no friend of Israel. He doesn’t know from tax cuts. There’s hardly anyone safe from the many trillions in new taxes the lifelong politician promises.

    There’s a very long way to go in this process. But winning has a way of adorning anyone with campaign credibility and more admirers. You can smell it already.

  • Joe Scarborough says “Hey, you broads should totally drop out so we can beat Bernie.”
  • Gmail seems to block an awful lot of mail from Presidential mailing lists. “We signed up to receive emails from Donaldjtrump.com but didn’t receive any.” 🤔
  • Heh:

  • Charlie Kirk has some thoughts:

  • “Russians Declare Election Too Chaotic For Them To Successfully Interfere.” “‘In our wildest ambitions, we never would have tried to get a straight out Communist to win the nomination in a major U.S. party,’ Putin said. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to interfere and add to that.’ Putin hung his head sadly. ‘It’s like people don’t even need a Russia anymore.'”

    • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 examines the Biden South Carolina win, offering hypotheses ranging from “Dead Cat Bounce” to he’s the only one standing between Bernie and the nomination. His South Carolina win scrambles the race:

    Joe Biden thumped all the competition in South Carolina. The scale of his victory there scrambles the Democratic race. And Biden’s victory takes more steam out of the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But it is not easy to imagine Biden having the stamina to take on Sanders in a long race.

    The result should worry Democrats who wanted unity. There had been some evidence in the polls that black voters were warming up to Sanders. They did not do so in sufficient numbers in South Carolina to begin making Sanders into a consensus candidate.

    Can Biden sustain the momentum? It’s hard to imagine that he can. This is a Saturday-night victory just days before Super Tuesday. Biden cannot mount much new campaign organization in the upcoming states or process any surge of donations into a surge of advertising. If Sanders wins the preponderance of delegates available next Tuesday, then Biden will just be another non-Sanders candidate, like Pete Buttigieg, who was given a strong look by a particular subset of voters within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile Sanders continues to put points on the board.

    Biden’s biggest difficulty is the media. Biden is now depending on an avalanche of earned media gushing about his “comeback” in the race in South Carolina. But, unlike John McCain in 2008, Biden is a candidate uniquely disliked and distrusted by the liberal media apparatus that would provide him such a narrative. They are very likely not to give it to him.

    Although much has been made about the continuing importance of black voters and black turnout to Democratic general-election victories, I expect to see stories in the next 48 hours about the unique nature of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. There may be an undercurrent of internal Democratic class warfare in these accounts, emphasizing that South Carolina’s Democrats are much less educated, less Latino, and less progressive than the party as a whole. Sandersistas will emphasize that Sanders polls better with blacks in the North.

    Biden’s victory raises serious questions about the role that liberal-leaning media play in the Democratic process. Black voters overwhelmingly rejected the liberal-media-approved alternatives to Bernie — Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. That media class has been whispering about Biden’s unfitness for office.

    Hey, give some credit to those of us in the Vast right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve been shouting about Biden’s unfitness for office! He works with dead people. Hey, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, they’re both Chinese leaders with Xs in their name. More worrying is the fact that there were two different Chinese leaders between the two that Biden’s mind skipped right over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) What?

    What words ordinary people associate with Hunter Biden: corruption, Ukraine, sleaze, cocaine, strippers. What word New York Times associates with Hunter Biden: “art”:

    “Biden Wishes Some Country, Any Country, Would Try To Influence Election For Him.” “Seriously, anyone! Prussia! Czechoslovakia! The Holy Roman Empire! They’re still around, right?”

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He said that bankers are his “peeps” and that the left is ready to set up guillotines.

    “Anytime we’ve had this before, society blows up and they do set up the guillotines and the guillotines don’t have to be chop your head off. They could be confiscatory taxes, they could be seizing the endowments of uh, educational institutions and um, philanthropic organizations, all of which those proposals are out there. You know, you’re going to have to do something about this income inequality and a lot of it comes from zero interest rates.”

    Moneybags isn’t necessarily wrong. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Bloomberg’s China Network:

    The business of the New York City billionaire (yes, another one) gets significant revenue from its financial and data services in China. He is deeply enmeshed with that country’s business and government networks, and it shows.

    Snip.

    If Bloomberg wins, he would arguably be the most pro-China president since an avalanche of such presidents following Richard Nixon, who fatefully opened the American economy to the country in 1972….loomberg generally ignores China’s growing military and diplomatic power, instead focusing his claims on how benefit can be derived from China’s growing economy. In a 2008 Newsweek article, he wrote that a “growing Chinese economy is good for America”. He continued, “we have a stake in working together to solve common problems, rather than trying to browbeat or intimidate the other into action.”

    Here he broadcasts China’s “win-win” rhetoric against “zero-sum” thinking. But in his many comments on China, Bloomberg does not adequately address the zero-sum thinking of China’s own leaders who argue that the Chinese autocratic system is superior to liberal democracy. Neither does he adequately address how China’s growing economy fuels its global military power projection, or the ongoing praxis of Maoist ideology that lauds the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as growing from the barrel of a gun.

    (Caveat: Really not wild about how this website’s bandwidth-and-gimmick heavy idea of webdesign.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “Bloomberg’s $400 million bet looks increasingly likely to flop as he lags in Super Tuesday states.” But he’s not out of it yet:

    The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?

    The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right. And they refuse to accept another lesson of 2016: it’s still possible to fix a party conference, but the party no longer controls the primaries and the debates.

    Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike mocked Donald Trump for even entering the Republican nomination race? Remember how the pontificators decreed that Trump’s lack of political experience disbarred him from the high office of crashing the biggest economy in the world, as the professional politicians managed to do in 2007 and 2008?

    Snip.

    The truth is, Bloomberg is in the Democratic nomination race for as long as he wants to be. The longer he stays in the race, the greater the amount of money he’ll spread around. The more he spends, the more the party managers and the senators and the governors and, though they’re far too high-minded to admit it, the media will come to see his candidacy as a fact that’s going to go the distance, and a reality to which the smart money should accommodate itself in case Bloomberg’s candidacy becomes a payday.

    Bloomberg understands the lessons of 2016 because, like Donald Trump, he understood them long before and was prepared to act accordingly. Trump and Bloomberg know what the rest of the Democratic field know but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, lack the integrity to say. The politicians of America are for sale to their highest donor.

    Bloomberg also shares with Trump a businessman’s awareness of the price of morals and the cost of moralizing. Elizabeth Warren affected outrage about Bloomberg’s alleged jokes about ‘horse-faced lesbians’ and transvestites, but Trump has already proven that these attitudes, fatal though they may be in the politically correct kingdom of the campus, are an inverse form of recommendation: the kind of candidate who refuses to bow to the puritans might also be the kind of president who could refuse the bribes of the donors.

    Heeeeeere’s Bloomy!

  • Update: South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Dropped out. Twitter. Facebook. Dropped out last night, so no in-depth analysis from me this week. 538 thinks this actually hurts Sanders:

    At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?

    The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.

    Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.

    Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.

    Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.

    Beyond mere imitation:

    “Scandal: Buttigieg Forced To Drop Out After Being Outed As A White Male.”

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Everybody who wanted a Hillary Clinton podcast, raise your hand. (pause) OK, that’s Ben Rhodes, Huma Abedin, and Bill Clinton (gets her out of the house). Also: “We Need to Talk About Hillary Clinton’s Disturbing Harvey Weinstein Ties.”
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. While others are campaiging, she’s surfing. At this point I don’t think it makes any measurable difference…
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She might not even win her home state on Super Tuesday, but she’ll probably pick up delegates there. Has a speech interrupted by #BlackLivesMatter, so evidently George Soros and company are still paying those idiots. Editorial on the case for Klobuchar, which is all narrowcasting on mental health and addiction.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look at Bernie’s record:

    Sanders gained steady employment for the first time when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., by ten votes in 1981, at the head of a coalition of leftist civic-action groups against a five-term Democrat who was tacitly endorsed by the Republicans as well. Sanders accused him of being a patronage-tainted stooge of local developers. As mayor, Sanders balanced the municipal budget, attracted a minor-league baseball team (it was called the Vermont Reds not because of Sanders, but because it was a farm team of the Cincinnati Reds). He was a pioneer in community-trust housing, sued to reduce local cable-television rates, and championed an imaginative multi-use redevelopment plan for the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront; his slogan was “Burlington is not for sale.” He worked well with all groups (except some developers) and showed no signs of the authoritarianism of the doctrinaire Left, though he admired some of their most odious exemplars, such as Fidel Castro, whom he unsuccessfully tried to visit. He was reelected three times as a declared socialist, with his vote inching up above 55 percent in 1987, and he had another try at the governor’s chair in 1986, but got only 14 percent of the vote. By this time Sanders was already focused on national government and had invited leftist professor and eminent linguist Noam Chomsky to give a speech in 1985 denouncing American foreign policy. He retired as mayor in 1989 and became a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1989 and at Hamilton College in 1991.

    In 1988, Sanders ran again as an independent for statewide office, as congressman at large for Vermont, and gained 38 percent of the vote, double the vote for the Democratic candidate, and within three points of the winner, Republican Peter Smith. Two years later, he ran again as an independent, but without a Democrat in the race, and this time he entered Congress, aged 50, as a Democratic-left independent fusion candidate. He served eight consecutive terms as a congressman and then in 2006 won the first of three terms (so far) as U.S. senator. It was unjust for Michael Bloomberg to suggest that Sanders was a Communist, as he does believe in free elections. He has stuck to his platform and doggedly fought out his career at the polls through 20 elections between 1972 and 2018, 16 of them statewide, albeit in a small state. It is correct, but unsurprising given that he sat as a socialist in the Senate, to say that he has introduced 364 bills as a senator, of which only three have passed, and two of them were to name post offices.

    Bernie Sanders believes in mobilizing the less advantaged 50.1 percent of the voters in America, as in Vermont and in Burlington, by promising them a sufficient share of the wealth and status of the upper 49.9 percent of society, while assuaging any reservations about confiscating the wealth and income of others by denouncing the system and representing such redistribution as fairness. He wants an environmental revolution, no doubt to reduce pollution as a side benefit, but more importantly as a planet-saving cover for his assault on capitalism and his acquisition of the votes of the relatively disadvantaged. He is making a direct appeal to a majority of Americans by promising them economic benefits wrenched from the hands of the greedy 49.9 percent, or benignly showered upon them by a kindly state, as if the state got its money from anyone but its constituents.

    Sanders keeps saying he’ll attract new voters. New York Times: Yeah, not so much. Here are 55 facts about Bernie Sanders. Nothing says “reasonable centrist” like hanging a Soviet flag in your office. Also: “Throughout his adult life he has denigrated Democrats, calling the party ‘ideologically bankrupt.'” Even Sweden’s Democratic Socialists find Bernie Sanders too far left. More media double standards:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Man of the people:

    WaPo: “Wow, Bernie sure loves him some communist dictators. Who knew?” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “Hey there, Mr. SuperDelegate! How do you feel about Bernie as the nominee?” “Aw, HELLS NO!” Bernie bros show up in the middle of the night with bullhorns outside the homes of DNC members Wow, that’s sure to bring them over to your side! There’s at least one outlet that’s all the way in the tank for Bernie: The Onion. Thou Shalt Not Make Funny Of Thy Holy Socialist.

  • Update: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 29, 2020. The shade of John Connally can rest a little easier tonight: No longer is his spending $11 million to garner one delegate the most embarrassing waste of money in presidential campaign history. Through January 1, Steyer spent $253,718,074 to get zero delegates. Steyer’s campaign never made any sense:

    Even relative to the other longshots, Tom Steyer, who dropped out of the race on Saturday night after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary, was a longshot. Nor was it entirely clear why he was running.

    Steyer, a billionaire from his previous career as a hedge fund manager, spent the years before his presidential run pushing two causes in particular: efforts to mitigate climate change and the impeachment of President Trump. But Steyer’s presidential campaign wasn’t particularly focused on either issue — or anything else. He embraced some more liberal ideas (a wealth tax) and opposed others (Medicare for All). He cast himself as a populist while also emphasizing his business experience. He touted his electability and his commitment to fighting climate change, but not in ways that were particularly unique compared to the other candidates.

    Steyer’s broader electoral strategy, skipping Iowa and New Hampshire while using his fortune to pump ads into states later in the calendar that the other candidates were not focused on yet, was fairly novel at first. And it halfway worked. According to our polling averages, Steyer eked just into the double digits in Nevada and South Carolina. He finished with 5 percent of county convention delegates in Nevada and 11 percent of the vote in South Carolina. That’s more than a lot of candidates managed.

    But it’s not good. And in national polls, Steyer’s support never escaped the low single digits.

    That’s why I always cheered on Steyer’s campaign: The money he spent on it was money he couldn’t spend against Republicans in races where it might have helped viable Democratic candidates win.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren has flip-flopped, fibbed, and pandered her way out of the race:

    Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists — the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer — but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.

    After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.

    Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.

    Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.

    Both she and Gabbard are evidently flying to Michigan before either knows how badly they lost on Super Tuesday.

    • 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:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020)

    • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 1 Comment »

    South Carolina: Biden Wins First Primary…Ever

    Sunday, March 1st, 2020

    Onetime frontrunner Joe Biden has now won his first primary. Biden won with 48.4% of the votes, with Bernie Sanders getting 19.9%, the only two above the 15% threshold for delegates. Biden is predicted to get 34 delegates, and Bernie Sanders 11. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how delegates are earned at the state, congressional district, and state convention level.

    Biden’s victory means we might actually have a real race rather than a Sanders coronation.

    Tom Steyer placed third with 11.3% and withdrew from the race. More on his spectacular flameout in the Clown Car Update tomorrow.

    Pete Buttigieg placed fourth with 8.2%, Elizabeth Warren fifth with 7.1%, Amy Klobuchar sixth with 3.1% and Tulsi Gabbard coming up the rear with 1.4%. Michael Bloomberg wasn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, but he will be on the ballot in most (all?) Super Tuesday states.

    People may not realize is that this isn’t just Joe Biden’s first primary victory of 2020, it’s his first presidential primary victory anywhere, ever.

    Biden withdrew from the 1988 presidential race after admitting that he plagiarized a speech from UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, which is rather like a UK politician plagiarizing Walter Mondale. That incident brought other cases of Biden plagiarism to light.

    In 2008, Biden withdrew after finishing fifth in Iowa. (After eight years as Obama’s Vice President, he would improve his Iowa caucuses finish all the way to fourth this year.)

    Fortunately for Biden, Sanders wasn’t able to appeal to black Democratic voters nearly as well as white voters. In fact, black voters favored Biden four to one over Sanders in South Carolina. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, Biden won the following groups in South Carolina by six percentage points or more:

  • Ages 65 and older:+52
  • Black:+44
  • Oppose changing to single government health plan:+43
  • Attend religious services weekly:+41
  • Top issue: Race relations:+40
  • Democrats:+36
  • Prefer candidate who can beat Donald Trump:+35
  • Military:+35
  • Ages 45 to 64:+35
  • Decided in last few days:+32
  • Economic system needs minor changes:+32
  • Women:+32
  • Decided before the last few days:+31
  • Top issue: Health care:+28
  • Attend religious services occasionally:+28
  • No college degree:+28
  • College graduates:+28
  • Economic system needs overhaul:+27
  • Not military:+27
  • Men:+24
  • Top issue: Climate change:+23
  • Top issue: Income inequality:+22
  • Prefer candidate who agrees with you on issues:+19
  • Somewhat liberal:+19
  • Support changing to single government health plan:+15
  • Very liberal:+13
  • Independents or something else:+12
  • White:+10

    • Wow, how does Bernie lose the socialized medicine and “very liberal” vote? By contrast, the only two groups he won were 17-29 year olds and those who never go to church.

    Now the same media figure who penned “Biden is doomed” pieces are now penning “Biden comeback juggernaut” pieces. But there’s a lot of the race still to run. Biden has the chance to rack up a lot of southern state delegates on Super Tuesday, but Sanders likely cleans up in California, Maine, his native Vermont, Utah, and possibly Colorado and Oklahoma (both of which he won in 2016), while Warren still has a chance to get a “favorite daughter” victory in Massachusetts, and even otherwise-hopeless Klobuchar might get a few delegates in her native Minnesota. Bloomberg’s saturation money bombing campaign is likely to produce some delegates, but where? Buttigieg might pick up a few California delegates, but otherwise I don’t see where he can even sniff a victory on Super Tuesday; if Biden’s viable, then he isn’t.

    A brokered convention is still very much in play.

    Stay tuned…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    The Twitter Primary for February 2020

    Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

    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.

    Six 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:

    1. Bernie Sanders: 10,760,318 (up 372,344)
    2. Joe Biden: 4,189,581 (up 53,012)
    3. Elizabeth Warren: 3,782,699 (up 126,668)
    4. Michael Bloomberg: 2,699,760 (up 299,036)
    5. Pete Buttigieg: 1,737,232 (up 136,279)
    6. Amy Klobuchar: 972,648 (up 96,239)
    7. Tulsi Gabbard: 789,081 (up 14,911)
    8. Tom Steyer: 296,335 (up 17,542)

    Removed from the last update: Andrew Yang, Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, John Delaney

    For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 72,989,096 followers, up 1,258,269 since the last roundup, so once again Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 28,262,527 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

    A few notes:

  • As expected for a frontrunner, Sanders gained the most followers this month.
  • Bloomberg also did very well. We’re finally seeing twitter results for all the megabucks he’s been throwing around.
  • Biden only gained about 1/7th what Sanders gained. Super Tuesday will tell us whether he has enough non-Twitter using voters to overcome his apparent lack of momentum.
  • Gabbard and Steyer have zero momentum.

    • Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 24, 2020

    Monday, February 24th, 2020

    Bernie’s the frontrunner, Bloomberg battered over fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, more slams against #NeverTrump, plus a gratuitous Slashdot joke. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates
    They’re still not through counting in Nevada, but right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Sanders 34
    2. Buttigieg 23
    3. Joe Biden 8
    4. Elizabeth Warren 8
    5. Amy Klobuchar 7

    Polls

    Omitting anything older than Sunday:

  • CBS News: Sanders 28, Warren 19, Biden 17, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. 10,000 registered voters should be enough, but I don’t buy Warren in second place.
  • CBS News (South Carolina): Biden 28, Sanders 23, Steyer 18, Warren 12, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1.
  • Minneapolis Star Tribune (Minnesota): Klobuchar 29, Sanders 23, Warren 11, Biden 8, Bloomberg 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison battleground states: Michigan: Sanders 25, Biden 16, Bloomberg 13, Warren 13, Buttigieg 11, Klobuchar 8.
  • Pennsylvania: Sanders 25, Biden 20, Bloomberg 19, Buttigieg 12, Warren 9, Klobuchar 5.
  • Wisconsin: Sanders 30, Biden 13, Bloomberg 13, Warren 12, Buttigieg 12, Klobuchar 9.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. 52.5% Bernie, 18.9% Bloomberg, 7.5% Buttigieg, 5.8% Biden.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Full blown panic among the Democratic establishment as Sanders takes a firm lead:

    “In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom. I’ve never had a day with so many people texting, emailing, calling me with so much doom and gloom,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way after Sanders’ win in Nevada.

    Bennett said moderates firmly believe a Sanders primary win would seal Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s this incredible sense that we’re hurtling to the abyss. I also think we could lose the House. And if we do, there would be absolutely no way to stop [Trump]. Today is the most depressed I’ve ever been in politics.”

    A renewed sense of urgency washed over establishment Democrats, who fear it’s quickly becoming too late to stop Sanders.

    Biden supporters moved to persuade the party to coalesce around him as the best hope of blunting Sanders’ momentum. A super PAC for Biden renewed discussions with jittery donors who had frozen their financial support for the former vice president as they awaited signs of whether billionaire Mike Bloomberg would emerge as the strongest moderate candidate, according to two donors with knowledge of the talks.

    Among the pitches from pro-Biden forces to donors: Bloomberg could not overcome past policies that alienated minorities, most prominently the stop-and-frisk policing tactic he embraced as New York City mayor. They argued that if Bloomberg stays in the race, Sanders will clean up on Super Tuesday, then it’s game over.

    “For the establishment, I think it’s Joe or bust,” said Simon Rosenberg, New Democrat Network president, who served as a senior strategist for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018.

  • Welcome to the Bernie and Bloomberg show:

    Good heavens. The Democratic presidential primary just took a giant leap beyond pass-the-popcorn stage. (We were doing that from the moment Beto O’Rourke learned the media wasn’t willing to treat him like he had magical powers anymore because he wasn’t running against Ted Cruz.) We were at hit-record on-your-DVRs when it became clear on Iowa caucus night that no one was going to win. No, the Democratic presidential primary has reached a point few of us outside it ever thought it would reach: They’re having a conversation they actually need to have.

    Mike Bloomberg’s campaign just unveiled a web ad making the obvious point that almost everyone else in the Democratic Party would prefer to ignore: There’s a thuggish mentality to Bernie Sanders’s online supporters. After Sanders charged that Bloomberg didn’t have the kind of energy that would be needed to defeat Trump, Bloomberg came back with an ad pointing out that Sanders supporters regularly tweet and offer memes with comments such as “vote Bernie or bad things will happen.” Supporters of Bloomberg are “going on lists.” The 53-second Bloomberg ad calls out Sanders for a seemingly disingenuous or powerless and pointless call for “civil discourse” while his grassroots supporters speak as if they can’t wait to get started on the liquidation of the Kulaks after Election Day.

    Throughout his career, Sanders talked about the value of bread lines in Socialist countries, cheered on the Marxist Sandinistas, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, praised Communist China’s progress in “addressing extreme poverty,” talked about his admiration for Fidel Castro, warmly welcomed the Irish Republican Army, saluted Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan regime, and almost never criticized Nicholas Maduro.

    And now he’s got a lot a slew of people who want to volunteer to serve as his personal KGB and NVKD.

    For a guy who keeps insisting he only wants non-authoritarian socialism, Bernie Sanders has gone out of his way to praise authoritarian socialists. As Jeff Blehar pointed out: “Why honeymoon in Moscow when you can just as easily visit Stockholm instead? C’mon now.” It’s not like Westerners didn’t know about the secret police and show trials and forced labor and the Holomodor and gulags and being sent to Siberia. Praising the Soviet system meant, at minimum, excusing all of that, if not de facto justifying it.

    Meanwhile, the New York Times — that allegedly always failing New York Times — pulls back the curtain on the Bloomberg campaign and reveals that some of the biggest and most influential activist groups on the Left just averted their eyes when it came to Bloomberg, because either they wanted or had grown dependent upon his generous contributions.

    In the fall of 2018, Emily’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily’s List over the years.

    Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior Emily’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.

    Remember, kids, bias in law enforcement is bad, unless it’s happening in the jurisdiction of a wealthy donor, and then it — presto-change-o! — turns into something not important enough to mention

  • Robert Stacy McCain on how “experts” who were horribly wrong are still trying to predict how the race will unfold:

    One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.

    Max Boot bashing snipped. Aw, who am I kidding? Bring it!

    Last week, for example, ex-Republican pundit Max Boot — panicked by the sudden meltdown of Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, which he had failed to anticipate — issued a desperate appeal to prevent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. “Please, Democrats, do the smart thing and coalesce quickly around one of the three moderates — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, or Michael Bloomberg — who are still standing after the first two contests,” Boot begged on Twitter in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, adding, “The future of our democracy may depend on it.”

    Really? Is “our democracy” in such dire peril that it can only be preserved by one of the three Democrats whom Max Boot has named? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that Boot is chiefly concerned about rescuing his own damaged reputation? Boot has squandered his credibility by betting on losing horses for nearly two decades. During the Bush era, Boot left the Wall Street Journal to join the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was among the most sanguine cheerleaders for the Iraq War, failing to anticipate the brutal terrorist insurgency that ultimately destroyed the neoconservative fantasy of turning Mesopotamia into a Western-style liberal democracy.

    It would be difficult to list everything Max Boot has been wrong about over the years, and perhaps it’s easier to just say “everything,” but certainly the Yale-educated CFR senior fellow is not alone in his propensity for false prophecy. He was part of the Never Trump crowd that tried to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination and then, confident that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, yelled “all in,” shoving their entire pile of chips onto a losing bet.

    Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.

    Having lost any ability to influence Republicans, the Never Trump crowd has now begun offering advice to Democrats, and it’s tempting to hope Democrats will listen to these “experts.” If Max Boot has always been wrong about everything, then what should we conclude about his claim that “the smart thing” for Democrats would be to nominate a moderate candidate to oppose Trump in November?

  • Highlights of the Nevada debate, mainly the times the knives went in deepest.
  • “Warren, Biden and Buttigieg dangerously close to going broke. Apart from Bernie and the billionaires, the Democratic presidential field is hurting for cash.”

    Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren each started the month scraping perilously close to the bottom of their campaign bank accounts, posing an existential threat to their candidacies as the Democratic primary goes national.

    They’re up against well-funded machines threatening to dominate the Democratic race: Bernie Sanders, whose recent rise in the polls has come during a major spending streak fueled by his online donors, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose fortune has vaulted him into the middle of the campaign to take on President Donald Trump.

    While Sanders started February with nearly $17 million in the bank, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Thursday night, his next closest rival (nonbillionaire class) was Biden, at $7.1 million. Warren was closest to the red, with just $2.3 million left in her account, while Buttigieg ($6.6 million) and Klobuchar ($2.9 million) were in between.

    The cash crunch comes at a critical time in the race, with nearly one-third of the delegates available in the primary up for grabs on Super Tuesday on March 3 — and only a handful of candidates able to marshal resources to advertise to voters in those 14 states. It’s why super PACs, demonized at the beginning of the 2020 primary, are suddenly jumping in to assist most Democratic candidates, and it’s why the campaigns are now making ever more urgent pleas for financial help.

  • Democrats are dying from exposure:

    The Democrat Party has turned hard left. By doing so, the party has unintentionally exposed itself.

    Ambiguity and obfuscation are the Democrats’ stock in trade. They distort words, and they abuse the English language. They use words and phrases that sound good but are impossible to define — for example, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, climate change, and sustainability.

    Such deception is crucial for the party’s survival. But the deception has become harder to sustain.

    More than anyone else, Donald Trump is responsible for exposing the Democrats. They detest him and his achievements so much that their judgment has been annihilated. With new clarity, their reactions say far more about themselves than him. He is causing them to take leave of their sanity.

    They hate Trump so much that they can’t celebrate his accomplishments. They even demeaned the killing of an evil and savage terrorist, Qassem Soleimani. But their insane hatred has put them in a bind.

    Donald Trump has set up camp inside their brains. They should not have let him do that. They will live to regret it.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Democrats Take Gamble That America Is Finally Ready For A Rich, White President.”

    • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He actually won delegates in Nevada, so he’s got that going for him. Remember how Biden was the “electable” one? Without that imaginary halo, black voters may not stick around. Another Biden senior moment. “Struggling Biden Campaign Now Offering One Month Of Free AOL For Rally Attendance.”
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. The reviews of Bloomberg’s debate performance are not good. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) More on Bloomberg’s debate awfulness, including these comments from departed-candidate-now-CNN-commentator Andrew Yang:

    I think three things happened to Mike tonight. Number one, he just found out he’d make the debate yesterday. There were two times when I wasn’t sure I was going to make the debate and my team got me together to prepare. And you’re really not sure if you’re preparing because you’re not sure if you’re going to be in the debate. So Mike, even though he was I’m sure getting coached and prepared, he’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be in this debate.” And so, I don’t think he was coached hard enough.

    Number two, he was clearly instructed to keep his cool no matter what. But that ended up presenting as lethargic and uninterested for a big chunk of the debate. And the third most telling thing is that if I’m his team, you know he’s going to get a stop and frisk question, like a gender discrimination or mistreatment question. So, you coach him and you have him give you 60, 75-second answers over and over again until he can do it in his sleep. And the fact that he did not have those answers at his fingertips lets me know categorically he was not properly prepared for this debate.

    “I watched 185 Mike Bloomberg Ads.” May God have mercy on his soul.

    Over the course of the past two weeks I sat down and attempted to watch every single ad and ad-adjacent piece of video content that the Bloomberg campaign has released on its official YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. (I only dipped my toes into Instagram, because I had to draw the line somewhere.) Then, after rejecting a few for redundancy, I ranked them from best to worst, based solely on my own idiosyncratic criteria. (I surely missed some, and I stopped trying to find new ones a few days ago, for sanity’s sake.) Why did I do this? Because I wanted to mainline the means by which a late primary entrant with unimaginable sums of money has become a possible Democratic frontrunner.

    Here’s what I learned: For one thing, that watching nearly 200 campaign ads in a short period is sort of like being brainwashed, which I suppose is the goal of all advertising. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m aboard the Bloomberg train, but I think I would feel a little less uncomfortable buying a ticket. Many of the ads are very good. Many more of them are not. The quality of any individual ad, though, is ultimately less important than the breadth of the entire corpus. It’s not that Bloomberg doesn’t have some good ideas—he does—or that he would not be a more competent executive than our current president. The point is that the campaign’s goal is to very quickly achieve messaging saturation in lieu of the monthslong ground game Bloomberg didn’t bother to run. I hate to say it, but it’s working!

    Being from a slate writer, it’s not at all surprising that the ones he likes best are all of the “Orange Man Bad!” variety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Tried of all the Bloomberg bashing? Me neither.

    What a catastrophe Wednesday night was for Mike Bloomberg. The New York plutocrat was kicked in the teeth by Elizabeth Warren in the first minutes — she denounced him as a Trump-like “arrogant billionaire” who called women “horse-faced lesbians” — and never made it back to his feet.

    Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds — Bloomberg’s joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.

    That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.

    Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg’s largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?

    California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a “legendary businessman”: Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies “the integrity we need.”

    Georgia’s Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up “against the wall” in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.

    That’s fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.

    But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing “Paging Michael Bloomberg”? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, “the museum my wife is building,” says Friedman, so there’s that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, “Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?” Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the “dream candidate”?

    These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg “gets things done,” he’s more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the “toughness” to take on Trump.

    Far from showing “toughness,” Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents.

    Snip.

    Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies and has wrapped his hands around autocrats, but for all the fretting about him perhaps not leaving office in 2020 if voted out, it’s Bloomberg who has already tossed term limits aside, and it’s Bloomberg who is openly trying to buy an election. There is zero evidence he will be any less of a threat to democracy or an agent for rapacious corporate interests than Trump.

    Even assuming one could cross into believing that Bloomberg is somehow less revolting or dangerous than the current president — I don’t, but let’s say — Wednesday exploded the idea that he would have a superior chance at beating him than Sanders or a conventional, non-plutocrat politician like Warren or Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg was a total zero charisma-wise, had trouble thinking on his feet, and failed to find even one issue where he sounded confident and convincing. His only distinguishing characteristic is his money, and fuck his money.

    William Jacobson agrees he had a bad night, but disagrees that he’s done as a candidate.

    Bloomberg’s reason to be in this contest is to be the last non-Bernie non-Warren candidate standing. Biden doesn’t have it in him. While he had some good lines, he was a sideshow and a sad figure. If anyone is done after last night, it’s Amy Klobuchar. Her performance was whiny and weak — please Mayor Pete and Elizabeth, stop criticizing me!

    Bloomberg didn’t help himself last night, but I don’t see that he ended his campaign provided he’s still willing to finance it.

    “When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out.”

    I am one of the many women Mike Bloomberg’s company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements. The funny thing is, I never even worked for Bloomberg.

    But my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me.

    In 2012, I was working toward a Ph.D. in sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and my husband, Michael Forsythe, was a lead writer on a Bloomberg News article about the vast accumulation of wealth by relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping, part of an award-winning “Revolution to Riches” series about Chinese leaders.

    Soon after Bloomberg published the article on Xi’s family wealth in June 2012, my husband received death threats conveyed by a woman who told him she represented a relative of Xi. The woman conveying the threats specifically mentioned the danger to our whole family; our two children were 6 and 8 years old at the time. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports a similar encounter in his award-winning book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” when the same woman told Osnos’s wife: “He [Forsythe] and his family can’t stay in China. It’s no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He’ll just be found dead.”

    Snip.

    My husband had been working for many months on another investigative report for Bloomberg about financial ties between one of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin, and the families of senior Communist Party officials, including relatives of Xi. Bloomberg editors had thus far backed the story. A Bloomberg managing editor, Jonathan Kaufman, said in an email in late September 2013, “I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. … It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line,” according to an account published by the Financial Times.

    Then Bloomberg killed the story at the last minute, and the company fired my husband in November after comments by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler were leaked. “If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,” Winkler reportedly said on a company call.

    Mike Bloomberg, then New York City mayor and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, was asked on November 12, 2013, about reports that his company had self-censored out of fear of offending the Chinese government and he dismissed the question.

    “Nobody thinks that we’re wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct,” Bloomberg told a press conference.

    Yet, days after Bloomberg made those comments to reporters in New York, Bloomberg lawyers in Hong Kong threatened to devastate my family financially by forcing us to repay the company for our relocation fees to Hong Kong from Beijing and the advance on my husband’s salary that we took out, leave us with no health insurance or income, and take me to court if I did not sign a nondisclosure agreement — even though I had never been a Bloomberg employee.

    Snip.

    On December 20, they sent a letter to my husband demanding that I sign a nondisclosure agreement. If I didn’t agree, we might owe the company thousands of dollars. I might even have had to pay Bloomberg’s legal bills. The thought of Bloomberg possibly ruining our family financially if I didn’t give in to their threats made me sick, but I was also infuriated that they had kept us in harm’s way after we received threats, forbidden me from speaking publicly about the death threats we received in Beijing, and now were trying to take away my freedom of speech forever.

    It was only when I hired Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong — Albert Ho and Jonathan Man offered me a low rate because it was a “good cause” — that Bloomberg finally backed off. In the meantime, they had sent me several more threatening letters. One letter from Mayer Brown JSM on January 8, 2014, spelled out that “by virtue of the knowledge that she retains (in her head) of our client’s [Bloomberg’s] Confidential Information she has an ongoing duty of confidentiality to our client.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Vox writer falls in line with the amazing new “Gosh, billionaires are actually great and awesome!” consensus among Democrats. More Bloomberg quotes: “Black And Latino Males Don’t Know How To Behave In The Workplace.” Sure, we could give that some context to make it sound less racist, but we also know that courtesy is never extended to someone with an (R) after their name.

    Bloomy slams Bernie bros:

    Ann Althouse was not impressed with Bloomberg in the debate. “He’s dull and he looks like death.” Bloomberg racks up three congressional endorsements: “Reps. Nita Lowey of New York, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Pete Aguilar of California.” Daily Caller laughably calls them “major” endorsements, but Aguilar is the only one I already had a tag for. “After Taking Brutal Beating In Debate, Bloomberg Rushed To Tiny Hospital In Tiny Ambulance.” “He’s recovering nicely in a matchbox.” “We are all individuals!”

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “South Bend Residents Have a Message for America: Don’t Elect Pete Buttigieg.”

    Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”

    “Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.

    “The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”

    Not coming in second place, Mayo Pete thinks the results must be wrong and wants Nevada Democrats to count votes again until he’s on top:

    Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is claiming there are inconsistencies in the reported results in Nevada, as the former South Bend, Ind., mayor tries to claw his way to second place in Saturday’s caucuses.

    In a letter sent to Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II and obtained by POLITICO, Buttigieg’s campaign is calling for the state party to publicly release a tranche of data and recalculate some precincts, a call the state party largely rebuffed.

    “In light of material irregularities pertaining to the process of integrating early votes into the in-person precinct caucus results, we request that you” release early and in-person votes, correct “errors identified by presidential campaigns” and “explain anomalies in the data,” Buttigieg’s national ballot access and delegate director Michael Gaffney wrote in the letter sent late Saturday.

    Buttigieg’s campaign is not challenging Bernie Sanders’ runaway win in the state. Instead, the Buttigieg camp is pointing to the battle further down the standings.

    “Given how close the race is between second and third place, we ask that you take these steps before releasing any final data,” Gaffney wrote.

    Those “close second” finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire already seem like ancient news…

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But: “Ex-Bill Clinton adviser: Bloomberg and Hillary cooking up ‘scheme’ for her to become Democratic nominee.” Not buying it, but enjoy another week in the clown car, Grandma Death.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why I’m voting for Tulsi Gabbard.” Enjoy that tiny little breadcrumb, Gabbard fans. Campaigned in Colorado. Campaigned in Utah.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s mired in single digits but the few news stories I’m finding focued on her are like “Watch Amy Klobuchar’s full speech after Nevada caucus defeat” (No), “Video: Senator Amy Klobuchar speaks with the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board” (No), and “President Amy Klobuchar: Here’s what it would mean for California” (Yes, we know weed is legal there.) Ah, this promises some blue-on-blue action: “How Amy Klobuchar’s Signature Bill Became a Disaster for Her Own Party.” Alas, no, it’s just another “she treats her staff like shit” piece, this time by throwing them under the bus for some technical abortion language in a bill the writer doesn’t bother to detail.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 confirms it: BSD is dying Sanders is the frontrunner. “His chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates are up 6 points, to 46 percent.” “Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucus; MSNBC, #NeverTrump Hardest Hit“:

    This is a decisive victory for Sanders, who more than doubled Biden’s total, and a major setback for Warren and Klobuchar, both of whom needed to show some kind of momentum to keep their campaigns viable. While it is possible that Biden could still bounce back with a win next Saturday in the South Carolina primary, even the most enthusiastic supporters of Warren and Klobuchar must see they now have no path to the nomination. Their money is running out, whereas Buttigieg (who at least got a narrow win in Iowa) could continue if he does well on Super Tuesday. Unless two or three of the non-Sanders candidates drops out before Super Tuesday, however, there will still be multiple candidates splitting the “Anybody But Bernie” vote with billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and that means Sanders could emerge with an insurmountable delegate lead after March 3. And this means . . . panic time!

    James Carville and Chris Matthrews meltdown bits snipped.

    Why are the MSNBC talking heads so despondent? Because they are convinced that if Democrats nominate Sanders, they’ll alienate middle-class moderate voters and thereby guarantee Trump’s re-election. I wish I believed this as much as they do, but can we trust the conventional wisdom dispensed by cable-news “experts”? These are the same people who thought Trump could never win the GOP nomination, and then believed Hillary Clinton could easily defeat Trump, so when they start predicting future political events, my hunch is they’re wrong again.

    Glenn Reynolds seems to share my concern: “You can assume that Trump would crush Bernie, and you’re probably right. But any major-party nominee, however lame, has a nonzero chance of becoming President, and that’s bad when we’re talking about a commie.”

    As much as I want to believe Trump would score a slam-dunk victory over Sanders in November, I’m disturbed by the fact that MSNBC talking-heads have the same opinion. Maybe I’m just being a worry-wart about this, though. In an all-out battle between a socialist Democrat and a capitalist Republican, Trump wins — if the American people are still the American people. If Bernie were to win, we might as well call ourselves “Southern Canada.” Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and the cruise-ship contingent of #NeverTrump ex-Republicans have reached a fatal reckoning; having committed to 100% opposition to Trump, they must now find a way to make the “principled conservative” argument for Bernie Sanders. They didn’t have much credibility left to lose, but once you sell your soul to Pierre Omidyar, you must pay that debt in full.

    Heh:

    Bloomy connects on a blow against Sanders:

    More tweets:

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s qualified for the next debate…which is tomorrow. Steyer’s spending is cutting into Biden’s black support. “The economy sucks! Who are you going to believe, me, or those lying statistics?”
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. In a shocking and completely unexpected turnabout, Warren now says that SuperPAC money is just fine and dandy! She calls Bloomberg “ a big threat — not a tall one, but a big one.” I’m sure the media that’s Margaret Dumonted an endless stream of “Well I never!”s over Trump tweets will quickly chastise Warren for this vicious personal attack.

    🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗

    • 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:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…

    • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 2 Comments »

    « Older Entries