Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Yang’
Monday, February 3rd, 2020
It begins!
The Iowa Caucuses are finally here today, Bernie panic wracks the DNC, a key poll mysteriously vanishes, Delaney drops Out, and one Biden staffer provides handy voter appreciation. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
A special shout-out to longtime readers who have been with me on this journay since January of last year. What a long, strange trip it’s been!
Polls
Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 28, Biden 21, Buttigieg 15, Warren 14, Klobuchar 11, Yang 5, Steyer 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Patrick 0.
CBS: Biden 25, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 21, Warren 16, Klobuchar 5.
Civiqs (Iowa): Sanders 28, Warren 21, Buttigieg 15, Biden 15, Klobuchar 8, Yang 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2. Hard left lean and sample size of 615.
Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 25, Sanders 20, Steyer 18, Warren 11, Buttigieg 7, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2. Bad news for Biden from his “firewall” state, as Steyer is making inroads into the black vote.
New York Times (Iowa): Sanders 25, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Warren 15, Klobuchar 8, Steyer 3, Yang 3.
Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 30, Biden 21, Klobuchar 13, Warren 11, Buttigieg 10, Steyer 5, Yang 5, Gabbard 5, Delaney 1, Patrick 0, Bennet 0.
USA Today/Suffolk (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6.
Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Biden 22, Warren 16, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5.
American Research Group (New Hampshire): Sanders 28, Biden 13, Buttigieg 12, Warren 11, Gabbard 8, Klobuchar 7, Yang 5, Patrick 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg (write-in) 2, Bennet 1. Sample size of 600.
Berkeley IGS (California): Sanders 26, Warren 20, Biden 15, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2.
Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah): Sanders 27, Warren 14, Biden 12, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1. Tiny poll sample size of 132. You would think this was unrepresentative, but Bernie crushed Hillary in Utah in 2016, winning 79% of the vote. I think Utah has moved to a primary system this year (and one run by the state, not by the political parties).
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Sanders leads Biden by 8 points here as well, Bloomberg is third, and Hillary Clinton is favored over Buttigieg, Yang or Klobuchar (in that order).
Pundits, etc.
Steyer and Bloomberg dropped $340 million in Q4.
Democrat presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent a combined $340 million in the final quarter of 2019, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data released on Friday.
Both billionaire candidates far outspent their Democrat rivals, according to the FEC. Former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, whose campaign is almost entirely self-funded, spent more than $188 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 and ended the fundraising period with $12 million cash available.
Steyer, a California businessman, spent approximately $153 million in the fourth quarter and ended it with $5.4 million cash available.
The figures from the FEC show that both billionaire Democrats spent more money on their campaigns than the top four Democrat contenders combined.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spent slightly over $50 million in the fourth quarter, while former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg spent $34 million.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spent $33.7 million while former Vice President Joe Biden spent more than $23.3 million during the fourth quarter.
The DNC hates Sanders so much they’re actually talking about changing the rules back so superdelegates can screw him:
A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention.
In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.
“I do believe we should re-open the rules. I hear it from others as well,” one DNC member said in a text message last week to William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee who does not support re-opening the rules.
Owen, who declined to identify the member, said the member added in a text that “It would be hard though. We could force a meeting or on the floor.”
Even proponents of the change acknowledge it is all but certain not to gain enough support to move past these initial conversations. But the talks reveal the extent of angst that many establishment Democrats are feeling on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.
Sanders is surging and Joe Biden has maintained his lead nationally, but at least three other candidates are widely seen as viable. The cluster raises the specter of a convention requiring a second ballot.
If Sanders wins the Iowa caucuses on Monday and continues to gain momentum, it is possible he could arrive at the convention with the most delegates — but without enough to win the nomination on the first ballot. It is also possible that he and Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive, could arrive at the convention in second and third place, but with more delegates combined than the frontrunner.
If, on the second ballot, superdelegates were to throw their support to someone else, tipping the scales, many moderate Democrats fear the upheaval that would cause could weaken the eventual nominee.
Democratic insiders enter the Danger Panic Zone over Sanders. “Democrats have valid reasons to be concerned. Bernie Sanders may play well to the Ocasio-Cortez wing of their party. Still, it’s hard to picture voters abandoning the booming Trump economy for the radical changes Bernie is proposing in a general election.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks its going to come down to Biden and Bernie:
I’d bet on the field to narrow to these two for two reasons.
First, there’s a tendency for the top-polling candidates going into Iowa to overperform in the final results, because the caucusing process ultimately forces supporters of low-performing candidates to cast their votes for stronger ones. Second, the possibility of Bernie’s winning may drive a stampede toward Biden or vice versa.
The emergence of a head-to-head race between Biden and Sanders would immediately clarify the choices for Democrats.
One septuagenarian — Sanders — has recently suffered a heart attack. The other septuagenarian — Biden — frequently seems to have senior moments in the middle of his sentences. A race between these two could eliminate age as a relevant dynamic, leaving clear questions of electability and ideology on the table.
And what then? On one side there is Biden, the more moderate Democrat who scares nobody by design — he’s framed his entire campaign as a return to normalcy — but doesn’t excite progressive activists. On the other side there is Sanders, whose has argued in recent debates that he is electable because he has the backing of a large, young, grassroots movement whose enthusiasm will become contagious. The viability of one could drive the viability of the other.
After many pointless hours debating the ins and outs of Platonic health-care reforms that will never be implemented and many pointless minutes worrying about personality, a Biden–Sanders clash would focus the race on the only questions that really matter to Democrats: Should the party move to the left or to the center?
How should other candidate stop Bernie? I don’t know, maybe by actually attacking him? Too bad none of them have tried that.
Still, there is reason to believe that an attack on Sanders’ resistance to math would contain his rise. The Democratic Party has plenty of moderates who get nervous about overpromising and overreaching. Even Sanders’ best national poll, a 3-point lead within the margin of error in a CNN survey last week, shows the combined support of him and Warren to be 3 points less than the combined support of the four leading moderates: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg. If Sanders can be shown to be unwilling to grapple with the finer points of policymaking, that would likely hamper his ability to forge a coalition beyond his initial democratic-socialist base, which would in turn prevent him from securing the nomination.
But a bigger shadow lurks over the Democratic field: the ghost of the Republican presidential campaign of 2016, when the candidates (like Jeb Bush) who attacked the outsider with the intense fan base lived to regret it. If you attack Sanders, and his democratic socialist platform, as mathematically challenged, you are not just attacking Sanders. You are attacking democratic socialism itself. And if you’re in a party with a young wave of democratic socialists as its newest and most unpredictable force, you risk disaster.
No one can say with certainty how many Sanders supporters would abandon the Democratic nominee if he lost the nomination. But we do know that his supporters are, on average, less loyal to the Democratic Party than voters who prefer other candidates. The Economist’s data guru G. Elliott Morris reported, based on two months of his operation’s polling toward the end of last year, that 87 percent of Sanders supporters would stick with the Democrats if he wasn’t the nominee. That’s a lot, but more than 90 percent of Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren supporters said they would vote for the Democrats this fall, no matter what. And just a few percentage points, if even that, could decide the presidency.
A look at why the frontrunners aren’t attacking others in their “lane”:
The relative tameness of this year’s race also stems from the candidates’ overlapping set of assumptions about how the primary will play out after Iowa. Biden’s camp is convinced that if the former vice president can’t win Iowa—and they are not sure he can if turnout is high—a Sanders win would be the best outcome for him. The reason, according to interviews with top Biden advisers, is that they believe Sanders has a ceiling on his support that will impede his ability to clinch the nomination. They believe that a victory for Warren, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar would pose a greater threat—a win for the latter two would also represent a meteor strike on the moderate voters Biden is relying upon.
The trio of Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are lagging behind Sanders and Biden, but they are betting that Iowa and the New Hampshire primary after that will not winnow the field as quickly as in the past. Instead, all three campaigns generally believe that the heightened media attention on the race, and the rise of online fundraising, will allow them to survive regardless of whether they win, or even finish in the top tier, in the first two states. “The idea that this is going to fit into the same mold as every other campaign you have covered in the past … is inaccurate,” Michael Halle, a senior adviser for Buttigieg told reporters this weekend.
But Iowa’s stakes may be higher than the candidates’ cautious strategy would seem to indicate. [Jeff] Link is one of several Democratic strategists who thinks that all of the campaigns are underestimating how powerfully the Iowa results may reshape the rest of the race. He believes the risks for the others are especially great if Sanders wins, because a victory here would likely further turbocharge the senator’s fundraising operation, which is already swamping those of his rivals. “There’s a kind of lack of urgency between Warren and Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar,” Link said. “Anyone who thinks it’s okay to let Sanders win anything is miscalculating.”
More on the fear of a Bernie Planet:
Dan “Baseball Crank” McLaughlin looks at the Democratic primary calendar:
Barring a last-minute surge in Iowa by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesotan who has banked her whole campaign on her neighboring state, this is a four-horse race that increasingly looks like it could quickly become a two-horse race between Biden and Bernie Sanders. But funny things can happen at the last minute in Iowa. The most stunning late surge was in the 2012 Republican caucus, when Rick Santorum won after being in sixth place and single digits in the polling averages as late as a week before the vote.
In December 1975, a month before Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucus with 27 percent of the vote, a nationwide Gallup poll showed Hubert Humphrey in first place at 30 percent, George Wallace at 20 percent, Henry “Scoop” Jackson at 10 percent, and Birch Bayh at 5 percent. Some 29 percent of Democrats said they would back Ted Kennedy if he ran. Carter wasn’t even on the radar. Carter was in better shape in the Des Moines Register’s Iowa polling, but his victory still totally overturned the race. National poll leaders in January lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, 2004, 1992, 1988, and 1972. Polling has gotten more sophisticated since then, but large fields and sequential primaries make it a lot less reliable than general-election polling.
Iowa is particularly unsettled in this year’s Democratic race because of the way the 15 percent threshold interacts with the caucus process. Unlike the 2016 Republican race, and even many past Democratic primaries, there are no winner-take-all Democratic primaries this year. Various states have different ways of dividing up delegates — some statewide, some on a district-by-district basis — but many have a 15 percent or similar threshold that prevents minor candidates from gathering any delegates. And Iowa’s caucus rules have a particular wrinkle: In each individual polling place, after the original votes are counted, all the candidates below 15 percent are eliminated and their supporters must switch to one of the remaining candidates (or band together to make one of the under-15% candidates viable) if they want their votes counted. That means that even a candidate who wins the statewide popular vote may be effectively wiped off the ballot in some polling stations. Second choices could decide Iowa.
Go over and read it for a long, detailed, and hard-to-summarize breakdown of the race. “After South Carolina, the calendar and the map are new, and they could make this race less predictable than in years past. Buckle up.”
It’s going to be hard for Democrats to win the White House without Pennsylvania, so maybe they shouldn’t have promised to put hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians out of work with a fracking ban.
A look at how the race got where it is today:
Take your mind back there. Miami. June 2019. Two nights, 20 candidates. A portrait of the Democratic Party in miniature assembled onstage, mics on, ready to debate.
They are U.S. senators and House members, governors and a mayor, a refreshingly human economic futurist and a self-help guru best known as Oprah’s spiritual adviser. They are young and old, black and white and Asian and brown, wealthy and in debt, gay and straight, war veterans, hailing from all parts of the country. They are, as Democratic chairman Tom Perez proudly points out, “the most diverse field in our nation’s history.”
Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?
There was a sense of possibility and optimism on that stage. Fast forward six months. The leading Democratic candidates are all white. Three are men, and three are older than 70. Meanwhile two old white billionaires are buying their way into contention by spending hundreds of millions of their personal fortunes. At this point four years ago, the top candidates for the Republican nomination were more diverse than the Democratic frontrunners today. Many politicians hailed as the Future of The Party — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke — are gone, exiting the race before a single vote was cast.
Reasons: Trump is inside their heads driving them crazy, the DNC rules ostensibly designed to make the contest fairer backfired spectacularly, and the press sucks. Left out is the fact that all the dropped out candidates sucked to various degrees as well…
President Trump slams Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Sanders at Iowa rally. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
538 does a district by district breakdown in Iowa.
Behold the totally fair and in-no-way-biased coverage of the Warren-and-Klobuchar-endorsing New York Times:
Unverified rumor thus far:
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still all in on New Hampshire. So we have to wait until at least February 11 to bid goodbye to him.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s betting on Catholics in Iowa. How many of those haven’t been completed alienated by the Democratic Party by now? Amalgamated Transit Union backs Biden, after backing Bernie in 2016. Just how much muscle organized labor still has left remains to be seen. Sanders supporters arrested for trespassing at Biden’s Iowa HQ. (Hat tip: TheDonald.win, which appears to be where the Reddit group went after they got siloed in the isolation tank.) Score this one for Joe:
Panders to Obama voters by suggesting Michelle as veep pick. Hunter Biden magnanimously agrees to actually heed a judge’s order and pay child support. Now enjoy some scurrilous, unfounded gossip that’s still completely hilarious:
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bloomberg dropped $200,114,049.18 on his own campaign. The DNC changed the debate rules to make it easier for Moneybags Bloomberg to qualify:
The Democratic National Committee eliminated Friday a fundraising requirement to qualify for the February debate in Las Vegas, potentially paving the way for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to make the stage for the first time.
Under the new criteria, candidates can meet either a delegates threshold or a polling threshold to qualify for the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, just three days before the Nevada caucuses.
Specifically, candidates must have been allocated at least one pledged delegate at the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.
Candidates can also qualify by reaching 10 percent support in at least four national polls or surveys of South Carolina and Nevada released between Jan. 15 and Feb. 18.
Alternatively, a candidate can qualify for the debate by reaching 12 percent support in two sanctioned national or early-state surveys.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Slipping Buttigieg under heavy pressure to finish strong in Iowa.” Yeah, if he doesn’t at least place, with his money and organizational advantages, I don’t think he has a prayer; Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg can all solider on without Top Two finishes in either Iowa or New Hampshire; Buttigieg can’t. He already has five town halls scheduled in New Hampshire. Was on This Week, along with Yang. He doesn’t think there’s any room for pro-life Democrats in the party. (Hat tip: Mike Huckabee.) Not just pandering, but really stupid and ineffective pandering:
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But why won’t she shut up? Is she angling for a veep spot? Does she not realize how much of the Democratic base actively hates her? “Hillary’s ego blinds her to the fact that nobody in either party wants to hear from her, and the fact that criticizing Bernie just reminds his supporters that the Democratic machine is out to get him.” She refused Tulsi Gabbard’s process servers. I was unaware you could even do that. Are we a nation of laws or a ruling nomenklatura?
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped Out January 31, 2020. I mean, why not wait three days until the Iowa caucuses give you an excuse to bow out anyway? Did he hit a self-imposed spending limit? Did he have no staffers left? Did the campaign office space lease agreement run out in January? Could he not book the Dubuque Pizza Hut banquet room for the “victory” party Tuesday night? This is like getting 100 yards from the end of a marathon, and then going “Yeah, screw it, I’m done.”
In fact, most Democratic voters didn’t even know who Delaney was. In a recent average of national polls that asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the candidates, less than 40 percent of Democrats knew enough about Delaney to have an opinion of him. (This was also true of other long shot candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.)
Delaney did have millions at his disposal to self-fund his bid, which probably helped him stay in the race longer than some other also-rans, but unlike billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, his ample cash reserves didn’t help him make headway in the race. But like Bloomberg, he was running as a moderate candidate. In fact, Delaney’s attempt to contrast himself with the progressives in the field during the second Democratic debate in July maybe gave him his one big “moment” in the race. It ultimately didn’t help his poll numbers, but in that debate he got a lot of airtime attacking the Medicare-for-all health care plans of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, illustrating a major division between the moderate and progressive “lanes” of the Democratic Party.
Delaney was probably the least likely of all Democratic candidates to destroy America’s economy. No wonder he never had a chance…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. So why did CNN snub her? Other than the fact they’re total garbage? She campaigned in New Hampshire.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s on the rise in Iowa.
A late surge for a candidate in Iowa wouldn’t be unprecedented either. Some notable past shifts include the 2004 Democratic race, in which John Kerry and John Edwards ended up capturing 38 and 32 percent of the vote, respectively, after polling at 24 and 19 percent going into the caucuses. And then, of course, there is the 2012 GOP contest, when Rick Santorum made a remarkably late push and actually won the caucuses with around 25 percent support despite polling at 13 percent going into caucus night.
I don’t think she can win or place, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see her pick up delegates, and to do better than Warren and/or Buttigieg. She campaigned in Iowa and said she was going to campaign in New Hampshire no matter what. Doesn’t think Sanders should lead the ticket. (Hat tip: CutJibNews on Ace of Spades HQ.)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Focusing on New Hampshire and South Carolina. Lasting longer than Cory Booker is no achievement if you can’t best his 3%…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bernie’s brand is left but not woke:
Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot. Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal. Sanders may have outgrown the revolutionary socialism of his youth. He seems to think in terms of ameliorating bourgeois hegemony rather than overthrowing it. He is not necessarily hostile to transgender claims. He has co-sponsored the current version of the Equality Act, which includes transgender people in the classes to be provided equal public accommodation and to be protected from job discrimination. But Sanders certainly does seem to think that such concerns are secondary. Compare and contrast the answers that he and Elizabeth Warren gave at the December 19 Democratic debate in Los Angeles.
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked:
Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, [most] of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil-rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?
Sanders’s answer quickly pivoted away from the cultural to the material.
We need moral leadership in the White House. We need a president who will do everything humanly possible to end all forms of discrimination against the transgender community, against the African American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country.
But above and beyond providing the moral leadership of trying to bring our people together, what we also need for the transgender community is to make sure that health care is available to every person in this country, regardless of their sexual orientation or their needs.
And that is why I strongly support and have helped lead the effort for a Medicare for All single-payer program, which will provide comprehensive health care to all people, including, certainly, the transgender community.
The question went next to Warren. She plunged directly into the question of identity.
The transgender community has been marginalized in every way possible. And one thing that the president of the United States can do is lift up attention, lift up their voices, lift up their lives.
Here’s a promise I make. I will go to the Rose Garden once every year to read the names of transgender women, of people of color, who have been killed in the past year. I will make sure that we read their names so that as a nation we are forced to address the particular vulnerability on homelessness. I will change the rules now that put people in prison based on their birth sex identification rather than their current identification. I will do everything I can to make sure that we are an America that leaves no one behind.
Sanders checked a box of support for the identity issue, then returned to regular programming. For Warren, the identity issue was the regular programming.
Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”
The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.
Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. [Should have put a “David Frum Warning” beforehand. -LP] In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.
The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.
Bernie’s human shield of Millennials:
A specter is haunting centrist Democrats — the specter of a Bernie Sanders nomination. As the democratic socialist has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and narrowed Joe Biden’s advantage in national polls, the high clerics of Clintonism have begun calling for a (political) counterrevolution.
“People need to start taking Bernie pretty seriously — there is a really substantial risk of him becoming unstoppable if he wins these early states by large numbers,” Matt Bennett, vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way, told the Washington Post this week. Bennett went on to chastise his fellow moderates for getting anxious instead of organized, lamenting, “It’s not like our phone is ringing from people saying, ‘Let’s do something.’ ”
Third Way has been flooding influential Iowa Democrats’ in-boxes with memos on Sanders’s general-election liabilities and seeding similar stories in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the Democratic Majority for Israel super-PAC is warning Iowans that a vote for a septuagenarian socialist with a heart condition is, in effect, a vote for four more years of President Trump. But a broad-based, deep-pocketed “Anyone But Sanders” push has yet to take shape. Allies of Michael Bloomberg have indicated that the billionaire’s burgeoning campaign will transform itself into such an entity, if necessary. If Biden suffers damage in the early states, the last thing he’ll need is for Bloomberg, an alternative anti-left candidate, to ramp up his (already gargantuan) ad spending, and likely eat into Uncle Joe’s margins on Super Tuesday. But by the time Iowa and New Hampshire are in the books, it may already be too late
Snip.
Even if one accepts Third Way’s memo as gospel, the hazards of mounting a massive “Anyone But Sanders” campaign still outweigh the benefits.
The reason for this is simple: Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters.
The age gap between the support bases of the two leading Democratic candidates is unprecedented in scale. According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero. In other national surveys, age polarization among Democratic primary voters tends to be a bit less severe. But in virtually all of them, Biden’s support among the young is historically low for a front-running candidate, while Sanders’s popularity with the contingent is exceptionally high.
It will be hard enough for Biden to mobilize younger voters after beating Sanders in a relatively friendly primary fight, free of conspicuous interference from Establishment forces. If Uncle Joe has to win millennial and Gen-Z hearts and minds — after riding to the nomination on the back of a wall-to-wall anti-Bernie ad blitz from Third Way and friends — his task may be impossible. Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago. One recent Emerson College poll found that only 53 percent of Sanders’s current supporters plan to vote for the Democratic nominee in November, no matter who that person turns out to be.
Eh, I don’t find this argument entirely persuasive. Young voters are notoriously bad at actually showing up at the polls. What they gain in youth votes they lose in the “not voting for crazy socialists” vote. Besides, we should realize that the DNC was going to go all in to screw Bernie no matter what anyway… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Would Trump-Sanders 2020 be a replay of Nixon McGovern 1972?
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Steyer raised $156,640,495.93 in Q4, though only a million of that came from other people. He’s up to third in South Carolina, which speaks to the power of money. He’s so horrible a candidate that buying his way into vague contention is an actual achievement…
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren’s tranny pander is pure cringe. Even Bill Maher slammed her for it. Shoe0nHead slams Warren the snake. (Shoe used to stan for Tulsi, but now stans for Bernie.) Ted Cruz said her impeachment shenanigans helped insure President Trumps’ acquittal.
Ms. Warren’s question during Thursday’s session sought to impugn the credibility of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. by saying his credibility was on the line in the impeachment trial.
Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said the question seemed desired to boost Ms. Warren’s struggling presidential campaign, but its immediate effect was to irk key GOP senators who realized Democrat’s‘ strategy to prolong the trial was centered on trying to drag the chief justice ever deeper into the action.
“Elizabeth Warren helped defeat the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Mr. Cruz said late Friday on a new episode of his podcast “The Verdict.”
“That stunt helped deliver the votes of Lisa and Lamar.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Transcript of an Andrew Yang speech in Iowa. There are actual interesting nuggets of truth in here.
So I went to our leaders in D.C. and I asked them, “What are we going to do to help our people manage this time – this transition?” And what do you think the folks in D.C. said to me when I said, “What are we going to do?” The three big responses I got from the folks in D.C. were these: No. 1: “We cannot talk about this”; No. 2: “We should study this further”; and No. 3: “We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.” How many of you have ever heard something like that?
But I’m a numbers guy and I looked at the studies. So I said to the folks who said we’re going to educate and retrain everyone, I said: “Hey, do you want to know what the effectiveness rate of government-funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs?”
You all want to guess what those effectiveness rates were? So, I’m anchoring you very low, so you know it’s low, but you also know it’s low because you’re human beings and you know what other human beings are like, and if you had 1,000 manufacturing workers walk out of the factory that closed, they don’t all say, “Alright, I’m ready for my coding skills training.” And they don’t go in being like, “Oh, this is what I wanted to do the whole time!” And six weeks later they aren’t being like, “Time to get hired by I.B.M.” I mean, we know that’s ridiculous.
The real-life success rates of those government-funded retraining programs were between 0 and 15 percent. Almost half of the workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry in the Midwest never worked again. We then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities because half of them filed for disability and they did not find new work. When I said this to the folks in D.C., they said, “Well I guess we’ll get better at the retraining programs then.” And then they went back to their lunch.
Watching Yang tour Iowa.
The centerpiece of Andrew Yang’s final push in Iowa is a 17-day-bus tour: Bouncing around rural Iowa, hitting three to five towns a day, instilling the fear of automation and the hope of a large monthly check from the government in would-be caucus-goers.
The route of the tour is an indication of the campaign’s strategy to try to nibble around the edges, popping up in areas that aren’t as delegate-rich but that other candidates aren’t paying as close attention to. The expectations for Yang are so low, his advisers know, that he just needs to surprise.
Meat of piece snipped. Near the end:
Publicly, Yang tells Iowans he’s ready to “win in Iowa,” but behind the scenes his campaign is under no illusions. They feel confident their rural strategy can yield a fifth-place finish and give them enough to move on to New Hampshire with their heads held high.
Gets endorsed by the Lowell Sun. I don’t think newspaper endorsements move the needle, but endorsing someone outside the ostensible frontrunners is unusual. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.) This is a pretty good get for your phone bank:
Why Yang won’t win the nomination, and why he might be formidable if he did, in one tweet:
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
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)
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. But! There was actually a report floated that he was considering getting in, that he actually had to come out and deny. Maybe, like Hillary, he’s secretly hoping to be called on at a brokered convention. Even better: Why not both? CLINTON-KERRY 2020: BECAUSE WE REALLY REALLY HATE YOU
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)
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
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Dave Chappelle, David Frum, Democrats, Deval Patrick, DNC, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, fundraising, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Iowa, Joe Biden, Matt Bennett, Media Watch, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, New Hampshire, New York Times, Pennsylvania, Pete Buttigieg, ShoeOnHead, Social Justice Warriors, South Carolina, Superdelegates, Ted Cruz, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, unions
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, unions | No Comments »
Sunday, February 2nd, 2020
Not a Hardy Boys mystery:
The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned Saturday evening.
Nothing is more important to the Register and its polling partners than the integrity of the Iowa Poll. Today, a respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered, which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.
While this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution, the partners made the difficult decision not to move forward with releasing the poll. The poll was the last one scheduled by the polling partners before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses, which are Monday.
J. Ann Selzer, whose company conducts the Iowa Poll, said, “There were concerns about what could be an isolated incident. Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll. The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.”
Check that out: a respondent.
One.
Something’s not adding up.
According to Politico:
The New York Times reported that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained the former mayor’s name was left off the list of candidates in one interview, leading the media partners to throw the poll out entirely.
Again, who cancels a poll because one partisan complained something was off? More:
Underscoring the attention paid to the poll, CNN had planned an hourlong TV program around its release. Instead, at 9 p.m. Eastern, the network’s political director, David Chalian, went on the air to explain why the poll wasn’t being issued.
Something stinks here. My guess is they saw something in the poll they didn’t want the public to see, mostly likely that Bernie Sanders was clobbering the other candidates, and CNN told them to pull the plug.
Some tweets (usual rumor caveats apply):
This has been making the rounds a lot. I’m suspicious of it, especially because why would they use everyone’s last names except for Bernie?
Reminder: That same poll missed a late Ted Cruz surge four years ago. Given the way the DNC and media put it’s thumb on the scales for Hillary, and how consistently the media has destroyed what little credibility it still had left pushing every anti-Trump narrative that flowed down the sewer pipe, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen. Our default assumption now is that you’re lying for partisan advantage. Especially with CNN. You’re worthless garbage and we hope AT&T fires everyone and shuts down your entire network in embarrassment.
Right now this poll is 92% not believing the Register‘s explanation:
Finally: OK, I laughed:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, CNN, Democrats, Des Moines Register, DNC, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, John Delaney, media bias, Media Watch, Pete Buttigieg, polls
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Tuesday, January 28th, 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.
Five months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
- Bernie Sanders: 10,387,974 (up 250,595)
- Joe Biden: 4,136,560 (up 91,552)
- Elizabeth Warren: 3,656,031 (up 82,196)
- Michael Bloomberg: 2,400,724 (up 36,373)
- Pete Buttigieg: 1,600,953 (up 28,982)
- Andrew Yang: 1,207,702 (up 83,546)
- Amy Klobuchar: 876,409 (up 37,138)
- Tulsi Gabbard: 774,170 (up 10,490)
- Tom Steyer: 278,793 (up 25,326)
- Deval Patrick: 53,931 (up 1,412)
- Michael Bennet: 44,611 (up 1,799)
- John Delaney: 38,213 (up 198)
Removed from the last update: Cory Booker, Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 71,730,827 followers, up an astounding 3,691,379 since the last roundup, so not only has Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined, the impeachment farce seems to have tripled the number of followers he usually gains. To put it another way, Trump gained more followers in a month than Warren has total followers. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,975,624 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Bernie is having a great month. In addition to now topping polls, he gained as many Twitter followers as his next three Democratic rival gainers (Biden, Yang and Warren) combined.
Biden’s follower gain rate picked up only slightly, but he moved into second because Cory Booker dropped out.
I expected Warren’s follower gains to tail off with the rest of her campaign, but it actually picked up a tick.
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
Bloomberg and Steyer’s upticks are also picking up slightly.
Given her previous rate of follower addition, for Klobuchar, endorsements from both the New York Times and the Des Moines Register have gained her…maybe 12,000 followers.
Patrick, Bennet and Delaney are all dead in the water, and Gabbard is barely moving.
Weird statistical anomaly: Last month Bennet was up 799 followers. This month, he’s up 1,799 followers.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, John Delaney, Media Watch, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Twitter
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch | No Comments »
Monday, January 27th, 2020
Everything’s coming up Bernie (including a Joe Rogan endorsement), Biden tranny panders, Buttigieg does a Jeb!, Bloomberg ops get sick bennies, Yang rises, and WaPo worries about screaming ghosts. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Also: The Iowa caucuses are next week. Our long national nightmare is finally coming to a middle!
Polls
Suffolk/USA Today (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. No link to crosstabs/sample size/etc.
CBS/YouGov (Iowa): Sanders 26, Biden 25, Buttigieg 22, Warren 15, Klobuchar 7, Steyer 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1, Delaney 0, Bennet 0, Gabbard 0, Patrick 0.
NBC/Marist (New Hampshire): Sanders 22, Buttigieg 17, Biden 15, Warren 13, Klobuchar 10, Gabbard 6, Yang 5, Steyer 3, Bennet 1, Patrick 1. Sample size of 1,401.
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 25, Biden 16, Buttigieg 15, Warren 12, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1, Delaney 1, Bennet 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 1,077.
ABC News: Biden 28, Sanders 24, Warren 11, Bloomberg 8, Yang 7, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 3. Sample size of 1,004. Yang over Buttigieg is interesting.
New York Times/Sienna (Iowa): Sanders 25, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Warren 15, Klobuchar 8, Steyer 3, Yang 3.
Emerson: Biden 30, Sanders 27, Warren 13, Yang 8, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0. Yang in fourth here!
WBUR (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Buttigieg 17, Biden 14, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Stehyer 2, Bloomberg 1, Patrick 1, Delaney 0. Samples size of 426. Sanders has doubled his support in a month.
Monmouth: Biden 30, Sanders 23, Warren 14, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 5, Yang 3, Bennet 1, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
Morning Consult: Biden 29, Sanders 24, Warren 15, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 8, Yang 4, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0.
Economist/YouGov: Biden 28, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 6, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Bennet 0, Delaney 0, Patrick 0.
CNN: Sanders 27, Biden 24, Warren 14, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 4, Yang 4, Steyer 2. I think this is the first CNN poll that has Sanders over Biden.
Boston Globe/Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 16.4, Biden 14.8, Buttigieg 12.2, Warren 9.8, Yang 5.6, Gabbard 5.4, Klobuchar 4.6, Steyer 2.6, Patrick .6, Delaney 0.0.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 24, Warren 18, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 14, Klobuchar 11, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 1 Bennet 1, Bloomberg 1, Delaney 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 500 and heavily biased questions, which you would expect from a hard left interest group.
Emerson (New Jersey): Biden 28, Sanders 25, Warren 15, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6, Yang 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Delaney 2, Bennet 0, Steyer 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 388.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
Everything’s coming up Bernie:
Up until this point, we’ve been pretty hesitant to read too much into any one of the post-debate polls — largely because for each poll that showed Sen. Bernie Sanders on the upswing, there was another poll that showed him on the downturn. But now with four more national polls and six early-state surveys (three from Iowa and three from New Hampshire) since we last checked in, we’ve got a much clearer picture of where things stand. And one thing that’s immediately obvious is that Sanders really has gained in the polls.
Sanders’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates has increased by 4 percentage points since Friday, up from 22 percent to 26 percent in our forecast. But notably, his gain hasn’t come at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden. In fact, Biden’s odds are unchanged — he still has a 42 percent shot at winning a majority of pledged delegates, which was also the case on Friday. Sen Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, slipped 5 points since Friday, and is now roughly tied with Buttigieg in our overall delegate forecast. (Buttigieg’s odds remain the same, and the chance that no candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates ticked up very slightly.)
The second thing that’s immediately obvious from this latest batch of polls is that the race in Iowa is still incredibly close. Biden has slightly better odds than Sanders in our forecast, but it’s probably better to think of the two of them as roughly tied, with Buttigieg and Warren not too far behind. That said, this weekend’s polls did change the picture in New Hampshire with Sanders vaulting into the lead, which at least partially explains some of his overall gains in the forecast.
Sanders is looking good in New Hampshire, but Iowa is a toss-up.
Two Jews walk into the presidential primary:
In a country where anti-Semitic attacks have spiked and the president has sometimes hesitated to condemn neo-Nazis, two men who celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the 1950s suddenly want to talk about their Jewishness.
“I know I’m not the only Jewish candidate running for president,” Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, told a packed synagogue here today, referencing his Democratic-primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. “But I am the only one who doesn’t want to turn America into a kibbutz.” For the first time in American history, this niche joke fit neatly into a campaign for the White House. And for the first time in American history, there’s a good chance that a Jewish candidate for president will beat another Jewish candidate to become a major party’s nominee.
Before this campaign, neither Bloomberg nor Sanders spent much time publicly discussing, let alone celebrating, their Jewishness. But a few weeks ago, Sanders was ice-skating during a Hanukkah party at a Des Moines rink, lighting a giant menorah with a blowtorch and mouthing the words to a few of the Hanukkah songs. And Bloomberg was here, making a direct appeal to Jewish voters complete with deli references and Catskills-style rim shots. He quoted Leviticus (a book he identified by its Hebrew name, Vaykira) in Hebrew and said, “Lo ta-amode, do not stand by idly while your neighbor’s blood is shed,” stumbling slightly over the pronunciation, much like how he misplaced the emphasis on the word kibbutz.
To those who know Bloomberg well and even spent years working for him, this is a surprising turn. As mayor, he was more of the stop-by-synagogue-on-Rosh-Hashanah kind of observer, not the guy who’d make a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump as “a pharaoh who knows not Joseph,” and speak about “standing together, rejecting demagogues who try to seduce us by playing us against each other, and uniting behind the only shield that can protect us: our common values as American citizens and our common humanity as God’s children.” Bloomberg went all in, going directly from “When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he smashed the golden calf and raised high a tablet of laws,” to noting that Monday is “the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation,” and recalling his own visit to the death camp a few years ago.
This wasn’t a speech like any presidential candidate has delivered before—and that includes Sanders. Before launching his 2020 campaign, Sanders rarely discussed his Jewish roots, publicly or privately. Sanders superfans know he spent a few months after college in Israel working on a kibbutz, but he’s talked about that more through his socialism than through any connection to the Jewish state. For years, Sanders referred to his father as a “Polish immigrant,” which some saw as a pointed erasure of his identity—when Eli Sanders arrived in America, after all, his passport from the Polish government would have listed his nationality as “Jew.” Jewish leaders have criticized him for decisions like speaking at the evangelical Liberty University in 2015 on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
The impeachment farce continues to sideline the senators still in the race, namely Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar and Bennet.
How much current maneuvering is “Block Bernie”?
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. All in on New Hampshire.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. ‘Middle Class’ Joe Biden has a corruption problem – it makes him a weak candidate.”
Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. I know it seems crazy, but a lot of the voters we need – independents and people who might stay home – will look at Biden and Trump and say: “They’re all dirty.”
It looks like “Middle Class” Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans. Converting campaign contributions into legislative favors and policy positions isn’t being “moderate”. It is the kind of transactional politics Americans have come to loathe.
After sitting on the sidelines, big money Democrats are finally backing Biden:
Joe Biden is locking down support from powerful New York donors who have spent the past year flirting with multiple candidates, setting him up for a major cash boost just as 2020 voting begins.
Biden’s campaign — sometimes with help from the candidate himself — has spent the last few weeks reaching out to big donors who have collectively raised tens of millions for past presidential campaigns and are not yet attached to 2020 rivals. The Biden camp, which suffered serious money problems in the fall, came to them with a message: The time is now to join up and back Biden to beat President Donald Trump, after the former vice president lasted the whole year as the Democratic polling frontrunner, despite frequent predictions that his campaign was about to collapse.
The message landed. And Biden’s campaign will cash in on those efforts in mid-February, when Biden will head to New York City for a pair of fundraisers hosted by a litany of Wall Street power players, many of whom previously helped Kamala Harris’ campaign or split their support among several candidates in 2019. Originally scheduled as one event, organizers had to split the Feb. 13 fundraising blowout in two because so many donors new to the Biden fold signed up to help.
Hosts for a cocktail-hour fundraiser will include financiers and former Harris supporters Blair Effron and Marc Lasry, both of whom were major donors to Hillary Clinton, as well as Jon Henes, a lawyer and Harris’ former finance chair, and Tom Nides, a Clinton donor and former State Department aide. Later that evening, another set of major donors will fete Biden, including former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, Blackstone president Jonathan Gray and PR executive Michael Kempner — another who was once a bundler for Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 race in December.
Biden succumbs to tranny pandering:
Speaking of pandering, Biden claims he was born a poor black child “raised in the black church politically.” “Hunter Biden’s Firms Scored Reportedly Hundreds of Millions from Russians, Chinese, and Kazakhs.” “Hunter Biden renting $12,000-per-month Hollywood home while refusing to pay child support.” Prince. Among. Men. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Have I stolen this one before?
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Why would anyone work for Bloomberg? Well, for starters, it’s a pretty sweet deal:
Billionaire presidential long shot Michael Bloomberg is trying to poach staff from other campaigns with outsized salaries and fancy perks like three catered meals a day, an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Pro, according to sources.
Bloomberg is paying state press secretaries $10,000 a month, compared to the average going rate of $4,500 for other candidates and state political directors are making $12,000 a month, more than some senior campaign advisers earn, sources said.
National political director Carlos Sanchez pulls in $360,000 a year. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s political director, made $240,000 in 2016.
Every Bloomberg staffer gets a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 11 on day one. They also enjoy three catered meals daily.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Various pundit sorts debate the effectiveness of Bloomberg’s billions. “Is there even a way to effectively spend another billion or $2 billion in a money-drenched election year? “There’s only so much airtime you can buy.'”
Jim McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked as a consultant on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, doubts Bloomberg will really spend nine figures this year, suspecting he is dangling the promise of the massive payout mainly to curry favor with Democrats.
“Do I think he can spend $2 billion? Of course. Do I think he will? No,” McLaughlin said.
And he questioned the impact of that money, either way.
After all, the most expensive presidential campaign in history was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, and she wasn’t able to stop Trump, though she did win the popular vote. She spent almost twice what Trump did per electoral vote won.
“Donald Trump was significantly outspent,” McLaughlin said, “and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s still the other white meat:
When Pete Buttigieg holds “big rally type events” in South Carolina, “it’s mostly white folks showing up,” he acknowledged ruefully Thursday night. And his struggle to fix that problem has become an existential threat to his presidential ambitions.
Buttigieg’s low standing with black voters has been a long-running theme, and as he and his campaign argued that he simply wasn’t well-known enough, it is one he has worked to correct. Over the past month and a half, he has invested more money advertising in South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are African American, than any of the non-billionaire Democrats running for president.
But the more than $2 million Buttigieg poured into TV and radio ads, some featuring black supporters touting the former South Bend (Ind.) mayor, hasn’t budged his stubbornly low poll numbers in the state — 2 percent among African American Democrats in a recent Fox News poll.
Goes on a Fox town hall. Twenty questions with New York Times, in annoying video snippet format. “Buttigieg warns that Sanders could alienate GOP and independent voters.” He’s not wrong. “Please clap.”
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She really hates Bernie.
“I just don’t want him to get out there and say the revolution is working, [that] people ‘felt the Bern,’” she says, before quickly leaving the room to beat him to a speech. Clinton adds that she found his socialist proposals unrealistic and phony. “I had people in my campaign say, ‘Just say ‘‘Free college.’’ Millennials love it,’ ” she says. “And I said ‘no.’ ”
Whenever Sanders is onscreen, his underscoring is brooding and villainous, like Darth Vader just took off his helmet for a breather. In a hallway before a debate in New Hampshire, Sanders asks a tense Clinton how she feels about his suit. “Buttoned or unbuttoned?” he says. Irked, she tells him to undo the button as soon as he gets “worked up.”
Last week, it was revealed that Clinton said of her former rival in the doc: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
You would not believe how black that pot is! Here’s a Truthout commentator who thinks she’s running.
In the interview, Clinton is asked if she has considered jumping into the 2020 presidential race. “I have had so many people [urge me to],” she replied. “Every day. And I’m grateful for people’s confidence, but I did think it was right for me to step back. I’ll do anything I can to defeat the current incumbent, and to reverse a lot of his damaging policies. Thankfully, I still have a voice and a following.”
I can’t simply dismiss this as another example of a politician who doesn’t know when to recede. I don’t believe this is just Clinton acting out because Iowa can’t throw a party without inviting her. This interview, and that pointedly vicious quote about Sanders, will explode the rift between the progressive candidates and the establishment candidates on the doorstep of the season’s first caucus. It will exacerbate the tensions already in place to a clamorous degree.
I believe it is deliberate on two levels. First, this is the establishment standard-bearer jumping into the fray in a moment when the establishment is conspicuously worried about the campaigns of Sanders and Warren. I have been nursing a fear that the Democratic Party might prefer a Trump victory over losing control of the party, and this sudden broadside from Clinton has only exacerbated those concerns.
He may be right, but he omits the other probably-even-more-true side of that equation: The radical left may also view losing to Trump acceptable if it means gaining control of the party. This is precisely the scenario that played out in Texas as it went from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state.
Second, Hillary is slated for release in March, an enormously important month that will see 29 primaries and caucuses take place in both the states and the territories. Super Tuesday falls on March 3, and will include make-or-break primary votes in California, Texas, Virginia, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio….Hillary Clinton seems to be hoping for a brokered Democratic convention so she can offer herself up as the “reasonable” compromise candidate.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Edward-Isaac Dovere asks “John Delaney Is Still Running. Why?” (First, let me check and make sure I didn’t run this article last week…nope, not a dupe. OK then.)
WHAT CHEER, Iowa—Don’t let the name fool you: What Cheer is a dreary little town. Other than the gas station, the most notable place in the city is an old building that apparently used to house the What Cheer Telephone Company, whatever that was. Today, cheap white curtains are drawn across the windows. It looks like someone is living there.
John Delaney is here at dusk on a Friday night in January because he’s still running for president. Did you know he was running for president? Probably not. If you did once know—Delaney was actually the first Democrat to declare his candidacy, way back in July 2017—you probably forgot. And if you did know he was still running, the question you’re probably asking is the one I am here to explore: Why? Why is a candidate who’s barely registering in any poll still traipsing across Iowa day after day when he has absolutely no chance of winning, or even of seeming like more than an outlying blip on the radar?
I’ve wondered that myself for months. But the Delaney campaign is like the This Is Spinal Tap of Presidential campaigns:
Today began with an event at a pizza place in the small central-Iowa city of Montezuma, which 12 people attended. This evening, the door-knocking starts at a house across the street from the old telephone-company building. No answer. At the second house, a light in the front hall illuminates a Christmas tree, but no one answers the door here either. Third house, also no answer. Finally, at the fourth house a man wearing pajama bottoms answers the door. After listening to Delaney make his pitch for six or seven minutes, he says that while he’s committed to voting for a Democrat in the general election, he’s not planning to caucus—and that if he was, he’d probably go with Andrew Yang, because he likes Yang’s proposed Freedom Dividend, his signature policy of providing a guaranteed basic income of $1,000 a month to all Americans.
“But that can’t happen!” Delaney says.
It’s quickly evident that Delaney can’t get this voter, but courtesy dictates that he now listen politely while the man talks about how he wants to fix up the shed across the road.
After that, Delaney’s small caravan, a big blue-and-red bus trailed by a car, rolls on. No one is home at the next two houses. When a woman pulls into the driveway of the second house, Delaney’s campaign manager tries to talk to her, but she walks in the back door and doesn’t come out again. Up a hill and around a corner is another house that the campaign staff have identified as belonging to a Democratic voter. An old man opens the door. He says he’s recovering from eye surgery but that he doesn’t like Donald Trump and is happy to talk. Finally—a prospect! He says the main thing he’s looking for in a candidate is honesty. Delaney makes his pitch, but the man is soon trying to wrap up the conversation. “Hope you do well,” the man says. Delaney invites him to a free dinner that the campaign is hosting the next town over. The man just smiles noncommittally.
At this late stage of a very long presidential campaign that has by any conventional measure been remarkably unsuccessful, this actually counts as a pretty good hour for Delaney. How, I asked him as he walked away from the old man’s house, does he keep his head up?
“I’m disappointed it hasn’t gone better, but I think it’s a privilege to do this,” he said. “I meet people who are really struggling. And I realize, you know, I have really no problems. And the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives is—what better way to spend my time?”
Has a Union-Leader op ed where he says that “Divisiveness is America’s biggest hurdle.” If only the political party whose nomination he’s running for could bring themselves to accept the results of the 2016 election…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Calls for ending the war on drugs. CNN screws Gabbard out of a town hall, even though Deval “0” Patrick gets one. She’s betting on independents and Trump supporters in New Hampshire. Eh, it’s a strategy, but I’m pretty sure she loses that bet. Talks about her lawsuit against Hillary.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Enjoying a little boomlet? Yeah, but “little” as in “maybe 5th place on a good day.” Gets the same annoying video format 20 questions with the New York Times. Endorsed by the Union-Leader. As one of the country’s few remaining conservative newspapers, I don’t think that will have much sway on Democratic Party voters.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently it’s “Edward-Isaac Dovere interviews no-hopers week,” because he did the same for Patrick:
Pretty much everyone hates what the Democratic primary race has become. It’s gone on too long, cost too much money, and tended to reward people who’ve been repeating the same lines for years. Pretty much everyone also hates the debates. (How many people watched last week’s debate and saw a future president? How many people saw someone who they’re confident can beat Donald Trump?) And pretty much everyone hates what the process has churned out: A Des Moines Register poll three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and 14 months after the campaign started, showed that 60 percent of people still hadn’t made up their minds. The New York Times endorsed two candidates. “People like the field, but I don’t think they feel that great about the front-runners,” John Delaney, who is still winding down the final days of his own candidacy, told me a few weeks ago. New York magazine’s latest cover headline nailed the Democratic panic: “Well, Here We Are.”
And here I am, in the lobby restaurant of a Marriott, with a candidate who’s telling me it’s not too late to do something about all this. Deval Patrick says voters have been telling him directly that they like him, that they’re ready to go with him, or at least consider him. “I meet donors who say, ‘I am so there; I just want to see this in the polls, and then I want to bundle for you.’ What are you waiting for? If you already think I contribute something that the rest of the field doesn’t, why are you waiting for permission from pundits, pollsters, the party, somebody else?” Patrick said. I’ve heard the same thing from people who’ve been thinking about writing checks. More often, I’ve heard people tell me that they can’t bring themselves to be a part of this.
When the lights in the lobby keep swelling high and low, and the manager comes over to apologize, he doesn’t recognize the former Massachusetts governor. Neither does the waiter.
That’s the problem for Patrick. He got in a year later than he was planning to, because his wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2018. Then he spent this past fall stressing about how far off course the primary race seemed to be spinning, before deciding in November to go for it. That’s a whole year he didn’t spend getting better known, or building any kind of organization. By the time he did jump in, he had to argue with campaign staff he’d never met before about whether to spend days chasing the media exposure they said he needed or follow his gut and campaign more deliberately, one on one, the way he had in his first race, when he’d pulled off his out-of-nowhere win for the governorship of Massachusetts. He’s annoyed about old friends and supporters who’ve been smiling to his face—and then telling reporters like me that they’re heartbroken to see what a flop his campaign seems to be so far.
Not sure “flopping” is quite accurate, since flopping usually makes a sound. He announced support for slavery reparations, because of course he did. That worked out so well for Kamala Harris…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Joe Rogan endorses Sanders…and is immediately smeared as a white nationalist. “Bernie Sanders Welcomed As Newest Member Of Alt-Right After Joe Rogan Endorsement.” “Bernie Sanders isn’t a ‘democratic socialist’ — he’s an all-out Marxist.” Oh come on! We all know “Democratic Socialist” is just what Marxists call themselves until they get into power.
His rise clearly troubles establishment Democrats who are uneasy with his far-left agenda. Among Sanders’s most notable detractors are mainstream Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The former president, for instance, is reported to be so “anxious” about Sanders’s standing that he’s contemplating publicly repudiating him (although some Obama allies deny this account).
Obama and Clinton may have unwittingly contributed to Sanders’s rise, but they are right to be concerned. The man has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office — not even on a guided tour. The fact that the socialist senator is considered a national leader is a disgraceful blemish on the Democratic Party, a party once comprised by men such as John F. Kennedy, who fought communists, while Sanders defended them.
President Donald Trump defends Sanders over the Warren flap. Live view of Democrats:
Can anyone stop Sanders?
We’ve seen a rash of establishment-minded Democrats speak out against Sanders in recent weeks, but polls suggest it’s done little to stop his rise. The Vermont senator was at or near the top of several early state and national primary polls over the weekend. We’ve heard everyone from Pete Buttigieg to Rahm Emanuel raising concerns about Sanders’ ability to beat President Donald Trump and help vulnerable down-ballot Democrats this fall, even as passionate progressives rally behind him. For now, establishment Democrats are girding for a fight. And the ghosts of 2016 are screaming.
“The ghosts of 2016 are screaming” sounds like an impressive turn of phrase, until you realize that it’s either meaningless, or can mean any of a dozen contradictory things. Is Sanders going to wound Biden so badly he can’t win? Is Trump being underestimated again? Are the shades of Prince and David Bowie going to rise up to haunt the race? “Sanders Apologizes to Biden for Bringing Up Biden’s Corruption Problem.” Bernie takes on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for daring to dis socialism. He has Alexandria Ocasio Cortez out on the trail for him as a surrogate in Iowa. BoldMoveCotton.jpg.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s one of the few candidates still schlepping around Iowa a week before the caucuses, due to either the impeachment farce or other candidates having gone all-in on New Hampshire. Can you imagine the glorious screw-job Steyer would wreck on the race if he won or even placed in Iowa? Deeply unlikely, but stranger things have happened in politics. Can he win Nevada? Since Bloomberg didn’t make the ballot, possibly. And I love this photo of him:
Yep, another New York Times video 20 questions. Calls for marijuana legalization and opioid decriminalization. Good for him. But his idea to eliminate cash bail is a horrible one.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren has no answer for Iowa dad who paid for his daughter’s education rather than getting bailed out by the government. “My daughter is in school,” he said. “I saved all my money just to pay student loans. Can I have my money back?” Warren replied, “Of course not!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Panderwatha. NYT 20 questions. Does the Des Moines Register endorsement matter? Their answer is “Sort of, maybe.” I suspect not.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for a February 7 debate in New Hampshire, joining Sanders, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Steyer. Marianne Williamson endorsed Yang. 20. He tells the DNC they should let Fox News host a debate. Agreed.
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
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)
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)
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
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Apple Computer, Bernie Sanders, Blackstone Group, Blair Effron, Democrats, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Hunter Biden, Iowa, Jamie Dimon, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, John Delaney, Jon Henes, Jonathan Gray, JP Morgan, Marc Lasry, Marianne Williamson, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Kempner, New Hampshire, socialism, Tom Nides, Tom Steyer, transexual, Tulsi Gabbard
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Monday, January 20th, 2020
Booker drops Out, Warren and Sanders feud, Steyer money-bombs his way to contention, Bennet idles at 500 milliMondales, and Patrick hits a new high of 1%. Plus a gratuitous shot at Franklin Pierce. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Too damn many polls this time around.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Yang 2, Booker 2. Steyer at 15% is eye-opening. That money-bombing must really be making a difference.
Survey USA: Biden 32, Sanders 21, Warren 14, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 9, Yang 4, Steyer 3, Klobuchar 2, Gabbard 2.
Emerson (New Hampshire): Sanders 23, Buttigieg 18, Biden 14, Warren 14, Klobuchar 10, Yang 6, Gabbard 5, Steyer 4, Delany 1, Patrick 0, Bennet 0. Sample size of 657, which strikes me as pretty good for a state that size. That’s the highest Klobuchar has ever polled in New Hampshire.
Ipsos/Reuters: Sanders 20, Biden 19, Warren 12, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6. Sample size of 681.
Economist/YouGov (page 114): Biden 27, Sanders 20, Warren 19, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Yang 3, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Steyer 1.
Survey USA (California): Biden 30, Sanders 20 Warren 20, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 6, Yang 4, Steyer 4, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2. For a sample size of 535, these numbers seem suspiciously round…
Florida Atlantic University (Florida): Biden 41.5, Sanders 15.5, Warren 9.7, Bloomberg 6.8, Klobuchar 6.1, Yang 5.1, Booker 3.1, Steyer 2.1.
Marquette (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 15, Warren 14, Yang 6, Bloomberg 6, Klobuchar 4, Booker 1, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1, Patrick 0.
USA Today/Suffolk (Nevada): Biden 19.4, Sanders 17.6, Warren 10.6, Buttigieg 8.2, Yang 4.4, Klobuchar 3.6, Booker 2.2, Gabbard 1.2, Delany 1.
PPP (North Carolina): Biden 31, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Bloomberg 8, Buttigieg 6, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Booker 1.
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 11, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 4, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3.
Morning Consult: Biden 29, Sanders 23, Warren 14, Bloomberg 8, Buttigieg 8, Yang 5, Steyer 4, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0.
Monmouth (Iowa): Biden 24, Sanders 18, Buttigieg 17, Warren 15, Booker 4, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 2. Samples size of 405.
Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire) (page 25): Biden 26, Sanders 22, Warren 18, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 4, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Steyer 2, Booker 1. I also want to note that Franklin Pierce is one of the worst Presidents in American history, signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act with uncommon zeal…
PPIC (California): Sanders 27, Biden 24, Warren 23, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Bloomberg 1.
Quinnipiac: Biden 25, Sanders 19, Warren 16, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 6, Yang 5, Klobuchar 4, Booker 1, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1, Patrick 1. 1% for Deval Patrick! A new high!
IBD/TIPP: Biden 26, Warren 20, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 7. (National sample size of 333.)
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
“The Woke Primary Is Over and Everyone Lost:”
In the run-up to tonight’s Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, the last such contest before primary voting begins, one of the big storylines is about who won’t be among the half-dozen candidates on stage.
“This debate is so white, it’s not allowed to bring the potato salad,” cracked Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher. “The smallest, whitest one yet,” concurred Politico.
With Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) exiting the race Monday, and both Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) failing to meet the qualification thresholds, the resulting lineup is not just pale, it’s ancient—the three highest-polling of the six debaters would each be the oldest president ever sworn into office. A fourth, Tom Steyer, is a hedge fund billionaire who literally bought his way to the podium, after an entire season in which Democrats debated whether billionaires should even exist. (An even older white billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, currently sits fifth in national polls but is not bothering with early primary/caucus states.)
So you can see why the younger, more progressive voices who punch above their weight in Democratic political discourse would be dismayed. “Bad for democracy,” pronounced Salon’s David Daley. “The system they have designed has suppressed the most loyal base of the Democratic Party,” charged Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson in The Washington Post. “Anyone with an understanding of civil rights law understands how the rules can be set up to benefit some communities. The Democratic Party should look at the impact of these rules and question the results.”
That is certainly one theory. But I would suggest at least considering another. Cory Booker was one of five Gen X candidates (only one white male among them) who came into the race with ideologically mixed pedigrees—including not a small amount of what progressives would deride as “neoliberal” policy positions on deficits, trade, and education—but then competed with varying levels of believability on being the most woke, before eventually collapsing.
First Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), then Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Julián Castro, and now Booker all made the affirmative choice to either tack heavily left on economics or just downplay their past heresies in favor of talking up issues such as slavery reparations, Medicare for all illegal immigrants, and the racism/sexism of President Donald Trump. The abject failure of this approach is one of the greater underexplored storylines of the 2020 presidential nominating season.
Eleven months ago, this group accounted for about one-quarter of voter support in national polls: Around 12 percent for Harris, 6 percent for O’Rourke, 5 percent for Booker, and 1 percent each for Castro and Gillibrand. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who would eventually vault herself up to near-frontrunner status, was then just a face in this crowd: 7 percent. Democrats were making similar murmurs of pride about their energetic and historically diverse field that you heard among Republicans in the first half of 2015.
What happened next? While Warren went on a white-paper spree of policy “plans” for every economic and regulatory issue under the sun, the Gen X Five engaged in more identity-politics emoting than a campus struggle session, only with less sincerity. O’Rourke agonized publicly about his ancestors owning slaves. Harris the cop tried gruesomely to rebrand herself as a hip Jamaican pot smoker. Gillibrand spent valuable debate-stage time talking about the need to educate people about her white privilege. Booker pushed for reparations and policed Joe Biden’s language, while Castro was busy shaking his damn head that all these leftward lurches didn’t go nearly left enough.
The late-night comedy skits wrote themselves. And by August, Warren was outpolling all five whippersnappers combined.
It’s not that the more successful septuagenarian progressives shied away from calling Trump a racist—far from it. But voters did not have to guess about what got the northeastern senators up early every morning: It’s the economic policy, stupid. What, exactly, was Kirsten Gillibrand’s selling proposition? Why were O’Rourke and Booker (at least until the last of the latter’s debates) running away from much of the stuff that made them interesting in the first place?
What makes their choice that much more curious is the persistent math of this race: The progressive bloc in the 2020 Democratic field has persistently lagged the centrists by about 10 percentage points. The RealClearPolitics running national averages for Biden (27.4 percent), Pete Buttigieg (7.8 percent), Bloomberg (6.2), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (3.0) (D–Minn.) combine for 44.4 percent; Sanders (18.8 percent) + Warren (16.8) + Steyer (2.2) = 37.8. Instead of using their ideological dexterity to compete against a very old-looking frontrunner for the scared-of-socialists vote, the Gen Xers chased whatever progressive crumbs hadn’t already been hoovered by two strong candidates.
“All the talk in the Democratic presidential race these last few days has been ‘Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!’ But all the action says “Biden! Biden! Biden!‘”
While the chattering classes are wetting themselves over a single poll, party bigwigs are coalescing around Biden.
I reported to you last week that Barack Obama and his former lieutenants “worry that Sanders is crazy enough to win the Dem nomination, but too crazy to win the general election.” The only thing Team Obama doesn’t have is a plan to actually stop him.
But maybe Nancy Pelosi does….
By delaying this thing from December and into the kickoff of the primary season, Pelosi has sucked much of the oxygen out of the room for challengers to Biden’s frontrunner status. The rest of the establishment appears to be lining up behind Biden as well. John Kerry — about as Establishment as it gets, and an early Biden backer — just blasted Sanders for “distorting” Biden’s record on Iraq. Democratic Congressman Colin Allred just became the tenth member of the Congressional Black Caucus to endorse Biden. Biden also just scored endorsements from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, and Iowa Rep. Finkenauer, whose district encompasses the kind of blue-collar voters the eventual Dem nominee will need to win back from Trump in November.
Indeed, Pelosi may have timed the impeachment farce to help Biden and Buttigieg and hurt Warren and Sanders…and to help keep her Speaker’s gavel by shafting the hard left.
Six reasons a brokered convention is more likely than you think:
- The superdelegates do not get to vote in the first round this year unless a candidate has a majority. Unlike 2016 when they all went to Hillary, this year they don’t vote until round 2 unless it is already decided.
- California is now part of Super Tuesday. In 2016, the California primary was held on June 7. This year, the survivor bias bandwagon effect will be significantly reduced and possibly eliminated.
- Following NH there will be two debates, and likely 4 candidates minimum at each. Currently there are six.
- This will likely not be a two-way races headed into Super-Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren may have little overall chance, but she does have a chance of getting 15% in many states.
- Progressive Split: Bernie Sanders are battling each other for the Progressives. Bernie will get most of this vote, but Warren will likely have enough money to stay in until the end if she wants.
- Bloomberg and Steyer may target a couple of states hard: Texas, Colorado perhaps? They may each pull 15% in a couple of them.
Graphical representation of Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign. Across the nation, TV station ad executives are toasting them from the behinds the wheels of their new Mercedes. (interestingly, Steyer seems to be throwing more money into cable TV ads than Bloomberg. Seems to be working in South Carolina.)
Nate Silver wargames the Warren-Sanders spat.
More nuanced analyses of the Sanders-Warren conflict suggest that maintaining a nonaggression pact would be mutually beneficial because otherwise Biden could run away with the nomination. But the word “mutually” is debatable. I’d argue nonaggression toward Warren is pretty clearly in the best interest of Sanders, who was in the stronger position than Warren heading into the debate and who would probably prefer to focus on Biden. But it’s probably not beneficial to Warren. Any scenario that doesn’t involve Warren winning Iowa will leave her in a fairly rough position — and winning Iowa means beating Sanders there.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Candidates can qualify for the next Democratic debate by winning a single delegate in Iowa.
Lots of polling meta-analysis from 538.
The Downer Party.
DNC chair Tom Perez says they set the bar low due to diversity, and it wasn’t his fault that the Affirmative Action candidates couldn’t even clear that. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
The Warren/Sanders hatred has reached the petty controversies phase.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. The pratfall candidate:
Michael Bennet is polling in 10th place. He hasn’t made a debate stage since July and won’t disclose how much money he raised last quarter.
And he can be awkward on the stump: In one 45-minute stretch at a recent town hall, Bennet swung his hands so wildly while making a point that he hit a woman in the leg, he tripped over a stool holding his water, and he nearly tangled himself in a microphone cord while trying to take off his sport coat.
Yet a small number of New Hampshire’s voters and political elites have found themselves drawn to his message, demeanor and experience, hoping almost despite themselves that Bennet could be the ultimate dark horse primary candidate.
Even his supporters admit there’s no clear path to winning the nomination.
He won’t recuse himself from the impeachment farce. Enjoy a “wait, is he still running?” piece. His elevator pitch to New Hampshire. It’s really quite amazing how boring he can be in less-than-50-second doses. Either he has a cold or he naturally idles at 500 milliMondales.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. A good week for Biden?
Joe Biden (almost certainly) had a better week than you did. Over the past seven days, the ramblin’ septuagenarian has seen his two top rivals for the Democratic nomination focus their fire on each other, his poll numbers in Iowa jump, his final debate before the the Hawkeye State’s caucus go off without hitch (or, at least, with no more than the normal number of hitches), and his former boss do his campaign a big favor.
The Democratic front-runner was already doing perfectly fine last Friday. But his campaign still faced the looming threat of Tuesday night’s oratorical smackdown in Des Moines. At the last two debates, Biden’s top rivals had largely held their fire, ostensibly calculating that it was better to avoid going negative on the former vice-president if at all possible; maybe the old man would find a way to beat himself. But now, with Biden’s lead in national polls sturdy as ever — and Tuesday’s debate, his adversaries’ last, best chance to bloody him before the first ballots are cast — surely Uncle Joe was going to take some fire.
After all, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had both previewed new, anti-Biden attack lines in the run-up to the event. The Vermont senator began sewing his many substantive critiques of Biden into a larger narrative challenging the front-runner’s electability. Warren, meanwhile, released a bankruptcy reform plan that was clearly intended to function as a jumping-off point for a searing indictment of Biden’s work on the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill — a piece of legislation that had privileged credit companies over consumers to such an egregious extent, it had radicalized a humble legal academic who had once considered herself a conservative.
And then, Warren learned that the Sanders campaign was (somewhat gently) challenging her electability in a call script. And then CNN reported on a private conversation Sander and Warren had apparently had. And then the rest is (disputed, incredibly stupid) history. On Tuesday night, both Warren and Sanders seem to have become too preoccupied with their feud to properly execute their hits on Biden.
How the Biden family got rich through his connections:
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the U.S. Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
Consider the case of HillStone International, a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm, Hill International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On November 4, 2010, according to White House visitors’ logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele Smith in the Office of the Vice President.
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company’s website noted his “40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political, legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally…”
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC Development, a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department.
David Richter, son of the parent company’s founder, was not shy in explaining HillStone’s success in securing government contracts. It really helps, he told investors at a private meeting, to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” according to someone who was there.
The Iraq project was massive, perhaps the single most lucrative project for the firm ever. In 2012, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business reported that HillStone officials expected the project to “generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years.” That amounted to more than three times the revenue the company produced in 2011.
A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. “There’s plenty of money for everyone if this project goes through,” said one company official.
The deal was all set, but HillStone made a crucial error. In 2013, the firm was forced to back out of the contract because of a series of problems, including a lack of experience by Hill and TRAC Development, its South Korean associate firm. But HillStone continued doing significant contract work in the embattled country, including a six-year contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
James Biden remained with Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere.
Let’s snip Hunter, just because we’ve been plowing that ground the way Hunter knocks up random women.
It would be a dream for any new company to announce their launch in the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
StartUp Health is an investment consultancy based out of New York City, and in June 2011 the company barely had a website. The firm was the brainchild of three siblings from Philadelphia. Steven Krein is CEO and co-founder, while his brother, Dr. Howard Krein, serves as chief medical officer. Sister Bari serves as the firm’s chief strategy officer. A friend named Unity Stoakes is a co-founder and serves as president.
StartUp Health was barely up and running when, in June 2011, two of the company’s executives were ushered into the Oval Office of the White House. They met with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
The following day the new company would be featured at a large health care tech conference being run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House, attending events in 2011, 2014 and 2015.
How did StartUp Health gain access to the highest levels of power in Washington? There was nothing particularly unique about the company, but for this:
The chief medical officer of StartUp Health, Howard Krein, is married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.
“I happened to be talking to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were down there [in Washington, D.C.],” recalled Howard Krein. “He knew about StartUp Health and was a big fan of it. He asked for Steve’s number and said, ‘I have to get them up here to talk with Barack.’ The Secret Service came and got Steve and Unity and brought them to the Oval Office.”
StartUp Health offers to provide new companies technical and relationship advice in exchange for a stake in the business. Demonstrating and highlighting the fact that you can score a meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a strategic company asset: high-level contacts.
Vice President Joe Biden continued to help Krein promote his company at several appearances through his last months in the White House, including one in January 2017, where he made a surprise showing at the StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco. The corporate event, open only to StartUp Health members, enabled the 250 people in attendance to chat in a closed session with the vice president.
Plus info on Frank Biden and Valerie Biden Owens. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Bill Maher thinks that the impeachment farce is a threat to Biden if he and Hunter have to testify. “If this gets to a trial and they call Biden and his son, trust me, Biden and his son and Ukraine will be the bigger scandal.” This doesn’t sound like the sort of headline that will play to Biden’s base: “Joe Biden Has Advocated Cutting Social Security for 40 Years”:
Biden has been advocating for cuts to Social Security for roughly 40 years.
And after a Republican wave swept Congress in 1994, Biden’s support for cutting Social Security, and his general advocacy for budget austerity, made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s.
“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he told the Senate in 1995. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.” (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)
While I’m personally in favor of real entitlement reform, I doubt the average Biden backer is willing to dispassionately contemplate the issue. The danger of nominating the default nominee. Biden opposes legal marijuana.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a second extension on his personal financial filing information, which means Democrats won’t get a look at them until after Super Tuesday. Had a rally at a San Antonio restaurant. All of 45 people attended. Even with Judge Judy! Never mind all that #NeverTrump talk of how moderate Bloomy is, he just pandered to the Social Justice Warrior set. Because that just worked so well for every single candidate that’s dropped out of the race so far. Speaking of pandering, he promised to throw $70 billion at poor black neighborhoods, because there’s another strategy that has such an outstanding record of success. President Donald Trump slammed Bloomberg over dissing church shooting hero Jack Wilson. Bloomberg is very upset that law-abiding citizens are allowed to remain armed. He promises to spend (Dr. Evil)Two BILLION Dollars!(/Doctor Evil) to defeat Trump. How could he possibly fail? Well, take a lot at the sort of thing his social media team is cranking out:
Update: New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Dropped Out. Booker was far from the worst of the bunch, but Kimberley Strassel notes that he suffered from a common malady among them: woke politics.
To paraphrase Santayana, Democrats who refuse to acknowledge Hillary Clinton’s failures in the 2016 election were always doomed to repeat them. Why is their primary field littered with the failed bids of woke candidates? Why is #WarrenIsASnake trending on Twitter? Because identity politics remains a political loser.
That’s the takeaway from the rapidly narrowing Democratic field, and smart liberals warned of it after 2016. Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Times, faulted Mrs. Clinton for molding her campaign around “the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop.” Successful politics, he noted, is always rooted in visions of “shared destiny.”
Progressives heaped scorn on Mr. Lilla—one compared him to David Duke—and doubled down on identity politics. Nearly every flashpoint in this Democratic race has centered on racism, sexism or classism. Nearly every practitioner of that factionalist strategy has exited the race.
Mr. Lilla is surely open to apologies.
Bonchie at RedState:
Booker’s campaign was always doomed. He’s comparable to Julian Castro in his penchant for never finding something not worth pandering over. After initially positioning himself as a moderate much of his career, including doing some across the aisles projects as both the Mayor of New Jersey and a Senator, Booker fell into the same trap everyone not named Joe Biden has fallen into, namely selling out the majority moderate Democrat voting base to please the woke scolds. For example, Booker was for school choice before he was against it.
He was also just not very likable. Perhaps not as much as Elizabeth Warren, but he always seemed to be straining to score points and that’s never a good look. It presents a front of desperation and Booker certainly was that most of his campaign.
“Cory Booker Moved To Tears During Participation Trophy Acceptance Speech.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Been a bad month for “Mayor Pete.” His momentum stalled, his poll numbers declined, and his “all in on Iowa and New Hampshire” strategy isn’t looking like a winning bet. Plus there’s that likability problem:
Buttigieg is still 17 months younger than Macaulay Culkin of “Home Alone” fame, an attentive reader notes. After all these years, that is a gap that shows no sign of narrowing. On the other hand, he is now a full three years older than Mozart—another prodigy, but who never served one term as mayor of South Bend, Ind., much less two—was at the time of his death.
As early middle age inches into view, Buttigieg is welcoming a new year filled with dazzling possibilities. He’s bunched in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he’s also experiencing a change in the weather that must be uncomfortable for someone who has known since early boyhood that he is very smart and that the Big People invariably find him impressive.
The very traits that usually impress—his fluency in political language; go-getter’s résumé; intense ambition carried in the vessel of a calm, well-mannered persona— are increasingly being greeted with skepticism and even derision. Notably, this is coming from his peers.
“Buttigieg hate is tightly concentrated among the young,” a writer at the Atlantic observed. “Why Pete Buttigieg Enrages the Young Left,” read a headline in POLITICO Magazine. “Swing Voter Really Relates to Buttigieg’s Complete Lack of Conviction,” said a headline in The Onion. For months, the satirical site has been vicious toward him in ways that evoke the wisecracking cool kids at the back of the class mocking the preening overachiever in the front row.
The Buttigieg backlash, by my lights, flows from origins that are less ideological than psychological. I noticed it some time ago with some—certainly not all—younger journalistic colleagues in particular. He torques them in ways that seem personal.
They are well-acquainted with the Buttigieg type. They find his patter and polish annoying. They regard his career to date—Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey, the mayoralty—as a facile exercise in box-checking: A Portrait of the Bullshit Artist as a Young Man.
Above all, they wonder why the artifice and calculation that seem obvious to them are somehow lost on others.
These Buttigieg skeptics, in my experience, typically overlook another possibility: His admirers aren’t oblivious to the fact that he’s partly B.S.-ing. It just doesn’t much bother them. I’ll go a step further: Viewed in the right light, his teacher’s-pet glibness and implacable careerism are desirable traits.
He gets interviewed by the New York Times editorial board. I don’t even like the guy, but they way they’ve interspersed links to refute his answers inside his actual answers, literally mid-sentence in some cases, strikes me as a shoddy hit piece. Want to refute him? Fine, but your reply links after his answers. But let the man speak. His campaign canceled a fundraising event at a gay bar over a stripper pole.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? So I’m all ready to move Grandma Death down into the also-rans when word drops that a new documentary about her is coming to Hulu.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says socialism is a terrible idea. Gets three questions with the New York Times. “I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises. When we run on things that are workable, not fairy-tale economics.” His poll standing suggests otherwise.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Calls for ending the war on drugs. Good for her. What you missed with Gabbard off the debate stage:
1. This entire debate might go on without anyone pledging to end “failed regime-change wars,” a refrain Gabbard has popularized on the campaign trail thus far. Her saying it in every answer is a bit of a meme at this point, but it’s also of crucial importance. In a time when we have troops engaged in nearly 150 countries and have spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in failed Middle East wars, it’s a message too crucial to overlook.
2. Gabbard’s willingness to buck the party establishment and call out Democrats on their flaws will be missed. From endorsing Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016 to taking on Kamala Harris’s draconian criminal justice record, any mealy-mouthed, weak criticisms we see from the candidates will probably not come anywhere close to the truth bombs Gabbard has regularly dropped.
Plus “The party of identity politics will feature an all-white field.”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a werid co-endorsement (along with Warren) from the New York Times; since the hard left are the only people that still read the Times any more, maybe it will have some effect on voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, but I remain skeptical. Amy sure loves her some big pharma money.(Hat tip: Instapundit.) Five take-aways from her debate appearance. (Actually, the headline is “The five moments that defined Amy Klobuchar’s Iowa debate performance,” which is horribly pretentious twaddle.) New Hampshire state rep Michael Pedersen defects from Warren to Klobuchar. (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.) Quad City Times backs Klobuchar after backing Sanders in 2016.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets the New York Times interview thing, at a much lower level of hostility than Buttigieg.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. The coordinated CNN/Warren attack on on Sanders backfired, making many on the left realize (possibly for the first time) what garbage our media is. (Why they didn’t learn this from the DNC and CNN coordinating to feed Hillary Clinton debate questions is a mystery.) More Democrats are worried that dastardly Sanders might actually be trying to win again by going after Biden’s weaknesses. Why can’t he have the good grace to lie down and let Biden walk over him on his way to the coronation? Sanders campaign locks down Twitter accounts and locks the doors and shuts off the lights of their field office, in the wake of Project Veritas video revelations. Vulnerable House Democrats are worried that nominating Sanders could cost them their jobs. Here’s a piece that suggests Sanders default mode is stoking outrage. Warren supporter whines that Bernie Bros are mean to him on Twitter; weirdly enough, the name “Steve Scalise” never pops up in either of those pieces…
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. The $100 million man. Gets the New York Times interview thing; hope you like endless nattering about climate change. He proposed a tax cut, to be paid for by an unconstitutional wealth tax, and by rolling back the Trump tax cuts (because it’s intolerable that they’ve been successful). Steyer’s Carolinas push has him picking up some black support there:
Johnnie Cordero, chairman of the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina, and South Carolina state representative Jerry Govan, chairman of the Black Legislative Caucus, are throwing their support behind the billionaire candidate, Steyer’s campaign told The Root exclusively. The former president of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s African American Caucus, Linda Wilkins-Daniels, is also endorsing Steyer.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Everything about Warren is a lie:
Her backstory, famously, is fake. During a time when elite universities like Harvard were under incredible pressure to hire non-white faculty to their law schools, Elizabeth Warren registered as a Cherokee. Eventually she concocted an almost-certainly-false story about anti–Native American prejudice from her father’s parents. Warren plagiarized her contribution to a book of Native American home recipes, Pow Wow Chow, from a French cookbook. Harvard bragged about its hiring of Warren and advertised her as an addition to its diversity, though reporting in recent years has attempted to obscure whether this was a help to her.
Warren’s political persona is entirely false. She claims to be a populist, but her form of social democracy is a kind of class warfare for millionaires and affluent liberals against billionaires and the petit bourgeois entrepreneurs who vote Republican. Her student-debt and free-college plans are absolute boons to the doctors, lawyers, and academics — the affluent wage-earners — who are her chief constituency. Meanwhile, her tax reforms go after not only billionaires but the small entrepreneurs: the guys who own a car wash, or a garbage-disposal service, and tend to vote Republican. Her consumer-protection reforms have hampered and destroyed local banks, and rewarded the bad-actor mega-banks she claims daily to oppose.
“Warren pointed out her defeat of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) in 2012 in an attempt to show she’s electable. This means she is ‘the only person who will be on the debate stage who has beaten a popular Republican incumbent Republican any time in the last 25 years.'” So her claim to beating electable is that she beat a Republican in Massachusetts in an Obama wave year. That’s like bragging that you beat your cousins at pickup basketball without mentioning that Michael Jordan was on your team. Speaking of stupid things she said, she also claimed she was the only one in the race with executive experience. “Warren Rejects Peace Pipe Offered By Sanders.” OK, I laughed:
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. How Yang would handle a recession. Want an analysis of Yang’s policies from the Washington Post editorial board? Me neither, but here it is.
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.
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)
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)
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
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Monday, January 13th, 2020
Williamson drops Out, Steyer eclipses Warren in two early states, the billionaire boys keep shoveling wheelbarrows full of cash into the fire, and Biden can’t tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Update: After I posted this, word broke that Booker was dropping out as well.
Q4 Fundraising
Either my Google-fu is weak or no campaigns have released Q4 fundraising totals this week. Or maybe the press just doesn’t care enough to report on any that have. I’m leaving this up because I suspect official numbers for the rest will start posting after the FEC January 15th deadline.
- Bernie Sanders: $34.5 million
- Pete Buttigieg: $24.7 million
- Joe Biden: $22.7 million
- Elizabeth Warren: $21.2 million
- Andrew Yang: $16.5 million
- Amy Klobuchar: $11.4
- Cory Booker: $6.6 million
- Tulsi Gabbard: $3.4 million
Polls
CNN/Des Moines Register (Iowa): Sanders 20, Warren 17, Buttigieg 16, Biden 15, Klobuchar 6, Yang 5, Booker 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1.
Fox News (Nevada): Biden 23, Sanders 17, Steyer 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Bloomberg 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Williamson 1. Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign may finally be bearing fruit.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1. Ditto.
Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 21, Warren 13, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 7, Klobuchar 4, Booker 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Williamson 1. If Klobuchar’s “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” strategy won’t work in Wisconsin, where will it work?
Monmouth (New Hampshire): Buttigieg 20, Biden 19, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 4, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Bennet 2, Booker 1.
Economist/YouGov (page 143): Biden 27, Warren 22, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Booker 1.
Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 23, Warren 14, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 7, Steyer 4, Yang 4, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Bloomberg is now in third place behind Biden and Sanders and ahead of Warren.
Pundits, etc.
Tuesday’s Iowa debate lineup is set: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer and Warren.
Welcome to the Bizarro World Primary:
Democrats are now beginning to confront a very real scenario where the nomination — and the winnowing — will not be decided in states where campaigns have been plowing ground for more than a year, but in places and calendar dates so deep into primary season that until recently they’ve received almost no attention at all.
The Iowa field is bunched together with little daylight between a handful of well-funded candidates. Each of the four early voting states continues to present the prospect of a different winner. And, at the end of that gauntlet on Super Tuesday, a free-spending billionaire — Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor — is waiting to challenge whichever candidate or candidates emerge.
Snip.
Coloring the thinking of many Democrats is Bloomberg’s apparent willingness to spend limitless sums, leaving him poised to overwhelm their early operations across the Super Tuesday map.
For most candidates, said Scott Kozar, a Democratic ad-maker who is helping Sen. Michael Bennet with his campaign, “No one is playing in those states.”
He predicted the candidates still standing after Super Tuesday will be forced to run a “fast play” as they scramble into March.
In addition to flooding the airwaves with television ads, Bloomberg has already put more than 200 staffers on the ground in states that vote in March and April. He traveled recently to Ohio and Michigan, where he has hired senior state-level staff and plans to open 9 offices and 12 offices, respectively.
His campaign told POLITICO he plans to open five offices in Missouri, 17 in Florida and 12 in Illinois.
“Before Bloomberg got in, I said whoever wins South Carolina on February 29 will be the nominee because of the momentum factor” coming out of the first four primary states, said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California. “Bloomberg kind of puts a pause on that.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with one of the field’s most robust ground operations, has had post-Super Tuesday staffers flung out across the country for months, with a presence in Missouri , Michigan, Washington, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to an aide. And Sen. Bernie Sanders has an army of volunteers held over from his 2016 campaign.
But for every other Democrat, the landscape following Super Tuesday’s gigantic delegate hauls on March 3 is relatively barren — and will likely remain so until after the initial primaries.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Speaking of free-spending:
Matt Tiabbi looks at the process in New Hampshire.
How the New Hampshire primary traditionally works: the out-of-town press invades, occupying the Manchester Radisson like a siege army, and leans into a presumed frontrunner until he or she wins.
If the voters are very rebellious, and decide to back a different conventional politician, the press re-calibrates behind the new hotness. If voters decide to think completely for themselves, and pick a candidate not approved by the party or major media – no one knows what happens then, since we’ve never seen it, at least not on the Democratic side.
Two candidates I didn’t catch on a recent tour through the state each show how conventional campaign thinking has been upended in this cycle.
In the days after the New Year, Biden announced he’d be willing to pick a Republican running mate and also said coal miners should “learn to program.” He will go on to say “no one understood Obamacare” in Iowa. Reporters almost universally think he’d be a shit candidate against Trump, but voters haven’t agreed: he’s still at or near the top of polls.
Bernie Sanders meanwhile has spent the last four years serving as the subject of stories detailing his lack of general election viability, declining popularity, Putin-ness, physical unfitness, bad hair, and ideological unsuitability, among other things.
Yet he entered 2020 crushing the field in fundraising, raising $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, and is now a co-frontrunner with Biden in some polls. The failure of years of blunt messaging to derail a candidate like Sanders is part of what’s been driving those stories about “anxiety” among the party elders.
One candidate who has been affected by media, especially of late, is Elizabeth Warren. In Concord, I watched the news cycle take a bite out of her campaign.
New Englanders (I’m one) think they invented everything from baseball to microbreweries to the Democratic Party, and they believe the rest of the country should pay an annual thank-you dividend for the Kennedys. In regional memory, Mike Dukakis won the presidency in a landslide.
That’s why a sizable crowd in Concord responds with howls of approval when Elizabeth Warren asks, “Can we just admit that trickle-down economics is a failure?” In Phoenix, they’d ask, “What the fuck is trickle-down economics?” In parts of New England, Reagan is still president and they’re still mad about ketchup being declared a vegetable. Understanding the vagaries of Masshole chauvinism helps here.
State of the race:
As of this moment, if I had to place a wager I believe Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet much—the race is just too volatile.
There are a batch of polls out showing the Three Bs—Bernie, Biden, and Buttigieg—virtually tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. Keep in mind two implications of this: first, a large portion of the Democratic primary electorate—maybe half or more—is undecided, and second, between undecided Democrats and the share of votes going to the rest of the field, Biden is an extremely weak front-runner. A few more senior moments in his campaign and the race might cascade rapidly to Bernie, who has the most money to go the distance, or Buttigieg, who has the kind of fresh face Democrats often fall for—maybe too fresh a face.
Democratic candidates are lying about a tranny murder epidemic.
Kurt Schlichter handicaps the Democratic losers:
The deciding factor is going to be personality, and Trump has the advantage because he has one. The question is going to be, “Who does America trust not to screw up all the repairs that Trump has made to America post-Barack Obama?”
The answer is going to be, “Not one of those quasi-commie Democrat dorks.”
There are six real candidates – sorry Yangbangers and Tulsi-touters, but those two are not in the mix.
There’s Biden. What a putz. From his bizarre behavior to his brazen demand that we just accept the manifest corruption of his boy Lil’ Crackpipe, Gropey Joe is not merely of the Swamp. He is the Swamp. And there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t drain him.
Right now, he’s the leader in the polls and he’s the most likely to be nominated. There are two reasons. The first is that he has legacy black Democrat support. He’s the closest to a traditional Democrat, as opposed to one of the faculty lounge snobs that makes up most of the rest of the race. The second is that he has been designated The Democrat Most Likely To Succeed in beating The Donald. It’s unclear why. Sure, some polls say it (though they are shifting in Trump’s direction), but the problem for Joe is that so many liberal media types are wishcasting his victory that they never hit him hard. He’s soft and open to attack. Not-Mrs. Willie Brown gently tapped him in a debate (on busing, which is very, very popular among rich Democrats whose kids would never, ever be bused in a zillion years) and Not-Senile Joe went into a tailspin. He’s vulnerable because he’s been coddled – Trump will bash Hoover Biden’s dad all over the stage, as Trump feels no obligation not to talk about the subjects that the media has deemed off-limits, like the ex-senator’s (D-Credit Card Companies) Snortunate Son.
And he’ll pick Amy Klobuchar as his running mate. She’s another one who the Democrats imagine can reach out and touch the working-class folks who went for Trump. Of course, she’ll reach out and touch them with a rock – she’s got a temper and she’ll get pilloried as a tyrant. Tyrannical women are a hard sell – just ask Stumbles McMyturn. Sure, the media has announced that she is “having her moment,” but moments stop. She’s neither interesting nor inspirational, and the very moderation she allegedly represents (she doesn’t – she’s on-board with every pinko policy her pals subscribe to) will keep her from breaking out as a candidate and depress the turn-out among the Dem left (but I repeat myself) when she’s on the ticket with Biden.
Snip.
Then there’s Chief Spewing Bull. Her own brother recently dissed her for inventing more fake family history. Trump would chew her up, spit her out, and wash the residue into the gutter. Where’s the enthusiasm for a serial fraud who compares poorly to every bitter spinster public elementary school teacher who either demanded you use your inside voice or tried to make her class celebrate Kwanza? Maybe at Harvard or The New York Times offices, and nowhere else. She sadly won’t get nominated, because she’s such a disaster Trump might get 45 states, and Biden won’t pick her as veep because he knows she’s going to be scheming and drape-measuring every time she visits the Oval Office, and the budget does not include a presidential food taster.
Maybe Bernie Sanders will get it – which would be great because then all the nimrods who pushed the phony dossier would have to concede that they were going to vote for the one candidate we absolutely know has had sex in Russia – shiver. Yeah, he had his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union, and to people who aren’t college professors or college students or aspiring college students, that’s a disqualifier. He’s a loser, and what will be great is how the Dem bigwigs try to explain to the harder left contingent why their crusty curmudgeon is getting dissed again in the primaries.
Pete Buttigieg…why? Why is he even part of this? He’s a sub-par mayor of a sub-par town in a state most Democrats have never even heard of. Really, if he’s the one the Dems are looking to for salvation – oh yeah, he says he’s a Christian too, incessantly – then they’re pretty hosed already. His candidacy will soon Pete-r out.
Though maybe Biden will pick him for VP – if so, I’ve got $10 that says Smart Joe will get caught on tape at a rally explaining to disappointed feminists that, “Well, a gay guy counts as a woman, right?” You know that will totally happen.
And tiny Michael Bloomberg’s zillion-dollar ad budget has captured him…fifth or sixth place. Fascist Frodo’s not going anywhere. He’s already lost.
Hmmm:
Pelosi’s impeachment farce is really going to screw Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar and Booker, as they might be stuck in the impeachment trial rather than campaiging in Iowa and new Hampshire.
Heh:
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got a New Hampshire Public Radio interview.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Biden Is The Front-Runner, But There’s No Clear Favorite.”
Joe Biden is the most likely person to win a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary model, which we launched on Thursday morning. This is our first-ever full-fledged model of the primaries and we’re pretty excited about it — to read more about how the model works, see here.
But saying the former vice president is the front-runner doesn’t really tell the whole story. He may be the most likely nominee, but he’s still a slight underdog relative to the field, with a 40 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates1 by the time of the last scheduled Democratic contest — the Virgin Islands caucus on June 6. If one lowers the threshold to a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, then Biden’s chances are almost 50-50, but not quite — he has a 45 percent chance of a delegate plurality, per our forecast.
Second place is a set of steak knives Sanders, and third place is “No one,” so evidently “brokered convention” has a better chance than Warren or Buttigieg. Read the piece for more 538 model wonkery. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Elected Democrats in Texas and California previously backing Castro and Harris have flocked to Biden, but when Leticia Van de Putte is the highest profile name, you’ve got nothing that’s going to move the needle. I don’t see the anti-war Democrats being wild at this statement:
But Biden just keeps lying about his record on the Iraq war. “Consider that not everyone pays all that much attention — and that the youngest batch of voters who will be heading to the polls in November were still in their mothers’ wombs (where news sources are limited) while Biden voted in favor of allowing military action.” It doesn’t help that he gets Iran and Iraq confused. “Hunter Biden linked to 2016 identity theft involving deceased brother.” He truly is a prince among men…
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s buying a Super Bowl ad. Democrats: How dare he not adhere to the sacred debate rules that all the other excluded candidates bitch about?
At a campaign stop here, the former New York mayor said he has no intention of trying to qualify for upcoming debates — even though he almost certainly could participate if he wanted to. It was his most definitive statement to date on a stance that has rankled his opponents, who chafe at his limitless war chest and feel he should have to endure the rigors of campaigning they do.
Bloomberg insisted he’d like to debate if the rules allowed. But the billionaire, a latecomer to the Democratic primary, reasoned it is inappropriate for someone of his wealth to ask supporters for cash.
“It’s up to the Democratic Party. They have a rule that you cannot participate in the debates unless you have a few hundred thousand donors,” he told POLITICO after the campaign event Tuesday. “I don’t take any money from anybody else. I fund my campaign myself.”
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) If Bloomberg doesn’t win the nomination, his fallback position is simply controlling the Democratic Party:
Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.
The party he is moving to transform, which he only rejoined in October, has become little more than a bystander to his ambition. With more than 800 employees, $200 million in ad spending so far and a fully catered Times Square office that houses hundreds of employees, “Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc.” does not resemble a primary campaign in any traditional sense. It is an experiment in what happens to democracy when a single faction operates without economic constraints.
AD
While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg’s political career closely in New York. The president has been closely monitoring Bloomberg’s campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise, according to Trump confidants with whom the president has discussed Bloomberg.
Remember, this is the Washington Post, so anytime they “quote” anonymous “sources” like “Trump confidants,” our working assumption should always be that they’re “lying.”
Bloomberg’s aides, in turn, have delighted in trying to find ways to get Trump’s attention and increase his anxiety, like the recent purchase of an $11 million Super Bowl ad that will run against a similar spot purchased by Trump’s campaign.
The extravagance is part of the message, an attempt to demonstrate his competence and show that he can manage something big with good intentions.
“We also want people to know that we are building a juggernaut pointed at Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” said Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been taking the message to state parties around the country. “One of Mike’s goals is to make a machine that lasts. This idea that he wants to do a vanity run or is just buying exposure is belied by that.”
To begin with, that means building a fully staffed general election campaign in January to win primary contests in March, with a suite of high-profile recruits on the payroll, like former top executives for Facebook, Foursquare and GroupM, the world’s largest advertising media company by billings. No one at headquarters knows what he will ultimately choose to spend, but they operate for the moment without budgets, putting the 12th richest person on the planet on a path to spend $1 billion or more.
He wants Democrats to know he is happy to spread the money around. During a swing through Texas on Saturday, when his campaign staged over 150 events in 27 states in a show of organizing prowess, he cast himself as a potential benefactor and mentor for all state and local party organizations.
“I think you look at each,” Bloomberg said, when asked if he would boost them. “You look to see how well they’re run, and if you tried to help, that you’d be able to help. That’s number one. And number two would be that your money would be used efficiently. And it’s not just money. We can bring some advice.”
Whether he wins or loses the nomination, the ubiquitous television and digital ads he is running have been crafted as the opening exchange in a conversation about Trump’s failures that will continue through November.
Also this line: “His policy, though sometimes nuanced on paper, is uncomplicated in presentation, leaning heavily on phrases known to move focus groups.” Left unasked how rank-and-file Democrats feel about their party being taken over by a billionaire. Bloomy is all in on importing cheaper foreign labor.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker says an impeachment trial would be a “big blow” to his campaign. Oh, cry me a river, Spartacus.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He snags the endorsement of seven term Iowa Democratic Congressman Dave Loebsack. A U.S. congressman is a good endorsement, but he’s also retiring, so it’s unclear he’ll influence anyone. (But it doesn’t hurt.) “Buttigieg has staked his presidential hopes on Iowa and New Hampshire, the two early-voting states where he is significantly overperforming compared to national surveys and polls of Democratic voters in other states.” Yep. It’s good to be Da Mayor: repaved streets for me but not for thee. (Hat tip: StephenGreen at Instapundit.) Black South Bend police offers are critical of the way he handled race relations. There’s that Achilles Heel again…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Everybody knows and understands’ that Hillary Clinton is a ‘warmonger.'” I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but I wonder what Tulsi’s endgame is in this spat, other than reincarnation.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Delaney Looks To Build Momentum As Iowa Caucuses Draw Closer.” That would suggest he had any in the first place.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC 4 interview (in, I think, South Carolina). Defends appearing on Fox News.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Can Amy Klobuchar pull off a surprise in Iowa’s presidential caucuses?” (Imagine another Magic 8-Ball gif here.)
Iowa political experts say her day job representing a neighboring state, her Midwestern values and the work she has put into meeting voters in big cities and small towns in every corner of the state could result in a surprise payoff when Iowans caucus on Feb. 3.
A win for Klobuchar here doesn’t mean coming in first in Iowa, said Dianne Bystrom, director emerita of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. It means beating expectations.
“I think Klobuchar has a chance. People really like Amy Klobuchar,” said Bystrom, who is neutral in the race.
“She is down home, and she’s funny, and she’s got this quirky charm about her,” Bystrom said.
Klobuchar is not a soaring orator; she is plainspoken and earnest. Sporting a no-muss, no-fuss bob, she offers anecdotes about parenthood and being a woman in the workplace — complete with references to hiding her gray roots — that appeal to the suburban moms who can be key to elections.
All this amounts to “We need to pump her up for the sake of drama, but, yeah, she’s toast.”
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. SuperPac makes $2 million ad buy for Patrick in early states. Given Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing and Patrick’s 0.0 standing in all polls, that’s probably a less effective campaign tactic than throwing a giant kegger in New Hampshire and inviting every state resident to attend. “Since his late entry to the race in November, Patrick has struggled to gain traction with early-state Democratic voters or a national audience.” Like a greased man on a Teflon floor wearing sticks of butter as shoes. He’s concentrating on New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Fear of a Bernie Planet:
Increasingly alarmed that Bernie Sanders could become their party’s presidential nominee, establishment-minded Democrats are warning primary voters that the self-described democratic socialist would struggle to defeat President Donald Trump and hurt the party’s chances in premier House, Senate and governors’ races.
The urgent warnings come as Sanders shows new signs of strength on the ground in the first two states on the presidential primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire, backed by a dominant fundraising operation. The Vermont senator has largely escaped close scrutiny over the last year as his rivals doubted the quirky 78-year-old’s ability to win the nomination. But less than a month before Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, the doubters are being forced to take Sanders seriously.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, previously a senior aide to President Barack Obama, warned Democrats that Sanders’ status as a democratic socialist and his unwavering support for “Medicare for All” won’t play well among swing voters in the states that matter most in 2020.
“You need a candidate with a message that can help us win swing voters in battleground states,” Emanuel said in an interview. “The degree of difficulty dramatically increases under a Bernie Sanders candidacy. It just gets a lot harder.”
The increasingly vocal concerns are coming from a number of political veterans tied to the Obama administration and the 2020 field’s moderate wing, including those backing former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
(Hat tip: Powerline.) “Of course Bernie can win,” says man waving away idea that a socialist is too far left for the American electorate. I find his arguments (such as they are) unconvincing. Sanders says that the Qassem Suleimani strike is just like Putin assassinating political rivals.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the January debate by polling at 12% in in Nevada and 15% in South Carolina. I never imagined there would ever be a Steyer boomlet, yet here we are. The hilarious thing about this is that it’s going to inspire Bloomberg to dump a ton more money into the race.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren campaign scrambling for survival. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) “Warren, Sanders Hosting Call With Pro-Tehran Lobby Group.”
Along with Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sanders and Warren are scheduled to speak Wednesday evening with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The group played a central role in what former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes called the administration’s pro-Iran Deal “echo chamber,” spinning journalists, lawmakers, and citizens.
The Democratic candidates’ willingness to engage with NIAC—a group that aggressively pushed the accord and has strongly advocated against U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic—reflects their desire to see America reenter the nuclear deal, which released up to $150 billion in cash to the regime. Much of that money has gone to fund Iran’s regional terror operations, including recent attacks on American personnel stationed in the region.
NIAC has deep ties to Iran’s regime, including senior officials like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif worked closely with NIAC founder Trita Parsi, who, in turn, consulted with the Obama administration.
Parsi lobbied Congress against sanctions on Iran in 2013 and met with Obama administration officials at the White House dozens of times leading up to the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015. Multiple U.S. officials and senior congressional sources informed the Washington Free Beacon that Parsi helped the White House craft its messaging as it tried to sell the nuclear deal to the public. The NIAC chief met with Rhodes, among other top officials, during multiple visits throughout the Obama era.
That’s just part of the Warren weirdness on Iran, where in 24 hours she went from calling Suleimani a “murderer” to just “a government official, a high-ranking military official.” (There’s no end to appeasing the soft-on-Jihad loony left). Castro endorses her. Let’s check the reaction meter:
Her face is crawling with bacteria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Update: Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: Dropped Out. She dropped out January 10th:
I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.
As of today, therefore, I’m suspending my campaign.
Farewell, Marianne. We’ll always have the memes…
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Taibbi piece on Yang:
No candidate has leaned more into the fun part of running for president than Yang. He does some high fives, then reminds all: He’s the guy who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. He notes the state of Alaska already does something like this, divvying up oil revenues. What’s the 21st century version of oil?
Murmurs among the teenagers. Yang grins.
“It’s technology,” he says. “Although, I thought someone was going to say marijuana. And that’s cool, because I want to legalize weed, too.”
LOUD cheers. The Beavis and Butthead factor here is through the roof. Also: Yang wants to give 16-year-olds with cash and expanded relaxation options the right to vote. (Studies show this increases like likelihood of future engagement). You could cause brain bubbles in a Fox News host with a video of this Democrat recruitment scene.
Through the eyes of a rival candidate, Yang’s slang-laden pitch to high schoolers might smack of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” routine. His speech is peppered with phrases like “That’s okay, bro.” Describing the political “disaster” previous generations have left children, he says, “You could even call it a shit show.”
But kids spot phonies quickly, and Yang isn’t failing. His campaign is meant as a warning that it’s traditional politicians who are being phony, when they don’t raise alarms about a jobs crisis brought on by automation and changes to the manufacturing economy.
He’s been evangelizing the Democratic Party to a new generation of voters, at events like these and online, where his #YangGang has been one of campaign 2020’s big marketing success stories. He raised $16.5 million in the fourth quarter, fifth among Democrats, hinting at new sources of support for the party.
But the reaction to Yang among party leaders and press has hovered between indifferent and hostile. He’s had trouble getting air time, and thanks to an arbitrary set of criteria, may be shut out of the January 14th candidate debate in Des Moines, despite poll numbers that are competitive with some already-qualified participants.
The standard requires four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two qualifying polls showing 7% or higher support in Iowa or New Hampshire. The problem is, there were no new state polls for over a month, making it nearly impossible for candidates on the edge to meet the increased standard.
Andrew Yang, Ken Jeong, what’s the difference? (Also note the pic for “Tulsi Gabbard.”) The Boston Herald likes Yang. “He is real. He talks to people — all kinds of people — and is not hindered by the unwritten rules of political tribalism and Twitter wokeness that have become wholly unproductive, if not totally exasperating….We also know that Yang is the most genuine candidate in the Democratic field, he is a successful businessman who has lived in the real world his entire life, and unlike his political competitors, still does.”
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.
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)
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)
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)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Barbara Lee, Bernie Sanders, black, California, Cory Booker, Dave Loebsack, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Elizabeth Warren, Hunter Biden, Iran, Iraq, Joe Biden, John Delaney, Julian Castro, Kurt Schlichter, Leticia Van de Putte, Marianne Williamson, Matt Taibbi, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, National Iranian American Council, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Qassem Suleimani, Ro Khanna, Texas, Tom Steyer, transexual, Tulsi Gabbard
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 6th, 2020
Castro drops Out, Williamson lays everybody off, Q4 fundraising numbers drop, Biden tells coal miners to start slinging code, Klobuchar talks UFOs, and a three way tie for first in Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q4 Fundraising
- Bernie Sanders: $34.5 million
- Pete Buttigieg: $24.7 million
- Joe Biden: $22.7 million
- Elizabeth Warren: $21.2 million
- Andrew Yang: $16.5 million
- Amy Klobuchar: $11.4
- Cory Booker: $6.6 million
- Tulsi Gabbard: $3.4 million
Some notes:
Those who expected Sanders to fade after his heart attack were badly mistaken. He has enough money to fight Biden all the way to the convention, and his broad small amount donor base can continue to raise money for him without hitting any campaign contribution limits.
Biden comes in third. Has any frontrunner ever trailed so badly in the money race? It suggests an inability to find the right people to fill staff roles.
Yang’s haul is hugely impressive, considering that no one (myself included) gave him any chance early on. He’s got enough funding to stay in through at least Super Tuesday, where he has a shot at picking up at least some of California’s 416 pledged delegates.
Though relegated to second place, Buttigieg continues to punch above his weight in fundraising.
No reports yet on how much cash Bloomberg and Steyer shoveled into their own campaigns this quarter.
Polls
CBS/YouGov (Iowa): Sanders 23, Biden 23, Buttigieg 23, Warren 16, Klobuchar 7. Yang 2, Steyer 2, Booker 2, Gabbard 1.
CBS/YouGov (New Hampshire): Sanders 27, Biden 25, Warren 18, Buttigieg 13, Klobuchar 7, Steyer 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1.
Harvard/Harris X (page 134): Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 12, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 7, Yang 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Steyer 2, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Messam 1 (really?), Delaney 1, Gillibrand 1.
Hill/Harris X: Biden 28, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Bloomberg 11, Buttigieg 6, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Castro 2. Delaney 2, Gabbard 2. Bloomberg at 11 ought to terrify the other candidates. But why is Sanders called out as “Bernie” on the chart, despite everyone else being referred to by their last name?
Economist/YouGov (page 165): Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 18, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 4, Bloomberg 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Castro 1.
Morning Consult: Biden 32, Sanders 21, Warren 14, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
“Bloomberg, Steyer Showing Money Can’t Buy Elections After Failed $200 Million Ad Blitz.”
With an unprecedented advertising spending binge, billionaire presidential wannabees Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have launched themselves all the way to….the middle tier of the Democratic primary field.
The two candidates have spent a combined $200 million on television ads—with Bloomberg accounting for about $120 million of that total since he jumped into the race less than a month ago. No other candidate in the field has spent more than $18 million on ads so far, Politico reports. Bloomberg spent more than that in the first week after entering the race in late November.
Despite the advertising blitz, Bloomberg and Steyer are almost certainly wasting their money chasing political power. While it is foolish to rule out any electoral outcome in a world where Donald Trump is president, voters have responded to both Democratic billionaires with a resounding meh, and there seems to be little reason to think that will change [this] year, no matter how much money the two candidates pour into the race.
There are two lessons here. First, Bloomberg and Steyer seem to be on an inadvertent crusade to prove that progressive fears about the influence of money in politics are largely unfounded.
Secondly, the two billionaire candidates are providing a real-world lesson about opportunity costs by setting fire to their huge campaign war chests. They’ve got the means to change the world, but getting involved in politics isn’t the best way to do it.
Candidates dance around the Qassem Soleimani strike.
The Atlantic offers a cheat sheet that includes the also-rans and never-rans. Most interesting tidbit: “[Deval] Patrick’s estranged father played in the alien jazz great Sun Ra’s Arkestra.”
“Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang see huge Q4 fundraising surges.”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bennet becomes a late entrant in the “everything for free!” derby by promising $6 trillion in phony baloney, pie-in-the-sky spending promises. It may not be too little, but it’s definitely too late. He’s hoping for a top three finish in New Hampshire. Don’t bet on it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden tells coal miners to learn to code. Amazing how someone who has never mined coal or written code so confidently asserts that one who has done one job can easily do the other. “Biden touts himself as the embodiment of honesty while spreading a well-known lie. That’s an exquisite form of lying.” Speaking of indicting yourself:
But no matter what Biden says, his poll numbers seem unsinkable. Another editorialist points out that Biden’s immunity to his many gaffes shows why he’ll win the nomination:
It starts with the polls. Biden has been dominant. Since Real Clear Politics started its polling average in December 2018, Biden has led for all but one day. Sen. Elizabeth Warren eclipsed him by 0.2 percentage points on Oct. 2. She now trails him by 13 percent and is in third place, also trailing Sen. Bernie Sanders.
This isn’t how many political pundits expected last year to go. They chalked up Biden’s pre-announcement lead to his high name ID. He was supposed to gaffe his way into an early exit. He wasn’t progressive enough for the liberal wing of the party either.
What makes Biden’s durability look sustainable is that he hasn’t been a great candidate. Far from it. His debates have been cringeworthy. In July, he messed up the address of his campaign website. He made a bizarre reference to record players in September. In November, he forgot that Sen. Kamala Harris — who was on the stage with him — was a female, African-American senator.
The campaign trail hasn’t been much better. During a September CNN town hall, his left eye filled with blood, presumably from a blood vessel bursting. He called New Hampshire “Vermont” during a summer visit. In August, he said, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” He appeared to mean “rich” not “white,” but that mistake could have ended another candidate’s campaign.
Biden’s done a better job undercutting his own candidacy than any of his opponents ever could have — and his support has hardly budged.
He keeps promising bipartisanship. I think Republicans all remember how “bipartisan” the Obama Administration was…
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s already spent $155 million on advertising. He’s in tied with Warren for third place in one poll, which I think says less about his strength than Warren’s weakness. He failed to file for the Nevada caucuses. Which is really stupid, because if there’s anything Nevada loves, it’s rich idiots willing to blow millions of dollars with nothing to show for it. There’s just no end to bad Bloomberg ideas:
He answered a Military Times questionnaire. It’s full of “on the one hand, on the other” platitudes, though he does say he’ll negotiate with the Taliban, but also leave a small force in Afghanistan, which sounds like it amounts to “stay in and lose,” with a side plate of living tripwires. He did approve of the Suleimani strike.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Looks like he’s going to miss the January 14th debates, and he seems to have fallen below the ever-rising Andrew Yang Line. Basically another “failure to launch” piece. he also campaigned in South Carolina.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Billionaires backing Buttigieg. “Forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings, making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America’s richest people.” That includes a surprisingly high number of hedge fund managers, as well as Google founder Eric Schmidt’s wife, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom’s wife, Square founder Jim McKelvey’s wife, David Geffen, Barry Diller, Netflix’ Reed Hastings, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, the wife of casino video game mogul Jon Yarbrough, members of the Ziff family, the Pritzker family, the NFL Giant’s Tisch family, etc. etc. etc. “Why Pete Buttigieg Enrages the Young Left.”
As the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries draw near and South Bend’s boy wonder, Pete Buttigieg, seems buoyant in the all-important early-state polls, “Mayor Pete” has been perpetually dogged by a major issue: the youngest and most activated voters in his party all seem to—how to put this delicately?—hate his guts.
Normally the first candidate of a generation can expect to ride a wave of youth enthusiasm, as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton once did. For the 37-year-old Buttigieg, it’s been quite the opposite. The newly radicalized Teen Vogue invoked a cringeworthy class-warfare pun to declare his campaign a “Lesson in ‘Petey’ Bourgeois Politics.” Jacobin, tribune of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, has developed seemingly an entire vertical focused on slamming Mayor Pete. A writer for Out magazine, putting it in starker terms, tweeted that if he “had balls he’d run as the republican he is against trump in the primary.”
Why is the enmity from young, left-wing activists toward Buttigieg so visceral? It’s true that they favor Bernie Sanders, but Buttigieg comes in for a type of loathing that surpasses even that they hold for Sanders’ older rivals, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
But those explanations are still too general to explain the fury inspired by a fourth-place presidential contender and Midwestern college-town mayor. And it’s not his ideology: The resentment he inspires runs much deeper than that earned by the Amy Klobuchars and Michael Bennets of the world—both of whom have more politically moderate tendencies than Buttigieg, who has, among other positions, argued for raising the minimum wage to $15, introducing a public health care option, expanding the size of the Supreme Court and abolishing the Electoral College. (Asked for comment for this article, a representative from the Buttigieg campaign told Politico that staffers are occasionally vexed by the cold reception to a platform that’s well to the left of any recent Democratic presidential nominee.)
The unspoken truth about the furor Buttigieg arouses is that his success threatens a core belief of young progressives: that their ideology owns the future, and that the rise of millennials into Democratic politics is going to bring an inevitable demographic triumph for the party’s far left wing.
Snip.
It’s especially galling that the first millennial to take a serious run at the presidency is nothing like the left’s imagined savior. Buttigieg is a veteran, an outspoken Christian, a former McKinsey consultant, and, frankly, closer to Mitt Romney than Sanders or generational peer AOC in his aw shucks personal affect. In the eyes of radicalized young leftists, Buttigieg isn’t just an ideological foe, he’s worse than that: He’s a square.
Snip.
Buttigieg is a young professional with an elite pedigree who’s chosen to buy into the system as a reformer instead of attacking it as a revolutionary. To a certain class of left-wing thought leaders, he’s an unwelcome reminder of the squeaky-clean moderates with whom they once rubbed elbows. And quite possibly, his elite credentials may also be an unwelcome reminder of their own. The editor-in-chief of Current Affairs, for instance, isn’t just a random antagonist: He’s also a fellow Harvard alumnus.
The educated young people leading the left have worked closely with these overachievers throughout their careers—often at the same elite institutions they deride, rightfully or not, as venal consensus factories. Such activists are baffled by their counterparts’ optimism and adherence to tradition in the face of the Trump era’s grimness and vulgarity.
And, again, it seems many of their peers agree. Buttigieg does not enjoy considerable support among young people. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll of Iowa voters, he placed a distant third among 18-to-29-year-olds, behind Sanders and Warren. But he does appeal to a certain kind of young person, as now represented in the cultural imagination by the “High Hopes” dancers. And to the self-renouncing meritocrats who act as thought leaders to the young left, those people represent both a personal frustration and a political fear—that the institutions of tomorrow may yet be built by those with faith in yesterday’s ideals.
The path to Washington may be clearer for them than their radical counterparts, even as more millennials age into political life. The youngest Democratic member of Congress is, of course, the 30-year-old AOC, who seems all but inevitable to succeed Sanders as the standard-bearer for democratic socialism in America. But if you look at the next 10 youngest Democrats in Congress, they include mostly moderates: the venture capitalist Josh Harder, the military veteran and Blue Dog Max Rose, and Conor Lamb, whose district lies deep in Pennsylvania’s Trump country.
When it comes down to it, the hard left would rather seize control of the Democratic Party than win elections, and Buttigieg refuses to immanentize the eschaton. Another look inside those high dollar fundraisers:
At an annual charity fund-raiser in October, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, shared a table with the designer Michael Kors and Pete Buttigieg, then the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who wore one of his trademark navy suits.
The event was a benefit for God’s Love We Deliver, a nonprofit that began delivering meals to New Yorkers with AIDS in 1986 and has since expanded to serve other homebound people. On the second floor of Cipriani’s South Street location, guests bid for meals with the actor Neil Patrick Harris, watched the model Iman receive an award for her philanthropic efforts and heard a short speech from Mr. Buttigieg, who was also honored that evening. He said volunteers for the organization had offered sustenance “in substance and in soul.”
Sitting at a table near the stage was the theater producer Jordan Roth, who back in April held an event for Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential campaign at his home in the West Village, at up to $2,800 per head. Nearby was the board chairman of God’s Love, Terrence Meck, who had co-hosted an event for Mr. Buttigieg in Provincetown, Mass., just after the July 4 holiday. (Tickets for that ran upward of $1,000 per person.)
Snip.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Buttigieg’s dinners and fund-raisers — complete with cozy pictures on Instagram of Mr. Buttigieg standing beside high-net-worth bundlers — have turned into grist for his critics.
Guests at a December fund-raiser for Mr. Buttigieg held at the New York home of Kevin Ryan, an internet entrepreneur behind Gilt Groupe and Business Insider, were greeted outside by protesters who banged pots and pans and called Mr. Buttigieg “Wall Street Pete.”
The police arrived when a protester got inside. By that point, Mr. Buttigieg had left for Ms. Wintour’s West Village townhouse, where a campaign dinner was being held. Tickets cost up to $2,800 each and the actress Sienna Miller was among the attendees.
Days later, Mr. Buttigieg appeared at a fund-raiser held inside a Napa Valley wine cave. Afterward, progressive activists reached deep into political crisis history to note that one of the hosts, Craig Hall, who is now the owner of Hall Wines in Rutherford, Calif., was a real estate developer involved in the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s. Mr. Hall went to Jim Wright, then speaker of the House, for help when he was facing bankruptcy — and the cascade of events led to a bailout for Mr. Hall, a congressional ethics investigation and, ultimately, Mr. Wright’s resignation as speaker.
Mr. Hall’s wife, Kathryn Walt Hall, co-hosted the Napa benefit. She was a prolific donor to President Bill Clinton and served as ambassador to Austria from 1997 to 2001.
Snip.
Prominent donors in Los Angeles argue that Mr. Buttigieg is also approaching celebrity fund-raising differently than Hillary Clinton did four years ago.
While her campaign publicized the appearances of Katy Perry and Lena Dunham at events, he’s kept a lid on similar associations.
The fund-raiser that Gwyneth Paltrow held on his behalf last May? The campaign declined to publicize it. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spoke in front of cameras that evening during a $25 (and up) appearance at the Abbey — sort of a gay, West Hollywood equivalent of dining at Sylvia’s in Harlem with the Rev. Al Sharpton.
“He wasn’t doing a song and dance with Gwyneth on national television,” said Simon Halls, a prominent entertainment industry publicist who in July was scheduled to co-host a reception at the television producer Ryan Murphy’s home. (That event was canceled after a white police officer fatally shot a black man in South Bend; the reception has not been rescheduled.)
An offer by the designer Tom Ford to dress Mr. Buttigieg during the course of the campaign? Declined.
In July, Mr. Buttigieg appeared at the Provincetown fund-raiser Mr. Meck hosted with Bryan Rafanelli, an event planner whose clients have included the Clintons. Although tickets cost a minimum of $1,000, Mr. Meck said the event took place after a free, packed and publicized town hall event. As Mr. Meck told it, Mr. Buttigieg told him that he wanted to spend his time in Provincetown actually meeting people. Later in the summer, he hit the Hamptons to collect more money.
Interesting approach. “I don’t want your star power, just your money.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Dropped out January 2, 2020. “Castro failed to make the last two debates or even achieve 2% in the polls despite promising government handouts for basically everything. Along with Sen. Cory Booker, he whined to the DNC about unfair qualifications for the January primary debate. More than likely he would not have participated in that debate.” “Dropout Julian Castro’s insufferably woke presidential campaign won’t be missed“:
Give Julian Castro some credit: In a crowded 2020 Democratic field originally featuring cringeworthy candidates such as Beto O’Rourke and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the former housing and urban development secretary still managed to run the most insufferably woke presidential campaign of this cycle.
Thursday morning brought the official end of Castro’s campaign. But it never really got off the ground, and the candidate failed to qualify for the November debate, getting under 2% of the vote in polling averages. Outside of a few fringe Marxist professors and woke liberal activists, Castro’s campaign was so radical that even Democratic primary voters weren’t buying it.
It’s not hard to see why. Castro’s only memorable contributions to the 2020 race are viral moments where he embarrassed himself.
For one, there was his cringey decision to randomly pronounce certain words with a Spanish accent during Democratic debates, despite not actually being a native Spanish speaker. Then there was his call for completely decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and attacks on other, slightly less terrible Democrats who declined to endorse his radical proposal.
Don’t forget the countless shudder-worthy instances where Castro pandered to the woke crowd with fact-free rants about “transgender women of color” being gunned down in the street in a supposed epidemic of anti-transgender hate crimes. Castro ignored the complete lack of evidence for this narrative, instead choosing to stir up bogus outrage for votes. His pandering even included a bizarre call for expanding abortion access to transgender women (aka biological males). Castro was also the first candidate to honor “International Pronouns Day” by putting his preferred pronouns, he and him, in his Twitter profile. This was, of course, a pure virtue-signal: Everyone already knew he was a man.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Esquire writer has a case of the sadz over his withdrawal. “Castro should have been viable all the way to the convention. (This is also true of Jay Inslee and Kamala Harris.) But the merciless criteria of polls and money worked against all three of them.” No, all three are out because all of them sucked in various ways, and all of them were terrible, inauthentic candidates spouting far-left bromides. Ace of Spades HQ: “He never stopped talking about giving trans women pap smears and abortions. Weird that he never connected with his presumptive Latino base.” 538’s postmortem talks about debate missteps but paints a picture of general suckage.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She accepted the role of Chancellor of Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Since it’s largely a ceremonial role, it doesn’t necessarily preclude yet another Presidential run. “Hillary Clinton Slams Trump For Not Taking A More ‘Hands-Off’ Approach To Embassy Attack.”
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited Sioux City.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Giving up on Iowa? She just moved all her paid Iowa staffers to New Hampshire. I suspect she’s just shuffling ammo crates on the Lusitania. She’s selling “No War With Iran” T-shirts. “Former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill slammed Democratic presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard after she criticized President Trump’s recent strike against” Qassem Suleimani. She surfs New Hampshire, because that’s a totally normal thing to do on New Year’s Day. “Hillary Clinton Accidentally Posts Condolences For Tulsi Gabbard’s Suicide One Day Early.”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her fundraising haul doubled her Q3 numbers, but there’s precious little evidence she’s threatening to move into the top tier. Says she’ll declassify UFO documents. Ha! As if the Grays and Reptoids would let her! And thanks to the UFO Chronicles for this image:
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s hired eight New Hampshire staffers and made ad buys “in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina,” concentrating on New Hampshire ($100,000 in ads) and South Carolina ($60,000). Maybe that can boost him from 0% to 1% in the polls. He has a net worth between $3.2 million to $11 million.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Everything’s coming up Bernie, who leads fundraising, tops New Hampshire polls and is tied in Iowa. How Bernie hangs in:
Whereas Joe Biden seems permanently diminished by his own verbal and intellectual confusion and by his son’s self-dealing, Bernie is getting stronger.
He has raised the most money of all the Democratic candidates, by far — some $95 million in 2019 from 5 million donations — though the average contribution to Bernie is $18. He raised $34.5 million in the last quarter alone. He got 40,000 new donors on the last day of the year.
When Mr. Sanders renounced bundlers and PACs it was said that he had unilaterally disarmed himself in the money race. Instead he is killing it.
Mr. Sanders is also raising money in the 200 “pivot” counties Barack Obama carried in 2012 and Democrats lost to Donald Trump in the swing states in 2016.
And he is not only acceptable to but well thought of by an astounding 75 percent of his party.
Those are singular metrics.
He is also the only candidate in a position to take either first or second in the first contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.
He polls as well as Mr. Biden in a direct matchup against Mr. Trump, though surely, as Mr. Sanders says, Donald Trump could eat Mr. Biden’s lunch on his votes in favor of NAFTA and the endless and futile Iraq War.
The money race and the size of his crowds show that Bernie Sanders is connecting, just as they show Joe Biden is not. His resilience is no fluke.
The people who “know” did not see this coming.
Hey Bernie, where are your medical records? You know, the ones you promised to release? Comes out against vaping, then walks it back.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hits donor threshold, hasn’t hit the polling threshold. “In addition to garnering the necessary number of voters, Democratic candidates need to reach 5 percent support in at least four DNC-approved polls, or at least 7 percent support in two single-state polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina. So far, Steyer is polling at 5 percent in two of the four polls conducted in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. On the ground with the Warren campaign in rural Iowa:
Many Democratic presidential candidates, such as former vice president Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have robust organizations. But among locals, Warren’s organization stands out.
While the campaign has declined to release exact numbers, the Massachusetts senator is believed to have more than 100 field staff fanned out across the state, including some who have been on the ground for the better part of a year. Warren staffers have become deeply embedded, showing up at high school sports games, book clubs, bingo nights and potluck dinners dressed in the campaign’s signature liberty green attire. In Fairfield, Iowa, a family recently named their newborn goat Herb, after the Warren field organizer who has prolifically canvassed that town for months. In Mason City, an organizer who was in the hospital for emergency surgery used his recovery time to pitch the ER staff on Warren’s candidacy.
The stories about Warren staffers in Iowa and how far they go to sell her candidacy regularly circulate among rival campaigns, eliciting both eye rolls but also grudging admiration. “It’s like, where did they find these kids?” marveled a longtime Iowa Democratic activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she endorsed another candidate in the race.
Caveat: Every one of these borderline-admiring pieces on a female Democratic candidate’s organization (be it Warren, Harris, or Gillibrand) always seems to come from a female writer, and this one’s from Holly Bailey. Warren calls Suleimani a murderer, then backtracks due to pushback from the hate-America left. “Elizabeth Warren Opens Casino To Help Finance Campaign.”
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook.
She laid off her entire campaign staff, which is hardly a sign of impending triumph. “Marianne Williamson, joined onstage by a large crystal.” Not the Babylon Bee… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Flush with cash, Yang wrestles with where to spend it.”
Andrew Yang has more money than his campaign knows what to do with.
He still can’t quite get accustomed to his surprising fundraising haul — Yang collected $16.5 million in the fourth quarter — or how to allocate it in the run-up to the Iowa and New Hampshire contests.
“We’re going to buy gold coins, and then put them in a vault, and then I’m going to go on top of the pile of gold coins and then wave my arms and legs up and down,” he joked in an interview.
The reality is that his newfound campaign riches are creating internal tension about whether to beef up the Iowa operation or bet it all in New Hampshire.
Yang’s strong focus has always been on New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state where he has spent more time than any of the top-tier candidates. The campaign sees it as ripe ground for him — Democratic voters relish their independent-streak and showed they were open to non-traditional candidates in the past, delivering Sen. Bernie Sanders a decisive win in the 2016 primary.
Their goal, to date, has been to finish at the top of the second-tier in order to stay relevant after the early-voting states. Suddenly though, with money to play in Iowa as well, there is a vigorous debate about where to spend the cash and Yang’s other precious commodity — his time.
“I think if we overperform expectations will have a very powerful narrative coming out of New Hampshire that people don’t expect us to be at the top four here,” Yang said after wrapping up the final of 14 events during a four-day trip here. “If we break the top four, I think people will see that we have a ton of energy behind us.”
Yang’s $16.5 million — 65 percent more than the previous quarter — placed him fifth in terms of fundraising for the Democratic presidential candidates, about $4.7 million less than Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who came in fourth. He raised almost five times more than Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another second-tier candidate who has invested so heavily in New Hampshire that she has all but moved here.
Honestly, instead of Iowa, he should probably look to Super Tuesday and build out an organization in California and either North Carolina or Texas, all of which have significant concentrations of high tech industries, where workers seem somewhat more attuned to his issues. Texas has a bigger population, and thus is more delegate rich, and a bigger concentration of Asians, but the diverse markets are brutal for ad campaigns. On the other hand, a $5 million direct mail/TV/radio push in the Research Triangle in North Carolina might well make an impression. Ohio is going to screw him out of a place on the ballot due to a technical filing issue. Yang has pretty much the same reaction to Biden’s “Coal miners should learn to code” suggestion:
Whatever he’s doing after the primaries, he’s not working as a bookie:
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.
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.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
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)
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)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Afghanistan, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Anna Wintour, Barry Diller, Bernie Sanders, Bryan Rafanelli, Conor Lamb, Cory Booker, Craig Hall, David Geffen, Deval Patrick, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Schmidt, Foreign Policy, Google, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hillary Clinton, Iowa, Jihad, Jim McKelvey, Jim Wright, Joe Biden, Jon Yarbrough, Jonathan Gray, Jordan Roth, Julian Castro, Kathryn Walt Hall, Katy Perry, Kevin Systrom, Lena Dunham, Marianne Williamson, Max Rose, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Kors, Military, Neil Patrick Harris, Netflix, New Hampshire, ObamaCare, Ohio, Pete Buttigieg, Qassem Suleimani, Reed Hastings, Reid Hoffman, Robert O'Neill, Ryan Murphy, Simon Halls, Social Justice Warriors, South Carolina, Terrence Meck, Tom Steyer
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Four months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.
This month, we’ve had our first ever verified decline in Twitter followers for any candidate.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
- Bernie Sanders: 10,137,379 (up 109,634)
- Cory Booker: 4,412,455 (up 10,464)
- Joe Biden: 4,045,008 (up 79,827)
- Elizabeth Warren: 3,573,835 (up 69,077)
- Marianne Williamson: 2,763,144 (down 1,550)
- Michael Bloomberg: 2,364,351 (up 20,552)
- Pete Buttigieg: 1,571,971 (up 15,095)
- Andrew Yang: 1,124,156 (up 78,687)
- Amy Klobuchar: 839,271 (up 22,461)
- Tulsi Gabbard: 763,680 (up 29,034)
- Julian Castro: 454,139 (up 19,337)
- Tom Steyer: 253,467 (up 4,146)
- Deval Patrick: 52,519 (up 6,510)
- Michael Bennet: 42,832 (up 799)
- John Delaney: 38,015 (up 564)
Removed from the last update: Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 68,039,448 followers, up 1,008,666 since the last roundup, so once again Trump has gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,370,155 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
The rate for most of the candidates adding followers slowed, which I attribute to the Christmas season.
Except Joe Biden, who gained some 30,000 more followers in December than November, bucking the trend.
However, Bernie Sanders still gained more overall, even if he gained half as many as he did in November.
Also gaining more: Andrew Yang, who gained more followers than Elizabeth Warren.
Marianne Williamson records the first verifiable decline in Twitter followers since I started tracking the race.
Steyer and Bloomberg are dropping huge amounts into ads, yet their Twitter counts are growing more slowly than Andrew Yang’s.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, John Delaney, Julian Castro, Marianne Williamson, Media Watch, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Twitter
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Monday, December 30th, 2019
Biden leans on bundling billionaires, Steyer hits diminishing returns, Bloomberg takes up the “Most Widely Loathed” spot, Warren donations take a nosedive, Sanders 💘 commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
We’re also down to the last two days of the year, so expect Q4 fundraising numbers to start dropping later this week.
Polls
As expected, it was a light polling week:
Economist/YouGov (page 193): Biden 30, Warren 19, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Klobuchar 5, Bloomberg 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Steyer 1, Castro 1, Williamson 1, Delaney 1.
Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 21. Warren 15, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 6, Yang 5, Booker 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. President Donald Trump’s chances of winning the general election are now up over 50%…
Pundits, etc.
Bloomberg, Steyer, and the law of diminishing returns.
Writer discusses all the predictions he got wrong this year.
Keep an eye on the new faces, I sagely advised: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, plus former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
Sorry about that. Despite a fawning cover story in Vanity Fair, O’Rourke flamed out fast. Harris staged an impressive launch, but then fell to earth. Brown never entered the race. Only Booker is still running, and his campaign is on life support.
Next time I recommend a hot technology stock or a soon-to-be-famous restaurant, ignore the tip.
Snip.
I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg coming. The 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city? Inconceivable, I thought. Iowa voters may shortly prove me wrong.
I did see Elizabeth Warren coming. Her focus on plans to make the economy work better for the middle class was effective, I wrote.
Then Warren stumbled on healthcare. When she belatedly offered a plan, it proposed a government-run health insurance system, but only after a long transition period.
That seemed smart, I wrote. It’s not clear that voters agree.
To be fair, I did get some things right.
I figured out that the controversies over Biden’s verbal gaffes were really a polite proxy for questions about his age. He’ll be 78 on Inauguration Day; is he up to the job?
I noted that most Democratic voters aren’t Bernie Sanders-style socialists, and that the progressive “litmus tests” that dominated early months of the campaign — “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — weren’t a sure path to winning primaries.
Speaking of which, unions, they of the fat health benefits, are not wild about “Medicare for All.” It would be tough going from a Cadillac plan to the equivalent of Medicaid.
Ranking the campaign dropouts. This is a pretty crappy “Have you done the will of the party, comrade?” ranking. No way does Kamala Harris’ disasterous campaign rank at the top.
Nate Silver doesn’t think we’re headed to a brokered convention. Party pooper!
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets three questions from the New York Times, which reminds us that he was a member of the “Gang of Eight” illegal alien amnesty push. Releases a trade policy plan, which seems to be “everything Trump did was wrong.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden: Subpoenas for the, but not for me. Says he would be willing to nominate Obama to the Supreme Court. There is some precedent (William Howard Taft was the 27th President, and later served as the 10th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), but that was back before being the ex-President became the greatest job in the world. “Biden reveals deep bench of campaign bundlers.”
Joe Biden released the names of more than 200 people and couples who are raising money for his presidential campaign, a list that includes a number of big names in Democratic money like Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and LGBT rights activist Tim Gill and his husband, Scott Miller.
Biden’s list of fundraisers, each of which has brought in at least $25,000 for his presidential bid, includes many of the biggest names in Democratic fundraising. The list spans Wall Street, Silicon Valley and a number of politicians themselves.
The former vice president voluntarily disclosed the list as the Democratic field — and especially Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren — sparred with each other throughout November and December over how to have adequate transparency about money and finances on the campaign trail.
More than any other leading candidate, Biden is relying on big fundraising events to power his bid for the presidency, which makes these bundlers crucial to his success. Other big-name bundlers for Biden include New York venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof, and billionaire real estate broker George Marcus.
Biden is running for president on his longtime experience in public service, and his list of bundlers reflects the many high-powered connections he built over that time. Biden bundlers include current senators Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles is a bundler for Biden, as is Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A number of former ambassadors — who are often longtime bundlers and major political donors in their own right — are also helping Biden. They include Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal; Denise Bauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Anthony Gardner, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; and Mark Gilbert, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, and more.
It occurs to me that if there were a massive foreign aid kickback scheme funneling overseas money to longtime swamp creatures, Belgium and EU ambassadors would be perfectly situated to direct/skim off the graft. Evidently Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been have been feuding since the 1980s. (Worth reading for the many flip-flops in Biden’s career, including on the death penalty.) Remember how Biden is supposed to be the moderate, rational one?
More Hunter Biden dirt? Eh, it’s from a private investigator in the baby momma lawsuit, so caution is probably in order. But the “helping defraud American Indians” charge is new, though the names of Devon Archer, John Galanis and Bevan Cooney are not. Heh:
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bloomy is the least electable and most disliked candidate in the race. “His favorable rating is a low 31%, and his unfavorable rating is a sky-high 30%. That, according to Morning Consult, makes Bloomberg ‘the most disliked candidate in the race.’ Meanwhile, Gallup last week put Bloomberg at the bottom of those who can beat President Trump, at just 1%.” Bloomberg’s ad campaign war against President Trump:
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late.
Yeah, let’s keep throwing money into a proven losing strategy. Can’t see how that one can possibly fail to beat Trump. And as long as we’re rerunning 2016’s Greatest Misses, have you tried expressing outrage over the Billy Bush tape? Bloomy is also dropping a ton of money on Texas for Super Tuesday:
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is ramping up his efforts in Texas, with plans to build a state operation that his campaign says will be unrivaled by anyone else in the primary field.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, his campaign said it will open a Texas headquarters in Houston and 16 field offices throughout the rest of the state between now and the March 3 primary. The offices will be spread across the Houston area, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Austin, East Texas, the San Antonio area, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and the Killeen area.
The campaign also named its first Texas hires:
- Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, will serve as Bloomberg’s senior advisor.
- Ashlea Turner, a government relations consultant who worked on Bill White’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, will serve as Bloomberg’s state director.
- Kevin Lo, who worked on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Iowa campaign before she ended her campaign earlier this month, will serve as Bloomberg’s organizing director. (Update: On March 27, 2020, Texas Tribune sent out this correction via email: “*Editor’s note: Bloomberg’s campaign initially listed Kevin Lo as one of its first Texas hires. Lo later said he was incorrectly listed by the campaign and never worked for the campaign and has asked this story to be updated to remove his name.”)
- Lizzie Lewis, communications director for 2018 gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez, will be Bloomberg’s press secretary.
Has anyone there ever run a successful campaign? None of the ones named were. Also:
While he’s only announced one hire, Biden has topped most Texas polls. There have not been many polls since Bloomberg declared his candidacy and launched a massive national TV ad blitz that prominently targeted the state. The one Texas survey since Bloomberg’s launch, released Dec. 11 by CNN, found Bloomberg at 5% — good enough for fifth place in but still far behind Biden, who placed a distant first with 35%.
“Bloomberg Campaign Vendor Used Prison Labor To Make Presidential Campaign Calls.” Another case of a metaphor being too on-the-nose for fiction…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s met the donor requirements, but not the poll requirements, for the next debate. “Iowans like Cory Booker, but he has yet to surge in the polls, and no one really knows why.”
Amy Keiderling is exactly who Cory Booker’s presidential campaign is looking for as he seeks to build momentum in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
The Waukee small business owner listened to Booker’s remarks in an Adel bowling alley recently — Booker’s first stop of a four-day bus tour across Iowa. She said he gives her the same feeling she had when she caucused for Barack Obama.
He’s the first candidate she’s seen in person this cycle, but before she left, she committed to caucus for the U.S. senator from New Jersey.
She isn’t alone. Tess Seger, a campaign spokeswoman, said Booker surpassed his 10% average of caucus commitments at each of his tour stops. Sometimes 20% or 30% of the crowd signed the commitment cards.
“We’re getting the people who are going to be caucusing for us, precinct captaining for us,” Booker told the Register on Monday. “It’s really exciting. This is how you win here.”
But, so far, Booker is a far short from the winner’s circle. In the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted in November by Selzer & Co., Booker earned 3% support among likely Democratic caucusgoers. He’s been at or below 4% in first choice preferences in the Iowa Poll since 2018.
One cruel explanation is that people are simply lying to the Booker campaign because Democrats don’t have the heart to turn down a black candidate. Alternately, his “10% of tour stops” simply isn’t translating into mass appeal. Another theory: People actually do like him, but no one thinks he’s tough enough to beat Trump. And if you haven’t already had your fill, here’s another “struggles for traction” piece.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Knocks Biden on the Iraq war resolution. For all his bragging about bringing South Bend “back,” did he really?
Downtown underwent a dramatic transformation under Buttigieg’s leadership. One-way streets became two-way. Speed limits were reduced. Driving lanes were narrowed. Trees were planted. Decorative brick pavers were laid.
I hate him already.
Buttigieg and his supporters say the more pedestrian-friendly downtown has spurred more than $190 million in private investment, as several key buildings found new life, transformed into hotels, apartments and restaurants.
As the economy recovered from the recession of 2008-’09, some of that investment might have been inevitable, as Buttigieg benefited from a rebounding national economy. Supporters still credit the mayor for setting the tone and aggressively pursuing projects.
More than 500 apartments have been built or are under construction downtown, luring new residents to the city.
That’s, what, two whole complexes?
The street changes have also annoyed some motorists. Any news story about Smart Streets that’s shared on social media will draw complaints from residents pointing out there is too much traffic congestion downtown at peak travel times. Buttigieg has said the slowed traffic is worth the larger benefits.
There’s no end to Democrats willing to make life worse for people who drive cars.
There’s also Smart Streets’ roughly $21 million price tag, paid for with bonds that are being repaid with Tax Incremental Financing money, which comes from property taxes paid on the assessed valuation growth in an area. That project, combined with the city’s overhaul of its parks system, means the city could be limited in making other big investments in the near future, depending on their size.
Still, the assessed value of downtown property rose from about $132.8 million in 2013 to roughly $160.9 million last year, a 21-percent increase, according to a Tribune analysis of county property tax records.
Whole things sounds like a mixed bag at best. But since there are no reports of him luring an entire population of drug-addicted beggars to South Bend, it does sound like he did a much better job as a mayor than Steve Adler…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Headline: “Julian Castro sees lift in polls despite being knocked off debate stage.” Reality: He’s up to 4%. Break out the party favors!
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Michael Moore: Trump Will Win in 2020 if Democrats Nominate Another ’Centrist, Moderate’ like Hillary Clinton.” I understand all those words individually…
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets the New York Times three questions treatment:
2. He’s criticized “Medicare for all” a lot. What is his health care plan?
He wants to keep Medicare for people over 65 and create a new government program for people under 65. Everyone under 65 would automatically be enrolled in that program — which would cover all “essential health benefits,” including pre-existing conditions — but people could choose to forfeit the coverage and receive a credit to buy private insurance instead. He argues that this would guarantee universal coverage without forcing people to use a government health plan.
So instead of an expensive, unworkable program, he offers a slightly-less-insane unworkable but expensive program.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Rep. Tulsi Gabbard says impeachment will only ’embolden’ Trump, increasing his reelection chances.” She’s not wrong. No wonder fellow Democrats hate her.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another day, another Iowa surge story, this one from her homestate Star Tribune. She completes her tour of all 99 Iowa counties. Red rover, red rover, a packed house in Dover. (New Hampshire, that is.)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. He failed to qualify for the Michigan ballot. His most recent poll numbers have ranged from zero to zero, with a median of zero.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. MSNBC hears from Democratic insiders who think Sanders could win the nomination, but I’m still betting the DNC finds a way to screw him out of the nomination even if he wins the most delegates. Sanders has a long history of playing footsie with leftwing totalitarians:
Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:
Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.
Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly. Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Miami Democratic campaign consultant and lobbyist Evan Ross on Sanders: “He is not ‘our own’ any more than David Duke is the Christian community’s ‘own.'” Ouch!
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. All the vaguely interesting Steyer news is also vaguely off target. First: “AOC accepted Tom Steyer contribution, despite accusing Buttigieg of ‘being funded by billionaires.'” (thisismyshockedface.jpg) Second: “Former Tom Steyer aide sues SC Democratic Party for alleged defamation.” Details: “A former aide for 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer who resigned amid allegations that he stole volunteer data from the rival Kamala Harris campaign is now suing the South Carolina Democratic Party, accusing the party’s chairman of defamation.” Being a former Tom Steyer aide must be like getting cut from the Washington Generals.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren’s campaign sounds the alarm as fundraising pace slows about 30% in fourth quarter.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign told supporters in an email on Friday that, so far, it has raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter, a significant drop from her fundraising haul during the third quarter.
The memo asks backers to step up in giving to the campaign.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” it says.
Warren finished the third quarter bringing in $24.6 million, which was much more than most of the other Democratic primary contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders – who, like Warren, shuns big-money fundraisers – led the field with more than $25 million during the third quarter.
If the $17 million total stands that would represent a 30% drop from the previous quarter. The quarter ends in four days.
Poll numbers and fawning media profiles are ephemeral, but cold, hard cash is a great measuring stick for a presidential campaign. Warren is in trouble and donors know it. After all that noise about the most women ever in a presidential field, it seems increasingly likely that it’s going to come down to Biden and Sanders. Warren had no problem taking high dollar donations until she ran for President. If you live in Iowa, own a phone and vote Democrat, there’s a decent chance Warren will call you:
Makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voice mail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials say she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Ms. Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial good-will dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Ms. Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Ms. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials, and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Ms. Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning — she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
Warren’s campaign is failing, but not because she isn’t putting in the work. Did Elizabeth Warren lie about her father being a janitor? Karl Rove thinks Warren could win Iowa. Let’s just say that Rove’s crystal ball is not batting 1.000.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yet another NYT three questions piece. “Power of love” question is vapid, and reparations is idiot Social justice Warrior pandering. On the third question, on her views on mental health, she “believes that antidepressants are harmfully overprescribed.” She probably has a point.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Billionaires donatingto Yang’s campaign, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and cybersecurity firm Fortinet’s owner Ken Xie. Yang appeared on MSNBC. Yang: “Democrats are still not asking themselves why Donald trump won in 2016.”
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.
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.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
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) “El Paso Man Comes Down From Insane Acid Trip Where He Hallucinated That He Ran For President.”
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
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)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alan Patricof, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, amnesty, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Anthony Gardner, Ashlea Turner, Beto O'Rourke, Bevan Cooney, Bob Casey, Carla Brailey, Chris Coons, Communism, Cory Booker, Democrats, Denise Bauer, Deval Patrick, Devon Archer, Elections, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, Elizabeth Warren, Erskine Bowles, Evan Ross, Fortinet, George Marcus, Iowa, Iraq, Jack Dorsey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, John Delaney, John Galanis, Karl Rove, Ken Xie, Kevin Lo, Lizzie Lewis, Marianne Williamson, Mark Gilbert, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Moore, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nicaragua, Pete Buttigieg, Rudy Giuliani, Sandinista, Scott Miller, Social Justice Warriors, South Bend, South Carolina, Star Wars, Super Tuesday, Supreme Court, Terry McAuliffe, Texas, Tim Gill, unions, William Howard Taft
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Monday, December 23rd, 2019
Another debate down (like the ratings), Buttigieg brings all the swells to the crystal wine bar, Bloomberg carpet bombs the airwaves with money, and Tom Steyer is the Cats of candidates. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
I’m betting polling will be sparse Christmas week:
Iowa State University (Iowa): Buttigieg 24, Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Castro 1. Sample size of 632.
CNN: Biden 26, Sanders 20, Warren 16, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 5, Booker 3, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Castro 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
NBC/WSJ: Biden 28, Sanders 21, Warren 18, Buttigieg 9, Klobuchar 5, Bloomberg 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 2.
Emerson: Biden 32, Sanders 25, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Yang 6, Gabbard 4, Bloomberg 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Delaney 1. “Warren appears to be losing to Sanders with younger voters, and losing to Biden with older voters, making it difficult for her to secure a base. With less than 50 days until the Iowa caucus, this strategy of waiting for Sanders or Biden to fall is looking shaky.” But sample size of only 525.
Economist/YouGov (page 186): Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 4, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Castro 2, Delaney 1, Bennet 1, Williamson 1, Patrick 0.
Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 22, Warren 15, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 7, Yang 4, Booker 3, Klobuchar 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1, Patrick 0.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets.
Pundits, etc.
“The December Democratic Debate in 6 Charts.” Once again, Yang spoke the least of all the candidates.
The more voters see of the candidates, the less they like them:
There’s something of a spotlight paradox happening in the Democratic primary this year. The candidates who have spent time under the bright lights have wilted, while those sitting in its shadow have risen.
Why is this? Democrats don’t suddenly dislike the candidates who have undergone the scrutiny that comes with front runner status. What they do dislike, however, is vulnerability. For many Democratic voters, President Trump is an existential threat. As with any existential threat, the most important question is who/what can beat it. In 2019, a candidate’s ideology isn’t as important as his or her ability to take a punch. And be able to punch back.
Biden started the race as the guy best suited to do just that. He started the race as the affable frontrunner, who had a long history with the party and a solid relationship with the country’s first African-American president. What he lacked in energy, he made up for in electability. Who better to win back those Rust Belt states than good old “Scranton Joe.”
But, once in the spotlight, or more specifically, under the debate stage lights, Biden looked anything but invincible. His performances in the first two debates were shaky and uneven. He spent most of the summer on his heels, defending (or changing) past policy positions and struggling to raise money.
From May to November, Biden’s share of the Democratic vote dropped 10 points in Monmouth polls. In Quinnipiac surveys, he dropped nine points from June to October.
As Biden slipped, Sen. Elizabeth Warren started to rise. She was attracting big crowds in Iowa, raising lots of money online and getting a second look from voters and pundits who had written her off earlier in the year as she struggled to explain her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry. By early October, the RealClearPolitics average showed Warren narrowly overtaking Biden, 26.6 to 26.4 percent. But, as she struggled to adequately explain how her plan for a Medicare for All system would work, voters started to get worried. Could the woman with the “plan” for everything, really be this unprepared to answer questions about a central issue in the campaign? And, if so, wouldn’t Trump exploit this?
Since reaching that high on October 8, Warren has begun a steady downward trajectory. The most recent RCP average pegs her vote share at 12 percent —13 points behind Biden.
As Warren slipped, anxious Democrats began to cast about for a candidate who would be steadier and less flawed than Biden or Warren had proven to be. And, right on cue, comes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He has been aggressive in the debates, steady on the stump and has surged into a big lead in Iowa. Since mid-October, Buttigieg has risen eight points in the RealClearPolitics average. The big ole spotlight is now trained directly on him and on his biggest weaknesses, namely his inability to attract voters of color.
As Buttigieg undergoes his ‘stress test,’ there’s another candidate just outside of the spotlight who is well-positioned to take advantage of this moment: Sen. Bernie Sanders. While we were all focused on Warren’s crashing, and Buttigieg’s rise, Sanders has been slowing moving up in the polls. The RealClearPolitics average puts him in second place nationally, and just slightly behind Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also holding a good position in Nevada. This, despite the fact that he spent much of the fall recuperating from a heart attack.
The DNC tightens debate criteria yet again.
In order to qualify for the next debate, candidates will need to reach one of two polling thresholds as well as a fundraising requirement. The White House hopefuls will have to hit at least 5 percent in four DNC-approved national or early-voting state (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) polls – or reach at least 7 percent in two early-voting state surveys.
The fundraising criteria for the upcoming debate – which will be hosted by CNN and the Des Moines Register – requires campaign contributions from at least 225,000 individual donors as well as a minimum of 1,000 unique donors in at least 20 states.
Candidates have until the end of Jan. 10 to reach the thresholds, and the window for qualifying polling started on Nov. 14.
Megan McArdle offers up some horserace analysis. It’s pretty much consensus opinion stuff, though Yang over Bloomberg for sixth is a result no one would have expected when the campaign began.
Everybody is campaigning in Iowa.
Saturday Night Live cold open debate parody. They’ve done better work.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s planning a big push in New Hampshire, though it’s unclear that he has enough cash on hand to make any kind of noise. He did make several campaign stops there, and opened his private fundraisers to the press.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He received the endorsement of California Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas, chairman of Bold PAC, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “Quid Pro Joe: Biden’s Brother’s Firm Was Handed $1.5bn Iraq Contract.” Also: “Latvia raised red flags on Hunter Biden transactions — right before Joe’s intervention.” Is there anyone on the Biden family who wasn’t making money off foreign contracts? He’s got big money fundraising events in New York City lined up.
Newmark Knight Frank CEO Barry Gosin and GFP Real Estate chairman Jeffrey Gural — bucking the trend of real estate gurus staunchly backing President Trump — are throwing a $2,800-a-ticket soiree for Biden at 6:15 p.m. Jan. 6. Then top Skadden partner Mark N. Kaplan and a host of other luminaries, including art collector and financier Asher Edelman, are hosting a breakfast for Biden in Midtown the following morning.
Heh:
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to kill the coal industry, as well as gas plants. $76 million in TV ads have gotten him to 5%. His newsgathering animals are simply more equal than others. Bloomberg the billionaire frat boy. Although that’s probably an insult to most frats. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Bad ideas and a fat wallet:
Bloomberg has committed $160 million from his coffers to fund vaping prohibition efforts, despite e-cigarettes being 95 percent safer than combustible cigarettes according to prestigious international health bodies such as Public Health England. The billionaire also gives generously to left-leaning organizations that advocate for carbon taxation and greater “green” regulation, including the League of Conservation Voters and America’s Pledge.
Yet, Bloomberg believes that with enough of an investment, a message of higher prices at the pump and less reduced-risk options for smokers will somehow translate to electoral success. He clearly hasn’t learned from the losses of his affluent forerunners and will surely have a lot of explaining to do to millions of moderate Democratic voters not sold on radical, costly progressive ideas such as the Green New Deal or his “Beyond Carbon” doppelganger.
Speaking of which: “Bloomberg just lost the state lawsuit against Exxon he’s been funding.”
The more interesting but barely reported aspect of the litigation is that it has been encouraged and even secretly funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
State attorneys general offices are busy places. They generally don’t generally have time for frivolous litigation, so Bloomberg stepped up to fund law schools, like the one at New York University, to do the climate litigation staff work for the various state attorneys general involved in the litigation, according to emails obtained via public records requests by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Bloomberg has essentially discovered a way for a (wealthy) private citizen to buy a state attorney general and use the state’s powers and resources to pursue his private political agenda. Although there is no specific provision in any law prohibiting such conduct, that is only the case because no one ever imagined that anyone would have the effrontery to do it.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.) Other candidates gear up for a Presidential run by hiring staffers. Bloomberg launches a startup. Single data point is single:
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released a list of campaign bundlers. “Among the high-profile donors who have raised at least $50,000 for Booker’s presidential bid are musician Jon Bon Jovi, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D).”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Well it’s all over now, Democrats: Buttigieg has been endorsed by the star of Waterworld. He evidently had a fundraiser in the Palace of Versailles. More:
At a Palo Alto, California, fundraiser on Monday, cohosts included Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; the Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s wife, Nicole Shanahan; the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s wife, Wendy Schmidt; and Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, a campaign document obtained by Recode’s Teddy Schleifer indicates. These hosts’ families combined have an estimated net worth of $80 billion, according to Recode.
After that cozy, down-home little gathering, Buttigieg jetted off to lecture people on income inequality. His fellow candidates may have torn into him for it, but the Wine Cave soiree is perfectly emblematic of the Democratic Party’s massive institutional hypocrisy, and of the disconnect between what it demands ordinary people (the ones it keeps claiming to represent) must give up in order to fight the existential crisis that is “climate change,” and the good life enjoyed by the anointed party elite, who make clear they are absolutely unwilling to give up jack squat, refusing to even to forgo their ostentatious displays of wealth.
Ordinary people are supposed to give up cars, toilets that flush and lightbulbs that work. Ordinary people are told to give up meat, eat bugs and recycle, while the party elite who look down on their backward ways continue dining in crystal-bedecked wine caves. Sacrifices, like laws against insider trading and foreign influence, are for the little people. What rankles is the unmitigated gall of railing against “the 1%” while insisting on their own right to live the same lifestyle, and expecting ordinary people to ignore the rank hypocrisy.
Remember, peasants: It’s not your place to question the privileges of your betters. And if that just wasn’t enough hypocrisy all on its own, Buttigieg is the son of a Marxist academic who specialized in the work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Makes you wonder how much of Buttigieg’s moderate persona is a sham from a red diaper baby…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. PBS: Why are you still in the race? Castro: Have a dump truck full of platitudes. Here’s a piece that argues that Booker and Castro should join forces as a ticket. So they can be the Voltron of Failure?
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She thinks the election will be close.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “John Delaney Would Like You to Know He’s Still Running for President.” Writer calls up to ask his campaign why and get offered an interview. Delaney says he’s all in on Iowa and wants to bring the country together. I think the country has already united behind not voting for John Delaney.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She voted “present” on impeachment. “My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.” I guess that desire for reconciliation is why Saturday Night Live keeps casting her as the villain in their debate sketches: If you’re not a hyper-left partisan, you’re the enemy. President Donald Trump, chaos magician that he is, said he respected Gabbard for voting present, which is sure to sure to drive the TDS crowd even further around the bend (it’s a very big bend).
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She scored in the debate by pointing out that Buttigieg had lost by 25 points in his only statewide run in Indiana, for Treasurer in 2010. Klobuchar has 99 problems but an Iowa county ain’t one. Iowa is make or break for her. You don’t say.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS interview. The headline says “Old allies come out to help Deval Patrick in N.H.” but the only allies actually mentioned are the Massachusetts couple running his campaign. But he is topping the order list for candidates in Massachusetts itself for the March 3rd primary. Is he planning on picking up enough home state delegates to be a kingmaker and wrangle a VP slot? If so, it’s a pretty longshot strategy, but at least it is a strategy, which is more than his stillborn campaign has evidenced thus far.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie Sanders Has a Big Jeremy Corbyn Problem.”
Nobody forced Bernie Sanders’s campaign to endorse Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. By the time the Sanders camp’s national organizing director, Clair Sandberg, announced that the Vermont senator’s team stood in solidarity with the far-left British candidate, it was already apparent that Corbyn’s party was likely to lose and lose badly. And that’s precisely what happened.
On Thursday, British voters delivered Labour its worst defeat in 85 years. The thrashing it endured was less attributable to the lingering debate over the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union than to Labour’s uniquely repulsive leader. When 100,000 British respondents were asked what they feared most about the prospect of a Labour government, all but the staunchest Labourites and Remainers indicated that the prospect of Corbyn’s ascension to 10 Downing Street was an unacceptable risk.
Corbyn rendered his party toxic. His penchant for standing in solidarity with terrorists and anti-Semites opened a seal out of which a cascade of anti-Jewish sentiments poured, engulfing his party in scandal. His brand of radical socialism was insufferably hidebound. His expressions of sympathy for history’s greatest criminals were thoughtlessly dogmatic. The Labour Party under Corbyn drifted so far toward overt Jew-hatred that Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the institution. The Archbishop of Canterbury agreed with that assessment, as did 85 percent of the country’s Jews. There was no ambiguity here.
So there were many obvious risks and few upsides associated with the Sanders endorsement. And yet, his campaign did it anyway. We can only conclude that this was not an act of political shrewdness but a genuine display of affection.
Bernie Sanders has thus far evaded scrutiny over the values he and his campaign share with the Labour Party’s discredited leader, but that lack of curiosity is indefensible. As of this writing, Sanders is firmly in second place in the average of national Democratic primary polls. He’s in second and gaining in Iowa, too, and is leading in New Hampshire. Sanders is a contender, and it’s time for the press to act like it. But taking that job seriously would entail an examination of the senator’s conspicuously Corbyn-esque instincts, to say nothing of the bigots with whom he has surrounded himself.
Don’t take my word for it; take that of Sanders’s own surrogates. Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of Sanders’s most visible endorsers with whom the senator frequently shares the stage, has apologized for some of what she’s admitted were anti-Semitic remarks. Or, if that’s not good enough, take the Democratic Party’s verdict. Those anti-Jewish slights for which Omar declined to show remorse had been targeted by her fellow caucus members for censure before a revolt of the party’s progressives and Black Caucus Members scuttled the initiative.
More on the same theme:
For one thing, as Trotsky correctly indicated, socialism tends to corrode all other religious and cultural affiliations. Secular Jewish progressive groups posing as faith-based organizations, for example, have long worked to conflate their ideological positions with Judaism by reimagining the latter to make it indistinguishable from the former. It’s one of the great tragedies of the American Jewish community that they are succeeding.
More bluntly, remember that Sanders honeymooned in Moscow, not Jerusalem, for a good reason. “Let’s take the strengths of both systems,” Sanders insisted even as the reprehensible Soviet system was on the verge of collapse. “Let’s learn from each other,” Sanders said even when over 100 Jewish refuseniks were still being denied permission to leave the Communist regime after enduring decades of anti-Semitic oppression under rhetoric of “anti-Zionism.” As far as I can tell, Sanders never said a word in their defense to his hosts.
Oppressed Russian Jews weren’t his people. Jeremy Corbyn is Bernie’s people. As Rothman notes, no one forced Sanders to compare his movement to Corbynism. Britain’s chief rabbi may have found Corbyn an “existential” threat to his flock, but Sanders never once thought it concerning enough to mention during any of his praise for the British leader.
Bernie’s 2016 press secretary Symone Sanders (who this piece suggests is totally known by insiders) is now backing Biden. Celebrities supporting Sanders: Tim Robbins, Danny DeVito, Willow Smith, Jeff Ross, and somebody by the name of “Anderson .Paak,” which is evidently a rapper rather than a new data compression protocol.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Atlantic interviews Steyer in the Nixon Library, so it’s all tedious impeachment blather. (Of course, we are talking Steyer, and tedious is his default setting. Historians will look back and wonder how the other billionaire in the race lost a charisma contest to Michael Bloomberg, something scientists previously thought impossible. Steyer is the Cats of the Democratic primary: spending tons of money only to completely horrify people.) He’s campaigning on climate change. Because that worked so well for Jay Inslee.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Obama talks up Warren behind closed doors to wealthy donors.” But! “The former president has stopped short of an endorsement of Warren in these conversations and has emphasized that he is not endorsing in the Democratic primary race.” She attacks Buttigieg in a new ad, for that exciting third place vs. fourth place action. Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus blasts Warren for bashing the rich. Ooopsie!
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her serious unserious campaign. It’s a sort of crappy piece, but coverage of Williamson is thin on the ground this week.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not a fan of the impeachment farce:
Yang, a candidate who is known for challenging the party consensus, slammed Democrats for their “obsession” with the president and impeachment during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate.
“The media networks didn’t do us any favors by missing the reason why Donald Trump became our president in the first place,” Yang told the PBS Newshour moderators. “The more we act like Donald Trump is a cause of our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what’s going on it our communities and solve those problems.”
“What we have to do is we have to stop being obsessed over impeachment,” he stated.
The Yang campaign as ideological incubator:
During his 2016 race, Sanders amassed a grassroots following with ideas like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college, two policies that initially had little mainstream support. That was the first year a majority of Americans backed Medicare for All, and their support has remained steady ever since, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Also since 2016, support for free public college has grown from 47 to 63 percent.
Sanders, of course, didn’t win the Democratic nomination. But his campaign did inspire hundreds of down-ballot progressive candidates across the country to embrace his platform: In the 2018 midterm elections, more than half of all Democratic candidates for the House backed Medicare for All, including his former campaign organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, with Sanders on his second campaign, his trademark proposals have dominated the 2020 primary race: Seven of the remaining 15 Democratic candidates have embraced some version of Medicare for All, and multiple debates have featured a sustained discussion about the proposal. Similarly, almost every candidate has promised to eliminate tuition for two-year community colleges, with several, in addition to Sanders, vowing to make all public four-year colleges free.
Sanders, in other words, has served as a transformational figure on the left—someone who was able to fundamentally shift the Democratic political conversation toward these ambitious policy goals. Whether or not Yang earns his party’s nomination, he, too, could be an influential figure. His policy proposals have already moved the primary’s Overton window, even as many American voters are only just starting to tune in to the race. Before his campaign, UBI wasn’t an often-discussed proposal in the United States outside the lefty-think-tank world, though a few cities have run pilot programs to varying degrees of success. Public support for the proposal increased by 6 percent from February to September of this year, according to the latest Hill and HarrisX polling. Among Democrats in particular, support for UBI ticked up 12 percent in the same period.
As Yang’s campaign has captured more attention, his competitors have been forced to take a position on UBI. Several—including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—expressed openness to the policy in the months after Yang’s candidacy began to gain traction. “I think that it’s worth taking seriously,” Buttigieg said in an interview this spring on the liberal podcast Pod Save America.
In debates, Yang has hammered home his warnings about automation, and during the October contest, the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked a question seemingly inspired by that message. She wanted to know how candidates would prevent job losses due to automation, leading to an argument between Yang and the primary front-runners about whether implementing UBI would be more effective than raising the minimum wage or instituting a federal-jobs guarantee.
“It’s likely,” Dave Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me, “that candidates will only be talking more about automation and its impact and its role in inequality in future years—whether they want to address it with some kind of enhanced safety net and a guaranteed income or not.” Already, Wasserman added, Yang’s ideas are speaking to “anxieties that a number of younger voters have about the future of the economy.”
This once again raises the question of why Yang is so concerned about automation taking American jobs in the future, but not illegal aliens taking American jobs right now. He wants to decriminalize whores, but not johns.
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.
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.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
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)
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)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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