Spider-man 3. Aliens 3. Godfather Part III. Very rarely is the third installment in a series the best.
What brings this to mind is word that Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, hot off losing a senate race and a Presidential primary, has decided to run for governor of Texas.
2018 was a perfect storm of fawning media coverage, peak Trump Derangement Syndrome, a Republican incumbent weakened by his own unsuccessful Presidential run, off-year presidential race dynamics, and more money than any Senate candidate had ever amassed in any race, ever. And all that managed to do was get him within three points of Ted Cruz. Then he ran for President, and flamed out well before Iowa.
Then he got out on the national campaign trail, where mainstream media outlets had already lined up behind candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as their preferred favorites, and the nation found out what Texas conservatives had been saying all along: O’Rourke is a big bag of nothing. All the qualities that the media found “endearing” and “authentic” were now goofy and eminently mockable. The flaws were always there.
Quick, name a single signature issue O’Rourke stood out from other candidates on. Until his disasterous “I’m gonna grab your guns” moment, there wasn’t any. Warren was the candidate that wanted to socialize healthcare; O’Rourke was the candidate that Instagrammed his dental visit. The more a national audience saw of him the less they liked him. The harder he pandered to the hard left the more phony he seemed and the softer his poll numbers, racking up some perfect “0.0” scores, where not a single person polled planned to vote for him.
Faced with an obviously failing campaign, O’Rourke made the decision to pull the plug.
There’s little reason to believe he’s gotten better.
Incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott has been hurt by a variety of missteps over the last two years: The futile Flu Manchu lockdowns, the border crisis, the ice storm. On none of those issues does O’Rourke credibly represent positions closer to those of the average Texas voter than Abbott.
Border security? While the Rio Grande Valley is in the midst of a Republican upswell over the issue, Beto wants to tear down the border wall:
Beto O'Rourke when asked, since Rep. @DanCrenshawTX asked on Twitter, if he would tear down the walls that are already in place: Yes and I think a referendum to do so would pass. pic.twitter.com/ENZuYvdqEa
And that’s to say nothing of the myriad issues O’Rourke moved hard left on during his presidential run, from guns to taxes. “”In his Presidential bid, Beto veered so far to the left, he is probably an unelectable candidate in Texas.”
Moreover, off year elections typically benefit the party out of the White House, which benefited O’Rourke in 2018, but hinders him in 2022. From inflation to the border to Afghanistan to Sundown Joe’s whole sleepwalking presidency, all signs point to a very difficult electoral environment for Democrats in 2022.
Does O’Rourke have any strengths as a candidate? Yes. First and foremost, he does the work. He’s been a pretty indefatigable campaigner in his senate and presidential runs, and there’s no reason to believe his gubernatorial run will be any different. He has an army of leftwing fans across the state, most of whom will probably return, meaning adequate campaign volunteers won’t be a problem. He also built an organization that ran far more smoothly than the one Wendy Davis built in 2014. And he has a large list of campaign donors to work, though it remains to be seen how many will want to keep throwing money at him for his third big race in four years after losing the first two in such spectacular fashion.
Does O’Rourke have straight path to the nomination? Right now, yes. Should actor Matthew McConnaughey jump into the race, all bets are off.
The dynamics of the Democratic Party are going to make the 2022 Texas Gubernatorial Race a crusade for abortion. That didn’t exactly help Wendy Davis win in 2014, where she failed to garner 40% of the vote. And remember that in 2018, when they were both on the ballot, O’Rourke got 4,045,632 votes, while Abbott got 4,656,196. That’s a big gap to bridge.
Democrats haven’t won the Texas governor’s mansion in over a quarter century. I’m pretty sure O’Rourke is not the one who’s going to break that streak.
There are two kinds of people who want Beto O'Rourke to run for governor of Texas: conservatives who understand Texas politics and progressives who don't.
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf [a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland], following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”
The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.
Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.
Read on to see mostly what those of you reading this blog knew last year, albeit with some new details. Such as…
It seems that even The State Department tried to block investigation of the lab leak hypothesis:
A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an investigation would uncover evidence of a lab leak or the extent to which the U.S. was funding dangerous research.
Indeed, there’s a lot more going on with this gain-of-function research than has ever been revealed. There appears to be a powerful lobby within the U.S. government that is heavily invested in the dangerous research and is serious about keeping it quiet. Former CDC chairman Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.
President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.”
When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality.
Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.”
Hunter Biden said he couldn’t remember his baby mama. Turns out she worked for him. And he fired her.
Every time Hunter is in the news, the MSM asks Joe Biden about…ice cream. “The record is now rife with individuals associated with foreign governments and intelligence organizations giving millions to Hunter and his uncle as well as luxurious expenses and gifts.”
Rashard Turner, founder of St. Paul chapter of #BlackLivesMatter learns better:
That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers union. I was an insider in Black Lives Matter. And I learned the ugly truth. The moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family. But it does create barriers to a better education for black children. I resigned from Black Lives Matter after a year and a half. But I didn’t quit working to improve black lives and access to a great education.
Congressional Democrats just hit a snag in trying to cram through lots of budget busting bills using reconciliation.
While the Democrats have high, if not delusional hopes of fundamentally changing every aspect of American life, from federal voting dictates to essentially outlawing sub-contracting, the actual rules of the Senate have stood in their way. The filibuster, which Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (among others who are laying low) have pledged to not touch, means that Chuck Schumer and his merry band can’t force through things on a simple 50-50 vote.
The Democrats were given a shot of life a few months ago, though, in the form of a parliamentarian ruling that Schumer claimed greenlit most of his agenda. I expressed skepticism at the time in an article discussing the infrastructure package.
Chuck Schumer recently claimed the Senate parliamentarian gave him free rein, yet that decision has not been made public, and there’s probably a reason for that.
Well, it appears my skepticism was warranted. In what is claimed as a “new ruling,” the parliamentarian effectively rips the heart out of the Democrat agenda.
the ruling ALSO said Congress would have to start over. Repass budget in committees and bring them to the floor. in the senate, that would trigger another vote-a-rama. This would be exceedingly time consuming, and potentially politically risky.
Reconciliation is a very narrow process, and the Byrd Rule requires that anything included in a reconciliation bill must deal with taxes and budgetary issues. You also have stipulations about deficit offsets that must be taken into account. You can not pass regularly legislative items under the guise of reconciliation.
Given that, this ruling essentially defeats HR1, the ProAct, and much of what is included in the current “infrastructure” bill. Of course, none of those bills were likely getting support from Manchin anyway, but with reconciliation off the table to get this stuff passed, Schumer is now officially out of options.
Corn, soybeans, and wheat have been trading at multiyear highs, with corn having risen from around $3.80 per bushel in January 2020 to approximately $6.75 now. Chicken wings are at all-time record highs. It is getting more expensive to eat.
Copper prices have risen to an all-time high. Steel, too, recently traded at prices 35 percent above the previous all-time high set in 2008. Perhaps most famously, the price of lumber has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020 and has nearly doubled just since January.
Naturally, with raw materials prices soaring, prices of manufactured goods are jumping, too. That is especially noticeable in the housing market, where the median price of existing homes rose to $329,100 in March—a whopping 17.2 percent increase from a year earlier.
The cost of driving is soaring, too. According to J.D. Power, cited in the Wall Street Journal, the average used car price has risen 16.7 percent and new car prices have risen 9.6 percent since January.
My answer would’ve been blunt – What I like about being white is I’m free to think anything I like; believe anything politically and not be prejudged by liberals for it. I don’t have people assuming I vote a specific way, for a particular party, simply because of my skin color. That no matter what I believe, I won’t be called a traitor to my race, a sell-out, or some racial slur like “Uncle Tom,” or “Uncle Tim.”
What I like about being white is I don’t have to suffer the bigotry of leftists demanding I conform to how they insist I must think.
Hill and pretty much every left-wing pundit, TV personality, reporter, academic, actor, etc., do not extend that same courtesy to, say, any black conservative. Ever.
In that answer, it would have exposed Hill for what he was trying to do to Rufo, and it shows what the left is now: you are your skin color. If you refuse to conform, if you won’t be what they demand you must be, you are their enemy.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid announced that he is able to form a new government, in another step towards ousting longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lapid’s coalition is made up of parties from the left and right wings of the political spectrum, many of whom would not normally sit together in the same government. For the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab political party—the Islamic conservative United Arab List—signed on as part of the prospective governing coalition.
The new government must survive a vote of confidence in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but the Knesset will not be in session for another twelve days. This means that members of Lapid’s coalition may defect in the meantime, potentially sending Israel to another round of elections.
Before Democrats start celebrating the fall of their designated bogeyman, the man likely to replace Netanyahu in the new government is Naftali Bennett, who is even harder right than Bibi:
Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett have reached an agreement to rotate the prime minister’s position between them as they race to meet a Wednesday midnight deadline to finalize a coalition government to end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year rule.
Under the agreement, Bennett will take the premiership first, but the two are still working on finalizing their ruling coalition, which would include parties from across the political spectrum. The Associated Press reported that as of 6 p.m. Wednesday in Israel, there was still no sign of progress.
Bibi would be going into the opposition. This isn't American politics, where losing a presidential election confines you to the outskirts of politics (usually). From the opposition, Bibi, who runs the largest party in Israel, is well-positioned to become PM again in the mid-term.
A-listers including actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Steven Spielberg have raised the stakes with their backing of candidates. Spielberg and his wife have finally supported activist Maya Wiley, while Paltrow has supported Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, Bloomberg reports.
The majority of those identified as actors or part of the entertainment industry have opted to join Paltrow in backing McGuire, who has vowed to boost film tax credits, Bloomberg reports. Figures who have donated to McGuire include “Despicable Me” producer Chris Meledandri, filmmaker Spike Lee and comedic actor Steve Martin. McGuire is also the only candidate not accepting public matching funds, Bloomberg notes.
Other candidates getting attention from Tinseltown include Scott Stringer and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Actress Scarlett Johansson has donated to Stringer, while Yang has reportedly received financial backing from actor Michael Douglas.
Also: “Recent polls, however, show Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the lead.”
“Google’s Diversity Chief Removed for Decrying Jews’ ‘Insatiable Appetite for War and Killing.’ No doubt they’ve moved him to their Republican Deplatforming division…
Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.
Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.
There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.
Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.
Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.
Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.
Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.
So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.
Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.
If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.
As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.
And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.
Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.
Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:
For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:
“Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
“On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
“He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
“The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
“Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
“Make climate change a core national security priority.”
These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.
Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.
Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
“The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
Not that our media will report any of them:
This is the most complete indictment of media bias ever.
Why does CBS think voters in…Australia need to know about these serious charges against Biden, but not voters in…America (where he’s actually on the ballot)?
“Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The ghost:
I simply cannot believe that #JoeBiden is running for President of the United States and is a complete ghost. Where is this guy? What the hell is a “lid”? Why are you in your basement, Joe? Will somebody please lay out a trail of hundred dollar bills so this guy will get going?!
It's also interesting to note that the Left has switched focus from Trump himself to his wife and family. Looks like they're starting to run out of ammo.
Between almost everyone dropping out, Biden continuing to rack up victories, and the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, almost all the air has been sucked out of the Democratic Presidential race. So this is going to be a relatively short and subdued Democratic Presidential clown car update.
Eh, not posting any individual polls this week, as Biden is stomping Sanders in every single one of them, usually by just shy of a 2-1 ratio. The closest thing to a surprise is that Hill/Harris X has Gabbard at 5% nationally, which suggests that 4% is the level of “Operation Chaos”-type effects.
Election betting markets. Biden’s first at a whopping 87.3%. However, second place is not Sanders, it’s Hillary at 5.1%. (strokes chin)(stops)(washes hands annoyingly long period of time) (strokes chin again)
Coronavirus is one of the topics that dominated last night’s Biden-Sanders debate, as well it should, as both Biden and Sanders are part of the target demographic most likely to drop dead of it. Plus coronavirus provides Biden the perfect excuse to run the first “front porch” campaign since Warren G. Harding.
The electoral patterns in Texas, which Biden narrowly won, were marked by divisions of age and ethnicity. Voters over 65 went for Biden nearly four to one, according to Washington Post exit polls. By contrast, among voters under 30, Sanders cleaned up, beating Biden 59 percent to 13 percent. African-Americans, who constitute 20 percent of the state’s electorate, gave nearly three-fifths of their votes to Biden, almost four times Sanders’s share. Carroll Robinson, who served on the Houston City Council for six years and is chairman of the Coalition of Black Democrats, notes that Sanders failed to connect, particularly with older black voters; he cites in particular his being the only major candidate not to attend the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as reflective of his “signaling problem” with African-American voters.
Black voters, Robinson notes, were critical to Biden’s small margin of victory, boosting his totals in Harris County, which includes Houston, and in Dallas County. In contrast, Latinos, already roughly one-third of the state’s Democratic voters, voted heavily for Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 40 percent of Latino voters, compared with about a quarter who opted for Biden. Sanders won easily in heavily Latino Bexar (San Antonio), Hidalgo (the Rio Grande Valley), and El Paso Counties.
Sanders also appealed to younger voters in Texas, as elsewhere, beating Biden among voters under 30—making up some 15 percent of the electorate—by almost four to one. He won hugely in Austin, the state’s epicenter of millennial culture, with its high concentration of tech workers. Sanders easily took Travis County over Biden, 83,000 to 52,000.
Moderate Texas Democrats can take heart in halting the momentum of a socialist candidate, but the broader trend is against them. According to exit polls, some 56 percent of Texas Democrats view socialism favorably. In Houston, voters elected an inexperienced 27-year-old progressive, Lina Hidalgo, as judge of Harris County in 2018. Despite its title, the role is nonjudicial; Hidalgo is actually the chief executive of the nation’s third most-populous county. This year, Christian Menefee, a young social-justice advocate, won the primary for Harris County Attorney over more mainstream opposition, on a platform of progressive criminal-justice reform. “There’s an incipient change among the grassroots activists,” notes Bill White, former Houston mayor and deputy energy secretary under Bill Clinton. “There’s a whole new group who are very anti-establishment and gaining influence.” White suspects that the ascendency of these forces may just be beginning. Sanders and Warren—before she dropped out of the race on Thursday—enjoyed a combined 40 percent support of the Texas Democratic electorate, running strongest among the fastest-growing demographic groups.
This leftward transformation is even further along in California. As Morley Winograd, a longtime Democratic activist and former aide to Al Gore, suggests, the state is not only “unique politically, but also big enough to have its own weather system. Democrats in the state feel the economy is strong enough to allow it to maintain its current high-tax, high regulation environment without causing a major downturn.” Socialism remains in vogue. At last year’s state party convention, when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, then a presidential aspirant, suggested that “socialism is not the answer,” he was lustily booed.
As in Texas, Sanders won biggest among Latinos and millennials, who represent the party’s future. He won an astounding 55 percent of Latino voters, according to New York Times exit polls, compared with a mere 21 percent for Biden. He won 72 percent of voters under 30 and 57 percent of voters in the 30-to-44 age range, beating Biden by wide margins. Biden did win older voters and among African-Americans, but blacks constitute only 7 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate, barely a third of their Texas share.
You may have wondered “With everyone else out, will Tulsi Gabbard start picking up protest votes?” Looking at the various vote totals, the answer appears to be “No.” She does not appear to have broken 1% in any state last week.
Here’s a piece that argues that Cory Booker could have been the nominee if only he hadn’t taken that hard-left turn. There’s a bit of truth to it, but Booker was already looking a little goofy before the pandering began, and primaries are littered with candidates who looked formidable on paper.
Bloomberg last month: Oh sure, I’m going to pay you campaign staffers through the end of the year whether I stay in or not. Bloomberg this month: Psych!
Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.
But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)
Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished.
For some damn reason, Biden decided that he needed to put Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in charge of his campaign. Certainly the lackluster Biden campaign has needed a shakeup for a long time (current run of success notwithstanding), but why you’d hire the person who couldn’t even get their candidate to the primary is beyond me. (Who he should be hiring is Buttigieg’s head of fundraising.) In the debate, Biden promised to pick a woman as Veep, which is exactly the sort of pander you expect of Democrats these days:
Pledging to "pick a woman" for VP doesn't deserve praise, it deserves ridicule because it's insultingly superficial — just like all bullshit attempts to elevate the primacy of identity traits
James Clyburn and James Carville say the quiet part out loud, that debates should be shut down so Biden doesn’t embarass himself. Thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus, Biden’s fundraising is now being done on the intertubes. Also: “According to campaign finance records, Biden raised $11 million immediately after his South Carolina primary win and $7 million following his Super Tuesday victories. The victories helped alleviate some of the campaign’s money woes, but it’s unclear how a ban on actual campaign events and fundraisers may impact his ability to raise money.” Those are good but not out-of-the-park numbers. He got endorsed by the NEA. Also endorsed by Andrew Yang. Joe Biden’s “bioethics advisor” (and ObamaCare architect) Ezekiel Emanuel wants people to die at age 75 (i.e., younger than Biden is now).
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
I’m sure that will go over great with Biden’s core of supporters…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Tulsi have any chance in the race? I could say “if both Biden and Bernies keeled over dead,” but even then I would expect someone like Warren or Bloomberg to jump back into the race and do better than Gabbard. She goes full Andrew Yang in calling for a Universal Basic Income, which should douse any remain fires for her on the right. “Tulsi Gabbard Says Her Sick Friend and Three Others Were Denied Coronavirus Testing in Hawaii.” Interesting (especially since Democrats absolutely dominate Hawaii), but rather peripheral to the race.
What can only be characterized, at best, as an election-year makeover campaign began to fall apart on Feb. 23 in an interview Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” Among other things, Sanders stated: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Right afterward, Sanders doubled down, which was really his only play, lest he come off as a flip-flopper. Despite his proclamation “Truth is truth,” his point wasn’t clear. Does improved literacy that occurred in the context of indoctrinating the population in communist ideology redeem Cuba in any way? Should the United States become more like such countries? Ultimately, these remarks went nowhere, perhaps because there wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Again, these remarks aren’t new and are entirely consistently with Sanders’ history. But, as even left-wing Vox conceded, it made for a bad look: “The other read, though, is more in line with Sanders’ past. Time after time, he has apologized for the actions of brutal left-wing dictatorships from Cuba to Nicaragua to the Soviet Union, partly out of a critique of America’s meddling in these countries but also – some argue – because of his ideological sympathies toward them.”
In a single interview, Sanders may’ve forever demolished the effort to convince the American electorate the 78-year-old career politician is a perfectly benign “democratic socialist” and not the hard-left socialist he’s always been.
Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.
The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.
In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.
Bernie doesn’t let facts get in the way of True Belief:
This is your must watch clip from the Bernie townhall.@marthamaccallum explains to Bernie that Sweden and Denmark are not even remotely close to being socialist countries.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
li>Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Stated again and again she’s not running, but there’s still a cottage industry in predicting she’ll displace Biden at the DNC or be the veep pick. Not really seeing either, but stranger things have happened this year…
Biden leans on bundling billionaires, Steyer hits diminishing returns, Bloomberg takes up the “Most Widely Loathed” spot, Warren donations take a nosedive, Sanders 💘 commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
We’re also down to the last two days of the year, so expect Q4 fundraising numbers to start dropping later this week.
Keep an eye on the new faces, I sagely advised: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, plus former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
Sorry about that. Despite a fawning cover story in Vanity Fair, O’Rourke flamed out fast. Harris staged an impressive launch, but then fell to earth. Brown never entered the race. Only Booker is still running, and his campaign is on life support.
Next time I recommend a hot technology stock or a soon-to-be-famous restaurant, ignore the tip.
Snip.
I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg coming. The 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city? Inconceivable, I thought. Iowa voters may shortly prove me wrong.
I did see Elizabeth Warren coming. Her focus on plans to make the economy work better for the middle class was effective, I wrote.
Then Warren stumbled on healthcare. When she belatedly offered a plan, it proposed a government-run health insurance system, but only after a long transition period.
That seemed smart, I wrote. It’s not clear that voters agree.
To be fair, I did get some things right.
I figured out that the controversies over Biden’s verbal gaffes were really a polite proxy for questions about his age. He’ll be 78 on Inauguration Day; is he up to the job?
I noted that most Democratic voters aren’t Bernie Sanders-style socialists, and that the progressive “litmus tests” that dominated early months of the campaign — “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — weren’t a sure path to winning primaries.
Speaking of which, unions, they of the fat health benefits, are not wild about “Medicare for All.” It would be tough going from a Cadillac plan to the equivalent of Medicaid.
Ranking the campaign dropouts. This is a pretty crappy “Have you done the will of the party, comrade?” ranking. No way does Kamala Harris’ disasterous campaign rank at the top.
Joe Biden released the names of more than 200 people and couples who are raising money for his presidential campaign, a list that includes a number of big names in Democratic money like Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and LGBT rights activist Tim Gill and his husband, Scott Miller.
Biden’s list of fundraisers, each of which has brought in at least $25,000 for his presidential bid, includes many of the biggest names in Democratic fundraising. The list spans Wall Street, Silicon Valley and a number of politicians themselves.
The former vice president voluntarily disclosed the list as the Democratic field — and especially Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren — sparred with each other throughout November and December over how to have adequate transparency about money and finances on the campaign trail.
More than any other leading candidate, Biden is relying on big fundraising events to power his bid for the presidency, which makes these bundlers crucial to his success. Other big-name bundlers for Biden include New York venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof, and billionaire real estate broker George Marcus.
Biden is running for president on his longtime experience in public service, and his list of bundlers reflects the many high-powered connections he built over that time. Biden bundlers include current senators Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles is a bundler for Biden, as is Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A number of former ambassadors — who are often longtime bundlers and major political donors in their own right — are also helping Biden. They include Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal; Denise Bauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Anthony Gardner, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; and Mark Gilbert, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, and more.
It occurs to me that if there were a massive foreign aid kickback scheme funneling overseas money to longtime swamp creatures, Belgium and EU ambassadors would be perfectly situated to direct/skim off the graft. Evidently Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been have been feuding since the 1980s. (Worth reading for the many flip-flops in Biden’s career, including on the death penalty.) Remember how Biden is supposed to be the moderate, rational one?
More Hunter Biden dirt? Eh, it’s from a private investigator in the baby momma lawsuit, so caution is probably in order. But the “helping defraud American Indians” charge is new, though the names of Devon Archer, John Galanis and Bevan Cooney are not. Heh:
Just saw the new Star Wars. Wow! Never saw this coming, Rey turned out to be Hunter Biden’s kid! What a twist!
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late.
Yeah, let’s keep throwing money into a proven losing strategy. Can’t see how that one can possibly fail to beat Trump. And as long as we’re rerunning 2016’s Greatest Misses, have you tried expressing outrage over the Billy Bush tape? Bloomy is also dropping a ton of money on Texas for Super Tuesday:
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is ramping up his efforts in Texas, with plans to build a state operation that his campaign says will be unrivaled by anyone else in the primary field.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, his campaign said it will open a Texas headquarters in Houston and 16 field offices throughout the rest of the state between now and the March 3 primary. The offices will be spread across the Houston area, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Austin, East Texas, the San Antonio area, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and the Killeen area.
The campaign also named its first Texas hires:
Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, will serve as Bloomberg’s senior advisor.
Ashlea Turner, a government relations consultant who worked on Bill White’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, will serve as Bloomberg’s state director.
Kevin Lo, who worked on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Iowa campaign before she ended her campaign earlier this month, will serve as Bloomberg’s organizing director. (Update: On March 27, 2020, Texas Tribune sent out this correction via email: “*Editor’s note: Bloomberg’s campaign initially listed Kevin Lo as one of its first Texas hires. Lo later said he was incorrectly listed by the campaign and never worked for the campaign and has asked this story to be updated to remove his name.”)
Lizzie Lewis, communications director for 2018 gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez, will be Bloomberg’s press secretary.
Has anyone there ever run a successful campaign? None of the ones named were. Also:
While he’s only announced one hire, Biden has topped most Texas polls. There have not been many polls since Bloomberg declared his candidacy and launched a massive national TV ad blitz that prominently targeted the state. The one Texas survey since Bloomberg’s launch, released Dec. 11 by CNN, found Bloomberg at 5% — good enough for fifth place in but still far behind Biden, who placed a distant first with 35%.
Amy Keiderling is exactly who Cory Booker’s presidential campaign is looking for as he seeks to build momentum in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
The Waukee small business owner listened to Booker’s remarks in an Adel bowling alley recently — Booker’s first stop of a four-day bus tour across Iowa. She said he gives her the same feeling she had when she caucused for Barack Obama.
He’s the first candidate she’s seen in person this cycle, but before she left, she committed to caucus for the U.S. senator from New Jersey.
She isn’t alone. Tess Seger, a campaign spokeswoman, said Booker surpassed his 10% average of caucus commitments at each of his tour stops. Sometimes 20% or 30% of the crowd signed the commitment cards.
“We’re getting the people who are going to be caucusing for us, precinct captaining for us,” Booker told the Register on Monday. “It’s really exciting. This is how you win here.”
But, so far, Booker is a far short from the winner’s circle. In the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted in November by Selzer & Co., Booker earned 3% support among likely Democratic caucusgoers. He’s been at or below 4% in first choice preferences in the Iowa Poll since 2018.
One cruel explanation is that people are simply lying to the Booker campaign because Democrats don’t have the heart to turn down a black candidate. Alternately, his “10% of tour stops” simply isn’t translating into mass appeal. Another theory: People actually do like him, but no one thinks he’s tough enough to beat Trump. And if you haven’t already had your fill, here’s another “struggles for traction” piece.
Downtown underwent a dramatic transformation under Buttigieg’s leadership. One-way streets became two-way. Speed limits were reduced. Driving lanes were narrowed. Trees were planted. Decorative brick pavers were laid.
I hate him already.
Buttigieg and his supporters say the more pedestrian-friendly downtown has spurred more than $190 million in private investment, as several key buildings found new life, transformed into hotels, apartments and restaurants.
As the economy recovered from the recession of 2008-’09, some of that investment might have been inevitable, as Buttigieg benefited from a rebounding national economy. Supporters still credit the mayor for setting the tone and aggressively pursuing projects.
More than 500 apartments have been built or are under construction downtown, luring new residents to the city.
That’s, what, two whole complexes?
The street changes have also annoyed some motorists. Any news story about Smart Streets that’s shared on social media will draw complaints from residents pointing out there is too much traffic congestion downtown at peak travel times. Buttigieg has said the slowed traffic is worth the larger benefits.
There’s no end to Democrats willing to make life worse for people who drive cars.
There’s also Smart Streets’ roughly $21 million price tag, paid for with bonds that are being repaid with Tax Incremental Financing money, which comes from property taxes paid on the assessed valuation growth in an area. That project, combined with the city’s overhaul of its parks system, means the city could be limited in making other big investments in the near future, depending on their size.
Still, the assessed value of downtown property rose from about $132.8 million in 2013 to roughly $160.9 million last year, a 21-percent increase, according to a Tribune analysis of county property tax records.
Whole things sounds like a mixed bag at best. But since there are no reports of him luring an entire population of drug-addicted beggars to South Bend, it does sound like he did a much better job as a mayor than Steve Adler…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Headline: “Julian Castro sees lift in polls despite being knocked off debate stage.” Reality: He’s up to 4%. Break out the party favors!
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Michael Moore: Trump Will Win in 2020 if Democrats Nominate Another ’Centrist, Moderate’ like Hillary Clinton.” I understand all those words individually…
2. He’s criticized “Medicare for all” a lot. What is his health care plan?
He wants to keep Medicare for people over 65 and create a new government program for people under 65. Everyone under 65 would automatically be enrolled in that program — which would cover all “essential health benefits,” including pre-existing conditions — but people could choose to forfeit the coverage and receive a credit to buy private insurance instead. He argues that this would guarantee universal coverage without forcing people to use a government health plan.
So instead of an expensive, unworkable program, he offers a slightly-less-insane unworkable but expensive program.
Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:
Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.
Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly. Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. All the vaguely interesting Steyer news is also vaguely off target. First: “AOC accepted Tom Steyer contribution, despite accusing Buttigieg of ‘being funded by billionaires.'” (thisismyshockedface.jpg) Second: “Former Tom Steyer aide sues SC Democratic Party for alleged defamation.” Details: “A former aide for 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer who resigned amid allegations that he stole volunteer data from the rival Kamala Harris campaign is now suing the South Carolina Democratic Party, accusing the party’s chairman of defamation.” Being a former Tom Steyer aide must be like getting cut from the Washington Generals.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren’s campaign sounds the alarm as fundraising pace slows about 30% in fourth quarter.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign told supporters in an email on Friday that, so far, it has raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter, a significant drop from her fundraising haul during the third quarter.
The memo asks backers to step up in giving to the campaign.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” it says.
Warren finished the third quarter bringing in $24.6 million, which was much more than most of the other Democratic primary contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders – who, like Warren, shuns big-money fundraisers – led the field with more than $25 million during the third quarter.
If the $17 million total stands that would represent a 30% drop from the previous quarter. The quarter ends in four days.
Poll numbers and fawning media profiles are ephemeral, but cold, hard cash is a great measuring stick for a presidential campaign. Warren is in trouble and donors know it. After all that noise about the most women ever in a presidential field, it seems increasingly likely that it’s going to come down to Biden and Sanders. Warren had no problem taking high dollar donations until she ran for President. If you live in Iowa, own a phone and vote Democrat, there’s a decent chance Warren will call you:
Makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voice mail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials say she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Ms. Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial good-will dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Ms. Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Ms. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials, and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Ms. Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning — she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yet another NYTthree questions piece. “Power of love” question is vapid, and reparations is idiot Social justice Warrior pandering. On the third question, on her views on mental health, she “believes that antidepressants are harmfully overprescribed.” She probably has a point.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Most campaign postmortems are of the “failure to launch” variety, but the Kamala Harris campaign achieved liftoff, started climbing, and then fell back down to earth followed by a giant explosion.
So let’s dig into her campaign’s cataclysmic demise!
Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.
I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense. Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.
On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.
Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America.
Tell us what you really think.
Jim Geraghty wonders not why Harris departed, but why so many of the no hopes stay in the race:
After you’ve heard Jim Gilmore insist he’s going to win the New Hampshire primary after getting twelve votes in the entire Iowa caucus, treating no-hope candidates as if they still have a shot starts to feel like we’re all enabling delusional people and playing along with their denial.
John Delaney? Senator Michael Bennet? Guys, I don’t know how to break it to you, but most people forgot you were running. Julian Castro? Sorry, pal. On paper, you had a shot, but in reality, people just weren’t interested in buying what you were selling. Tom Steyer? It’s your money, but most Democrats would prefer you spent it in other ways, and the longer you hang around, the more they’ll see you as a fool using up valuable resources on a narcissistic Quixotic effort.
This is precisely why I urge Steyer to stay in the race.
Harris routinely insisted that she was still introducing herself to Americans. But Harris’s campaign, dogged for months by questions about her health-care stance, her political ideology, and, ultimately, her staff’s infighting, never seemed to settle on a single consistent answer to a question voters kept asking: What was she about? At times on the trail, she presented herself as a matter-of-fact progressive, a comforter-in-chief, and an unapologetic prosecutor. Harris, and those who’ve known her for decades, insist all of these are accurate descriptors, but that at her core she’s a results-oriented pragmatist with a long-running disdain for ideological boxes. That, they often said, is precisely what the country could have used right about now. Yet as Harris tried appealing to as broad a swath of the Democratic electorate as possible, she found that in an overflowing field led by three far better-known characters, being a consensus-style candidate who can offer something to everyone meant it was especially difficult to offer everything to anyone.
When Harris sat down over the weekend to re-evaluate her plans and dig deep into her campaign’s financial state after a pair of brutal reports from the New York Times and Washington Post, she saw an operation quickly running out of cash and low on realistic paths to victory, even though she already qualified for the December debate. She spoke with family and close aides, and considered both her short-term options and her political future beyond the primary race. On Monday, she determined there was no politically acceptable way for her sputtering campaign to keep competing. She opted for an abrupt halt to a fall that would have been unfathomable back in Oakland in January, but which could have worsened in the unforgiving Iowa winter.
It would soon get harder, but at the time, the aftermath of the Detroit debate felt like a new low for Harris’s campaign. Looking back four months later, that stretch crystalized what went wrong. As she struggled to find a meeting of minds with the voters she needed between spring and fall — while Biden held onto his support and Elizabeth Warren gained steam — Harris and her team tried out a series of different messages. They didn’t stop trying until they ultimately settled on “Justice Is on the Ballot” late this year. Some political allies urged her to return to the “fearless” message she’d used while running for Senate in 2016. (“Fearless” was also the name of a TV ad she’d ran that was based around footage of Warren praising her.) Others grumbled that her early focus on “truths” meant little to voters, and that her subsequent “3 A.M. Agenda” wasn’t ambitious enough. “Sometimes her over-preparation comes across as a lack of preparation,” said one of her advisors. Still, most in Harris’s corner were convinced that she was close to hitting the right note. “The political consultant class gnashes their teeth over this — they have to market a product,” a Harris friend and longtime political ally told me this fall. “The problem that they have is: She is what she is. She’s complicated.” After the second debate, her team advised her to start telling more personal stories on the campaign trail, fearing the career prosecutor who was campaigning on her toughness was coming across as too lawyerly.
But then, and throughout the campaign, the advice wasn’t always consistent. “I don’t know who’s in charge,” one former Harris aide who remains close with her team told me repeatedly over the summer and fall. Harris has long been surrounded by a wide array of advisors — in addition to campaign chair Maya Harris (her sister), and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, there were strategists Sean Clegg, Ace Smith, and Laphonza Butler, former chief of staff Rohini Kosoglu, adman Jim Margolis, and pollster David Binder, among others. “It’s a Kamala thing to have 9,000 people whispering in her ears, thinking they’re running the show,” said another of her ex-aides.
That doesn’t sound like an effective strategy for running a campaign, or governance. Indeed, it sounds like even more reasons to celebrate the demise of her incompetent campaign long before she could inflict that dysfunction on the White House.
Kamala Harris has ended her presidential campaign. Thus fades into history one of the most overhyped candidates in recent memory.
It’s not hard to see why Harris failed.
She was half the aggressive prosecutor and half the noble social justice warrior, half practical Democrat and half proud progressive, and it was never clear where she stood. With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consolidating the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg fighting over the center ground, Harris’s uncertain political identity denied her a foundation to build on. Instead, the California senator appeared to copy policies that she assumed would be popular in any one moment: most ignominiously, her call to ban President Trump’s Twitter account.
For a Democratic Party craving authenticity, as well as a candidate who can beat Trump, Harris’s strategic ingredients were a poor match for success. The basic point is this: As my colleague Tiana Lowe noted back in the summer, Harris simply wasn’t ready for prime time. She was too desperate to win and lacked established values.
It’s interesting that both Harris and Beto O’Rourke were hyped early and heavily, but both ended up bowing out even before the first primary votes were cast. (You could put Kirsten Gillibrand in this category as well, but honestly, the only people hyping her seemed to be female journalists from New York; everyone else seemed to regard her as a hopeless lightweight.) Neither seem to have ideas or convictions important enough to run a low-cost insurgency campaign ala Jerry Brown in 1992. For Harris and O’Rourke, it was either First Class or nothing.
Beto goes bye bye, sticker shock sets in for Warren, Grandpa Simpson forgets which state he’s in (again), and a failing Harris goes all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
The story had been about how Biden was doomed and Warren’s rise was inexorable, but Biden tops every national poll this week, maintaining a modest lead over Warren, while Harris is in freefall. Also notice that there’s not a single poll outside Iowa or New Hampshire where Warren leads Biden. (For one thing, Quinnipiac, which has constantly shown a more pro-Warren tilt than any other poll, evidently didn’t do one last week.)
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Buttigieg 10, Yang 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 5, Steyer 3, Harris 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1. Good news for Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar, though I’m not sure if this is a DNC qualifying poll or not.
The assumption that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will win New Hampshire is all but baked, Democratic insiders told POLITICO; the neighbor-state senators could easily take the top two spots. The biggest prize, at this point, is the surge of momentum that would come from eclipsing Joe Biden, as the race turns to Nevada and then South Carolina.
I think the story coming out of this state may not be first place,” said former Democratic state Sen. Andrew Hosmer. “It may be who shows up as a strong second or third place that really propels them.”
Hosmer’s assessment was broadly shared by more than two dozen knowledgeable Democrats interviewed for this story, including the party chair, current and former state lawmakers, several underdog campaigns and one of the candidates. Officials with several Democratic candidates’ campaigns, meanwhile, described the race as fluid, with no real frontrunner despite the advantage enjoyed by Sanders, who won New Hampshire in 2016, and Warren, who has been building inroads for years.
The candidates and campaign aides said superior organization will trump all in the state — more so than a heavy TV ad presence or endorsements. And with more than four of five voters still undecided or only leaning toward a candidate, there’s an enormous opportunity for a lower-polling candidate to emerge.
With no clear frontrunner and at least four plausible candidates, superdelegates might make a comeback in a brokered convention.
Depending on how frontloaded a primary calendar is, late April tends to be around the point where enough delegates have been allocated that the presumptive nominee is, if not already clear, coming into sharper focus. So if three candidates are still cresting above the 15 percent threshold by the six-contest “Acela primary” in late April, when more than 75 percent of delegates will have been awarded, that could wreak havoc on the 2020 Democratic nomination process.
But of course, much of this depends on how wide the margin is by which the candidates clear that threshold. If, say, only one candidate is getting a supermajority while the others struggle to hit 15 percent, then the fact that three candidates are above the threshold matters very little — see Trump in 2016. But if three candidates are tightly bunched at 40, 30 and 20 percent, it potentially becomes much more problematic. This is especially true if that clustering happens early and often, especially on delegate-rich days like Super Tuesday, which is scheduled for March 3 this year and is the first series of contests after the four early states.
But:
Here’s why I think a logjam situation is unlikely: How the threshold is applied tends to already have a built-in winnowing effect on the candidates. Yes, there is a proportional allocation of delegates, but that only applies to candidates who win 15 percent of the vote. And that qualifying threshold is not applied just once, but three different times. A candidate must meet that threshold at the statewide level twice, once for at-large delegates and once for party leader and elected official (PLEO) delegates. A candidate must also win 15 percent of the vote in a given congressional district (or other subdivision) to lay claim to any district-level delegates. In other words, a candidate who surpasses 15 percent of the statewide vote by running up margins in a few concentrated areas will not earn as many delegates as a candidate who hits the 15 percent statewide threshold by earning at least 15 percent of the vote across districts. A candidate must build a coalition of support more uniformly across a state — and the country — in order to win delegates. It’s more than just peeling off a delegate or two here and there.
Hey Democrats, when even Nancy Pelosi says your ideas are too far left to win elections, don’t you think you should listen?
“Voters are sick and tired of politicians promising them things that they know they can’t deliver,” the Colorado senator said in a statement. “Warren’s new numbers are simply not believable and have been contradicted by experts. Regardless of whether it’s $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn’t going to happen, and the American people need health care.”
Warren on Friday released the cost estimate of her plan, which increases federal spending by $21 trillion over the next ten years, a significant increase that is nevertheless cheaper than the $31 trillion increase attributed to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
While serving as senator of Delaware, Joe Biden reached out discreetly to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discuss matters his son Hunter Biden’s firm was then lobbying for, according to government records Goodman gathered.
The latest revelations further buttress accusations that Joe Biden’s work as senator and vice president frequently converged with and assisted Hunter Biden’s business interests. Whether it be getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired or meeting one of his son’s business partners while on a diplomatic trip to China in 2013, Joe Biden’s political activities in relation to his son Hunter have continued to garner scrutiny.
In 2002, while his father was a senator, Hunter founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which lobbied on the Hill. When his father announced his candidacy for president in 2008, Hunter opted to leave the firm, claiming it was to reduce concerns about conflicts of interest.
While Hunter was still at the firm, in late February 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden reached out to DHS, expressing concern over the department’s proposed chemical security regulations. The regulations were in accordance with Section 550 of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2007, which called for chemical facilities to submit detailed “site security plans” for DHS approval. Part of these plans were expected to include specifics related to training and credentialing employees.
Biden’s call seems like an eerie coincidence. Two months prior to that phone call, the Industrial Safety Training Council had enlisted Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS precisely on Section 550. The Industrial Safety Training Council is a 501(c)3 that offers safety training services to employees of chemical plants. In the midst of debates over regulations stemming from Section 550, ISTC launched significant lobbying efforts to encourage the expansion of background checks under the new regulation regime.
Hunter was not registered as an individual lobbyist on behalf of ISTC, but he did serve as a senior partner at his namesake firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which only boasted three partners at the time. According to Goodman, from early 2007 to the end of 2008, his firm earned a total of $200,000 from ISTC in return for its lobbying efforts.
While we don’t know the source of Joe Biden’s concern over Section 550 and whether his “concern” was the one ISTC shared, it is worth noting this repeated crossover between Hunter Biden’s business and his father’s political stratagems. At some point, coincidences stop being merely a product of a chance. In the case of Hunter and Joe Biden, the coincidences continue to pile up.
Joe Biden’s use of his political power for his son’s business dealings didn’t stop there. At one point, Hunter’s firm was lobbying on behalf of SEARCH, a national nonprofit devoted to information-sharing between states in the criminal justice and public safety realm. SEARCH was interested in expanding the federal government’s fingerprint screening system and hired Hunter’s firm to lobby on behalf of this issue.
During that very time, Joe Biden sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expressing a desire to unpack this very topic. In his letter, then-Sen. Joe Biden asked to meet with DOJ to explore the benefits of the expanding the federal government’s fingerprint system.
From the Yogi Berra Institute for Advanced Whackery — er, Business Insider, actually — comes a new poll showing that while Joe Biden is the most-loved Democratic presidential contender, he’s also the least-liked. According to figures releasedon Sunday, “27% of likely Democratic voters would be unsatisfied with a Biden nomination, 21% would be dissatisfied with a Sanders win, and 15% would be dissatisfied with Warren.”
What that means is, should Biden win the nomination next summer, more than a quarter of Dems would face a serious “Meh” moment when deciding whether to even bother showing up at the polls in November.
Snip.
Registered voters (it’s too soon to narrow down to likely voters) who approved of Trump’s job performance are either “extremely” or “very” enthused about voting next year — by a whopping 79%. If you’re a registered voter and you disapprove of Trump, you’re only 66% likely to be extremely or very enthused. 13 points is a major enthusiasm gap. And as Kilgore also notes, “White folks are more enthusiastic about voting than nonwhite folks; old folks are more psyched than young folks; Republicans are more whipped up than Democrats.” Those demos suggest that Democratic primary voters had better think long and hard about nominating someone who generates serious enthusiasm, but their frontrunner doesn’t seem to be the guy to do that.
Records filed with the Department of Justice show that Rasky is also a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Azerbaijan. The records, which were filed pursuant to the Foreign Agent Registration Act, show that Rasky was hired by the Azerbaijani government on April 23, 2019. Federal documents signed by Rasky show that he reports directly to Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.
“[The government of Azerbaijan] will pay RASKY a minimum monthly non-refundable fee (the ‘Monthly Fee’) for the Services provided of $15,000 per month, plus a 5% administrative fee as described below,” Rasky’s contract with the foreign government states. “The Monthly Fees totaling $94,500 shall be paid in two equal installments. The initial payment of $47,250 is due upon the signing of this agreement. The second payment of $47,250 is due on July 15, 2019.”
Rasky changed the name of the PAC from “For The People” to “Unite the Country” on Monday, according to FEC filings. The filings do not state which country Rasky intends to unite on Biden’s behalf.
The vainglorious, name-dropping Biden also couldn’t help himself from invoking Pope Francis and noting that he “gives me Communion.”
Such brief asides won’t solve his Catholic problem. For one thing, invoking Pope Francis plays poorly in American politics, as the opponents of Donald Trump found out in 2016. Trump’s poll numbers didn’t fall but rose after the pope slammed his immigration position. Hiding behind an obnoxious left-wing pope won’t help Biden any more than it helped Hillary and Kaine, who tried to drive that wedge between Trump and Catholic voters. Kaine’s faux-Catholic schtick — he would go on and on about his “Jesuit volunteer corps” work in Latin America with commies — went over like a lead balloon.
The Catholics who bother to go to Mass regularly anymore are loath to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in all its grisly stages and presides over gay weddings (which Biden has done since pushing Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012). That poses an insuperable impediment to picking up Catholic votes. Notice that Biden’s I-grew-up-Catholic-in-Scranton lines are recited less and less. His strategists have probably concluded that that routine hurts him in the primaries and can only remind people of his checkered Catholicism in the general election. His “private” Catholic stances grow fainter and fainter and can’t even be found in a penumbra.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Could Booker gain from O’Rourke’s exit? I rather doubt it. Booker’s no longer getting fawning profiles, but his director for state communications, Julie McClain Downey, is. The article opens stating she was “on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers.” Presidential campaigns are intense pressure cooker endeavors that require staffers to work killing hours over the course of (for a competitive campaign) 12-18 months. If key staffers are taking 12 months of leave during the white heat before the primary season, no wonder Booker is languishing around 1%.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Steve Bullock gets Anthony Scaramucci to unknowingly tape endorsement for $100.” That’s his big, exciting news this week. Maybe next week he can pay for Snooki’s endorsement. (And I know what you’re thinking, but no, she’ll only be 33 next year, making her constitutionally ineligible to be elected President…)
Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.
A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.
While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.
At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.
“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”
Snip.
Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa, one of the largest left-leaning advocacy groups in the state, said Buttigieg generated considerable buzz with a recent statewide bus tour. He starts another on Saturday. But the Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.
“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”
Almost always in politics, an early money lead counts for a hell of a lot more than an early poll lead.
Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a new round of digital ad spending in Iowa. And he’s opening a new office in the state, giving him 23 overall as well as 100 staffers. The campaign also notes an October fundraising bump as a sign they’re not losing momentum — the campaign said it had its best month to date online, raising $5.3 million from 182,000 donations, with an average donation of $28.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still not getting out. “Julián Castro plans to refocus his 2020 presidential campaign on Iowa, Nevada and Texas in the coming days and is supporting his staffers looking for jobs with other campaigns.” That pretty much says he’s broke, though Nevada and Texas make sense as last-ditch Hail Mary plays. In that CNN/UNH poll, Castro hard the largest net favorability decline of all the candidates listed, a whopping -25%. I’m sort of surprised voters actually noticed him enough to dislike him. Maybe it was the “abortion services for trannies” line that did it…
Coming off a close loss in Texas’s 2018 Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March, though some wondered if he had waited too long to fully capitalize on the national notoriety he gained from his 2018 performance. Still, O’Rourke’s initial polling numbers suggested he might really be in the mix to compete for the nomination — he was polling at 10 percent or more in some national polls not long after he announced. However, his survey numbers quickly deteriorated as the race moved along, and he spent the past four months mostly polling below 5 percent even after he tried to revive his campaign in August by tacking left on some issues and focusing more on President Trump.
’Rourke’s tumble in the polls was also accompanied by fundraising difficulties. Having been a prodigious fundraiser in 2018, he seemed capable of attracting the resources to run a top-level presidential campaign, and he showed early promise by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the second best opening day after only former Vice President Joe Biden. But fundraising dollars started drying up shortly thereafter. He had raised only $13 million by the end of the second quarter, and added just another $4.5 million in the third quarter.
His debate performances didn’t help him recover either; in fact, his most recent performance seemed to have hurt him. After the October debate, O’Rourke’s net favorability among Democratic primary voters fell by about 6 points in our post-debate poll with Ipsos, the biggest decline for any of the 12 candidates on stage. His place at future debates was in serious jeopardy, too. O’Rourke was two qualifying polls shy of making the November debate and had yet to register a single qualifying survey for the December debate.
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough…only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate.
O’Rourke may have been billed as a moderate, but he quickly joined the Twitter Woke Circus, threatened to take our guns, and watched his polls crash even harder as a result. A fact that makes the NRA celebrate his exit:
What do Beto, Gillibrand, and Swalwell have in common? They based their presidential campaigns around demonizing the @NRA, 100M gun owners and trying to destroy our right to self-defense and to even own guns. They messed with the bull and they got the horns. pic.twitter.com/oozFjUgJkr
Across the Democratic Party, ordinary voters, senior strategists, and health care wonks are increasingly nervous that the candidate many believe to be the most likely nominee to face Donald Trump has burdened herself with a policy that in the best case is extraordinarily difficult to explain and in the worst case could make her unelectable.
On Tuesday night, in Concord, one of the more bougie New Hampshire towns that should be a Warren stronghold, Warren stepped inside Dos Amigos, a local Mexican restaurant. She made the rounds talking to voters as locals ate tacos and watched a football game playing above the bar. It didn’t take long before the first Medicare for All question came up.
Martin Murray, who lives in neighboring Bow, came down for a taco and a beer and ended up having a conversation with Elizabeth Warren about single payer and slavery. (That’s what it’s like in New Hampshire.)
“I paid pretty close attention to the last debate when Buttigieg was talking to her,” he told me, “and what I got from him was simply that going for the golden coin, if you will, might be a little too much all at once and maybe we have to take that step by step. And that’s what worries me too: that going for Medicare for All might be unattainable.”
Murray, who is leaning toward supporting Warren, asked her about the Buttigieg critique. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she told him. “In fact, can I just make a pitch on that? People said to the abolitionists: ‘You’ll never get it done.’ They said it to the suffragettes: ‘You’ll never get that passed.’ Right? They said it to the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. They said it to the union organizers. They said it to the LGBT community.”
She added, “We’re on the right side of history on this one.”
Some Democrats I talked to found the comparisons that Warren used to be jarring. “I have the highest respect for Sen. Warren but she’s wrong about this,” said former Sen. Carol Mosley Braun, the first female African American in the Senate. “Abolition and suffrage did not occasion a tax increase. People weren’t giving something up — except maybe some of their privilege.”
She added, “To compare the health care debate to the liberation of black people or giving women the right to vote is just wrong.”
“Medicare for All does not equate in any shape, form or fashion to the Civil Rights Act, or Voting Rights Act, or the 13th Amendment, or 14th Amendment,” said Bakari Sellers, a Kamala Harris supporter whose father was a well-known civil rights activist who was shot and imprisoned in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. “It doesn’t.”
Plus a history of Warren’s position, since she’s been on both sides of the issue whenever it suited her. Warren is a great candidate…if you want to see the stock market collapse. New York Times reporter had documents that proved Warren was lying about her “I was fired because I was pregnant” story, and sat on them. We all know why: They want Warren to win and they want Trump to lose. Saturday Night Livemocks Warren’s health care plan. The fact I’m linking here rather than embedding it should tell you how funny it is. Also, as with Hillary Clinton, SNL helps Warren’s campaign by having her played by an actress roughly half her age. “Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School.”
The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools — a proposal first backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) This does not appear to be an official Warren campaign account, but it does offer up an infinite well of cringe.
“The downsides of that, the entire country gets engrossed in this impeachment process,” Yang said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then, we’re gonna look up and be facing Donald Trump in the general election and we will not have made a real case to the American people.”
Yang said that while he does support the impeachment, he feels Democrats waste too much time talking about it and not enough about the future of the US.
“That’s the only way we’re going to win in 2020 and that’s the only way we’re actually going to start actually solving the problems that got him elected,” he told CNN.
In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.
The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.
Snip.
Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”
Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.
“We wouldn’t have signed on with somebody we didn’t think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there’s a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that’s what’s driven it this far.”
Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.
The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.
The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.
That effort has evolved into more than 30 Yang Gangs across the state— 17 that South Carolina campaign chair Jermaine Johnson says are “100% structured.” The Columbia and Charleston group, made up of about 250 members, is the largest of these South Carolina Yang Gangs. The campaign maintains that while not all of these members are showing up to in-person events, the majority are active online.
It was fall of 1999, and Yang, 24, was in the job he had steered toward his whole life. Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown University, Columbia Law — the perfect elite track to land at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the country’s premier law firms. His Taiwanese immigrant parents were thrilled. Counting salary and bonus, he was making about $150,000 a year.
He quit because he didn’t like it. “Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie.”
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Former nanny, warez-trader, would-be punk rock star, El Paso City Councilman, three-term U.S. Representative, magazine cover boy, and losing 2018 U.S. Senate candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is now a former Presidential candidate.
Our campaign has always been about seeing clearly, speaking honestly, and acting decisively.
In that spirit: I am announcing that my service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee. https://t.co/8jrBPGuX4t
O’Rourke’s rise was quick, and his fall was even quicker. Backed by family wealth and political connections, Bobby Francis became Beto and successfully primaried a Democratic incumbent in a district that hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1962, where he spent three largely undistinguished terms before running against Ted Cruz for the Senate in 2018.
The senate race is what fueled O’Rourke’s rise to national prominence. Though supported by national Democrats’ absolute hatred for Cruz, O’Rourke brought real strengths to the race. First and foremost, he did the work, campaigning hard all across the state with a grueling personal appearance schedule that rivaled similar hard work put in by Cruz in his winning 2012 race. He also built out a competent campaign infrastructure and a national fund-raising apparatus to channel in the huge sums of cash national Democrats were throwing into the race. (O’Rourke raised more money than any senate candidate ever.) “Competent campaigning and fundraising” may seem like tepid praise, but it was more than any statewide Democrat had accomplished in two decades. (Wendy Davis had gotten similar fawning press coverage and solid out-of-state money, but ran a manifestly incompetent campaign.) And he was photogenic.
All of which lead to O’Rourke receiving some of the most fawning national campaign coverage for a statewide race ever seen. National magazine after national magazine showered rose petals of praise on O’Rourke from on-high. They were so predictable you could construct a checklist of the elements included. Skateboard? Check. Punk rock? Check. Sweaty? Check. “Kennedy-esque good looks”? Check.
O’Rourke lost, but he made the race a lot closer than it should have been, and dragged a lot of down-ballot Democrats into office on his coattails in a “wavelet” year for Democrats fired up in opposition to the Trump Administration. O’Rourke picked up more votes for a Democrat than any race in Texas ever. But a side effect was helping Republicans hold onto the senate, with several Democratic incumbents (Florida’s Bill Nelson, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp) going to down to defeat in winnable races that didn’t receive nearly a fraction of the resources thrown at O’Rourke.
All of which naturally fueled talk of O’Rourke running for President. As I said in the very first clown car roundup, “I don’t see any reason for him not to run, with high favorables, strong polling and having just received a zillion fawning national media profiles.” He came in third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in a November 2018 preference poll of candidates, and he was Daily Kos’ second-ranked straw poll candidate behind Elizabeth Warren. And he had a huge fundraising list from his Senate run. So there were several factors that made O’Rourke’s run entirely logical.
Yet he dithered, and hemmed, and hawed, letting a dozen other candidate get the jump on him into the race, before finally launching with yet another fawning national media profile, this one in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photographs, that endlessly talked about his youth and charisma.
Then he got out on the national campaign trail, where mainstream media outlets had already lined up behind candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as their preferred favorites, and the nation found out what Texas conservatives had been saying all along: O’Rourke is a big bag of nothing. All the qualities that the media found “endearing” and “authentic” were now goofy and eminently mockable. The flaws were always there.
Quick, name a single signature issue O’Rourke stood out from other candidates on. Until his disasterous “I’m gonna grab your guns” moment, there wasn’t any. Warren was the candidate that wanted to socialize healthcare; O’Rourke was the candidate that Instagrammed his dental visit. The more a national audience saw of him the less they liked him. The harder he pandered to the hard left the more phony he seemed and the softer his poll numbers, racking up some perfect “0.0” scores, where not a single person polled planned to vote for him.
Faced with an obviously failing campaign, O’Rourke made the decision to pull the plug. That was the right decision, but I’m slightly surprised he made it, since his $3 million cash on hand was probably enough to coast into Iowa and New Hampshire with something resembling a functional campaign on one last roll of the dice. But maybe shorn of his protective media glow, O’Rourke was finally able to read the writing on the wall. The question is when the half-dozen other candidates in the race doing even worse than O’Rourke drop out.
Who does his departure help? Given how minimal his remaining support was, probably no one. An earlier O’Rourke exit might have helped Julian Castro snag additional Texas funding, but his campaign has been flatlined for a while.
O’Rourke was a deeply flawed candidate, but I suspect he might have peaked higher and lasted longer if he’d jumped into the race right after the senate race loss. By the time he finally got in, his buzz had already died and a lot of higher profile candidate had locked up funding and campaign talent before he could. I think he still would have lost, but he might have gone out in a big bang rather than a whimper.
There’s something weirdly appropriate about the fake Hispanic candidate ending his campaign on the Day of the Dead.
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.
Two 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. Today’s falls on the 29th, while last month’s fell on the 24th, so feel free to adjust accordingly for the five day difference.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Tim Ryan, Wayne Messam
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 66,325,828 followers, up 1,626,646 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 27,008,334 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.
Warren gained the most followers of all the Democratic contenders, 237,827, but she’s not quite on a pace to overtake Biden before Iowa.
Biden gained the second most, 167,504, which doesn’t sound that impressive until you realize that he’d only been making mid-five-figure gains in previous Twitter Primary roundups. A six-figure gain is the most momentum we’ve seen from him.
Gabbard’s 143,711 gain is the third biggest gain this month. We’re still waiting for that momentum to show up in her polling numbers.
Yang was the only other six-figure gainer (though Harris and Sanders were close), and he should break one million followers soon.
Marianne Williamson’s mere 416 gain shows her buzz is dead.
Steyer still seems to be getting a pretty pathetic return on his Twitter ad buys.
Biden is up, Ryan is out, a poll has Buttigieg second in Iowa, and the Yang Gang takes on Bernie Bros. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 30, Warren 19, Sanders 13, Harris 11, Buttigieg 9, Steyer 5, Yang 4, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1.
Civiqs/ISU (Iowa): Warren 28, Buttigieg 20, Sanders 18, Biden 12, Klobuchar 4, Harris 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Bennet 1. That’s the first time Buttigieg has placed ahead of Biden in any poll, anywhere, ever. Could be an outlier (sample size of 598), or it could show his spending is finally having an effect there. My guess is some of each.
SSRS/CNN: Biden 34, Warren 19, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Klobuchar 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1. Not only do the CNN and Quinnipiac polls diverge, but the divergence between the two seems to be getting larger.
WBUR (Massachusetts): Warren 33, Biden 18, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Yang 1. But that poll notes than even liberal Massachusetts is not sold on her socialized medicine scheme.
Winning Iowa or New Hampshire will likely be critical for someone in the 2020 Democratic primary, too, especially if the same candidate wins both states. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is currently in the lead in both places, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of polls in Iowa and New Hampshire since the third Democratic debate in September — although she barely leads in Iowa. She has a narrow 1-point lead over Biden in Iowa and a 4-point edge in New Hampshire, according to our analysis. (RealClearPolitics’s average puts Warren roughly 3 points ahead of Biden in New Hampshire and less than a point behind Biden in Iowa.) But in both states, we’re only talking about a few points separating the top two candidates, so to be clear, the race is still incredibly tight.
And that’s important, because the margin by which a candidate wins Iowa or New Hampshire can have big consequences for the primary. A narrow defeat, for instance, wouldn’t necessarily spell doom for Biden’s campaign. Instead, it could give them an opportunity to spin the loss and talk about the relative lack of diversity in the first two states, said Josh Putnam, a political scientist and FiveThirtyEight contributor who tracks the nomination process. Putnam argued that a defeat by a wide margin would be harder to sell, and Caitlin Jewitt, a political scientist at Virginia Tech who studies presidential primaries, agreed. Jewitt stressed, however, that even a loss could be considered a good showing if the candidate lost by less than predicted. “It’s important to win in Iowa and New Hampshire,” said Jewitt. “But it’s almost more important to do better than you were expected to do.”
Winning or exceeding expectations in Iowa or New Hampshire seems to have a real effect on Democratic primaries, too — especially as it pertains to a candidate’s ability to attract national support. Take John Kerry in 2004. He was polling at about 8 percent nationally before Iowa, but after he won both Iowa and New Hampshire, his numbers went through the roof — a 37-point gain in the polls in a couple weeks — as he steamrolled to victory at the expense of opponents like Howard Dean. Similarly, in 2008, Barack Obama trailed the favorite, Hillary Clinton, by double digits in national polls, but after he won Iowa, he gained nearly 10 points in national support, even though Clinton recovered to win New Hampshire. Eventually, Obama won the lengthy nomination battle. And while Bernie Sanders didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2016, his strong start in Iowa and New Hampshire helped force Clinton, once again the favorite, into a drawn-out race.
Case against: They’re both much whiter states than the general Democratic electorate. Also:
As we saw in the 2016 Democratic primary, Clinton was able to fight on despite underwhelming results in Iowa (where she narrowly won) and New Hampshire (where she lost). Granted, she had overwhelming support from the party establishment that Biden can’t currently match, but her position as the likely nominee was never really in doubt despite a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. What 2016 suggests, then, is that as long as expectations aren’t set too high, somewhat underwhelming results in Iowa and New Hampshire are survivable. Putnam described the Biden campaign’s efforts to discount the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire as “a gamble,” but “one that might pay off” if the results are relatively close and South Carolina still looks favorable for him.
The media might also be more receptive to the idea that Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t representative of the Democratic Party, which may make them less important this year. Already there have been a number of stories about how the primary calendar — especially the Super Tuesday states — may shake up which states matter most to candidates. And as CNN analyst Ronald Brownstein wrote in February, the 14 states voting on March 3 “could advantage the candidates best positioned to appeal to minority voters, particularly African Americans.” So if Biden retains his solid support among African American voters and his campaign’s effort to lower expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire works, Biden might get what he wants — South Carolina and Super Tuesday as his real campaign tests.
Fortunetallies up the endorsement race while wondering if it actually matter anymore. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.) I note that every single Booker endorsement is from New Jersey…
Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old. He dresses neatly and always in blue. Staff envelop him. There’s the body man, the advance man, the videographer, the photographer, the digital director, the traveling chief of staff, the traveling press secretary, the local press secretary, the adviser, the other adviser, the adviser’s adviser, the surrogate, the other surrogate, and the bodyguard.
Snip.
And it is a production. This is true even when the event is small, which it often is, because the stakes never are — Joe Biden speaking off the cuff is something the entire campaign seems focused on preventing at all costs. Inside the community center or union hall or college auditorium, the stage is crafted just so. The red and blue letters — each roughly the size of a 9-year-old — spell IOWA 4 BIDEN. The American flag is stretched taut and stapled to the plywood. The lawn sign is stapled to the lectern. The delicate panes of teleprompter glass angle to meet his hopeful gaze, so that he may absorb the programmed speech as he peers out at his audience, which usually skews quite old and white, unless he’s in South Carolina.
This first part — the reading of the speech — he almost always gets right. Even when he makes changes, rearranging the order of the words, skipping over a few, adding others, how could he not get it right? He’s been delivering some version of it for more than 40 years and living it for longer. He could deliver it in his sleep, if he ever sleeps. It’s like my father always said: Joey, a job is about more than just a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about being able to look your child in the eye and say, “It’s gonna be okay …” There is an undercurrent of shame that pulses throughout, this idea that the unequalness of our society is embarrassing for those who have access to less, rather than embarrassing for those who have more than anyone could need.
Folks … Not a joke! He’s always saying something rather solemn, about cancer or immigration, and then adding, “Not a joke!” as if anyone thought it might be. I’m being serious here … Come on … The bottom line is … I’m not kidding around … The fact of the matter is … Barack and me … Folks … Folks … Folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … FOLKS … folks … FoLkS … fOlKs … F. O. L. K. S. …
And this next part — the greeting of the voters — he gets right, too. In this context, he possesses an almost mystical quality that, for whatever reason, does not come across when filtered through the kaleidoscope of newsprint or television. It’s the way he focuses his eyes, which are as blue as the seas, except for (yikes) that time the left eye filled with blood on CNN a few weeks back.
He is swarmed. Women reach out to him, linking their arms in his. He bows his head and lifts their hands to his mouth for a kiss and, later, when you ask them if that makes them uncomfortable, they look at you like you have three heads. This is the best day of their lives. Are you insane? There are men, too, who embrace him, wrapping their hands around his neck. He calls every male-presenting human he encounters “man.” I watched him call a baby “man.” As in, Hey! Howareya, man?! He is as skilled a selfie-taker as any influencer, and in the span of 30 or 40 minutes, he snaps hundreds, leaning his body against the rope that separates him from the crowd, straining it one, two, three feet forward. He really does connect with every living being this way, talking about their jobs or their health care as he listens, sometimes crying with them, whispering in their ears, taking their phone numbers and promising to call them. He does, in fact, do that. Everybody is Joe Biden’s long-lost friend. Every baby is Joe Biden’s long-lost child. A little girl in Iowa City called him her uncle Joe. On the Fourth of July in the town of Independence, he took off, running through the parade like a dingo with somebody’s newborn. As hard as it might be to believe that anything in this realm could not be bullshit, it’s simply true that this isn’t.
His own loss is staggering in its scale and cruelty: Neilia, his wife, and Naomi, his infant daughter, killed in a car crash. Beau, his oldest son, who survived that crash with his brother, Hunter, killed decades later by brain cancer. And it’s as though in that loss he’s gained access to an otherwise imperceptible wavelength on which he communicates in this way, with the eyes and the hands.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but sometimes some people would walk up with a lot of emotion in their face, and without even hearing their story, he could connect with them,” John Flynn, who served as Biden’s senior adviser in the White House, said. “He would know it was either one thing or another, and he would just know how to approach them and to get them to gently open up if they wanted to. And if they didn’t want to, he just said, ‘Hey, I’m with you, and I’m there for you. I feel your pain.’ ”
Snip.
The pitch goes like this: Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word — the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president — despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.
To anyone paying attention — the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else — it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)
But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.
Yet Biden is still the front-runner. Volatile and potentially worthless as they may be, it’s what the polls say. Biden leads the field on average by a handful of percentage points, though his lead has trended steadily downward, from a high of 33 in May to 20 in June to 11, and then to 9.9, and 6.6, and 5.4, according to RealClearPolitics. In the whole campaign, there has only been one day — October 8 — when he slipped to second place, an average of 0.2 points behind Warren. He’s also the front-runner in South Carolina, Nevada, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. “There is this sense of hanging on. And perhaps he can. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. “Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is.”
It’s a long, generally balanced piece. Remember how Biden was toast an Warren was the inevitable nominee? Yeah, not so much:
Joe Biden is enjoying one of his largest leads over the rest of the Democratic field since joining the presidential race, a new poll finds.
A CNN survey conducted by SSRS finds that 34% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters currently back the former vice president to unseat President Trump in November. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sits in second place, with 19% support. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont placed third with 16%.
The rest of the pack is even further behind, with Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and California Sen. Kamala Harris earning 6% support, while Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke garnered 3% support.
CNN/SSRS interviewed more than 1,003 Democratic voters for the poll Oct. 17-20, which has a +/- 3.7 margin of error.
He got a 60 Minutes interview. Also, Biden called Castro “Cisneros.” Hey, Hispanic mayors of San Antonio whose last names start with “C”, I can certainly see how those neurons might get entangled. But as far as I know, Castro has never been convicted of a felony…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His emergency fundraising appeal worked. “Booker asked supporters to give $1.7 million in 10 days — donors ultimately chipped in $2.16 million, the campaign said.” But “Booker is still struggling to gain ground on his Democratic rivals and his campaign is still bleeding money. At the rate he’s been spending, the strong fund-raising performance bought him about an extra month of campaigning, making the next debate on Nov. 20 another critical moment.”
Polls of the Democratic primary occasionally show that not a single person in the survey picked Bullock. He made the second debate, in July, but was then bumped from the stage, unable to garner enough donors or hit the 2 or 3 percentage points of polling support needed to qualify. Last week, during the fourth debate, instead of standing onstage alongside the other 12, he watched it at home in Helena with his family.
In an enormous field dominated by a famous former vice president and four diverse blue-state senators with intriguing backgrounds, Bullock has been almost invisible. He’s never graced the cover of a glossy magazine, like Beto O’Rourke (Vanity Fair) and Pete Buttigieg (New York), who play to the cultural predilections of so many Gen-X male writers who can talk Fugazi and Joyce. He doesn’t have a gimmicky new policy idea for attracting a niche online audience the way Andrew Yang does. He’s never had a jaw-dropping debate confrontation with Biden the way Kamala Harris did. He hasn’t even been interesting enough to have had a cycle of widespread negative attention, as with Tulsi Gabbard’s unusual affection for Bashar Assad or Amy Klobuchar’s unusual use of a comb. As a middle-aged white guy in a mostly white state, there is no social justice barrier Bullock would break as the party’s nominee.
What does it say about the Democrats and presidential politics in 2019 that the candidate who has arguably the most impressive governing credentials in the race, aside from the former vice president, has been a nonentity?
Bullock swears he will stay in the race until at least the Iowa caucuses on February 3. I spent enough time with the governor and his small staff over four days in September in Montana and Iowa to know that he and his closest advisers are not delusional. They all know how unlikely it is that he’ll be the Democratic nominee. And yet maybe—just maybe—his decision to keep running is not completely insane. Joe Biden, the other moderate white guy in the race, is not exactly lighting people on fire.
Snip.
Like anyone working for an extreme underdog, Bullock’s aides oscillate between utter despair and glimmers of hope. “What motivates the whole team and certainly me as a Westerner. and as someone who’s not from the coasts, is you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to ignore these people who won red states or these Democrats that are in red states?’” said Ridder. “If we don’t have someone like Steve Bullock at least as part of the conversation to show that there are Democrats in red states, we have a big problem and we’re going to lose out on a whole swath of our country pretty quickly.”
Snip.
His candidacy exists in a strange netherworld where he did everything you were once supposed to do as an ambitious Democratic politician—become a governor, win over lots of Republican voters, rack up progressive achievements, put out serious policy proposals—but none of it seemed to matter. The biggest bump in attention Bullock has received all year is when Jeff Bridges—the Dude from The Big Lebowski—tweeted out an endorsement of him.
It’s hard not to be left with the feeling that at a certain point in the 2000s the romantic era of presidential politics that began with Carter ended. In the 70s, the old system of party elites controlling the nominating process gave way to a more democratic system of voters in state caucuses and primaries taking control. Gradually that system, which was once defined by local campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, became nationalized. Now, candidates who can’t run an aggressive national pre-primary campaign seem doomed. The casualties of the new system, which reward the elusive quality of fame, strong ideological views, or both, have been government service and careers outside of the coasts.
It just seems like the week for long, detailed profiles of candidates whose names start with “B”…
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think the narrative is mostly bullshit. Just want to get that on the record nice and early…. I certainly think he had a good debate, and he’s probably gained a point or so, which isn’t nothing! But to say there’s been a big Buttigieg surge is so far from reality that, if you simply glance at a table of polls, it almost feels like gaslighting. He’s maybe gained a point or so in national polls.
Snip.
sarahf: Right, but how should we interpret his higher standing in Iowa or New Hampshire?
Is that meaningful at this point?
natesilver: He’s a good candidate for those states because (1) They’re really white, and his supporters are really white; (2) He’s got enough money to build out a good ground game; (3) He’s got a regional advantage in Iowa by being one of the few Midwsterners in the race.
So I take his chances in Iowa pretty seriously! I just don’t think anything much has changed about them over the past week.
julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I take Nate’s point about national polls, but an unexpected showing in Iowa seems like the kind of thing that could shape this race, especially if Joe Biden tanks and there’s an opportunity for someone else to wrestle the moderate mantle away.
My guess money is on Buttigieg’s huge warchest starting to have a real effect in Iowa. As I suspected, he’s snatching up Biden donors.
Tulsi gets Strange New Conservative Respect for several reasons, but the primary one is that she doesn’t seem to hate our guts. She is what an opponent should be – an opponent, not an enemy. Let’s face it – the mainstream Democrat Party hates our guts, and given its malignant druthers it would strip us of our First, Second, and probably Third Amendment rights in order to make sure that we never, ever have a say in our own governance again. Then, with us silenced and disarmed, it would take our money, corrupt our children and generally oppress us in ways that make today’s punitive straw bans look tame. If you don’t believe that a scary number of mainstream lefties want us Normals enslaved or dead, well, you’re either in denial or not on social media.
Make no mistake – Tulsi is not one of us conservatives, though the kind of leftism she embraces (which owes a lot to the socialism of Bernie Sanders) shares some superficial similarities to the populism that has swept the GOP base. In many ways, we share her critique of an inept, corrupt ruling caste eager to send non-elite citizens off to fight their endless, mismanaged wars. We also share a critique of Big Business as a crony capitalist simulacrum of free enterprise, basically a bunch of rich jerks sidling up to the leaders of both parties to repeatedly shaft us regular folks to pump up a few digits on their balance sheets.
That Tulsi will take on the corrupt leaders of her garbage party, like Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit, is certainly a welcome change from the lockstep stonewalling we have seen from the others – “Why, I see nothing wrong with Toots McHoover Biden peeing hot then getting 50 grand a month from an oligarch, and if you do you’re racist!” When Mee Maw got into the cooking sherry again and started calling her a “Russian asset,” you knew Tulsi was drawing blood from Ole Granny Reset Button. That charge is particularly amusing since Major Gabbard is an Army officer and a veteran of the elite’s dumb wars – another thing the right appreciates about her. But then everyone is a Russian agent these days. We cons get the same insane idiocy, and not just the president.
Snip.
Gabbard is far more open to Assad than many of us cons like, but her opposition to the Fredocon warmonger model (like the opposition of many woke conservatives) seems to come from a place of genuine concern for the troops she serves and served with. Unlike most of the rest of her rivals, dead American warriors are not an abstraction. Moreover, you get the idea that, alone among the faux Cherokees, naggy mistresses, and militant furries up there on the Democrat debate stage, Tulsi actually likes America, and Americans.
The Gabbard Left and the Trump Right share the conclusion that our elite sucks and that it has forfeited any moral authority to lead our country, but the similarity ends there. She is not conservative and is not traditional. Just because she has doubts about offing babies in the third trimester, as opposed to supporting abortion until high school graduation, does not make her pro-life. She would take your guns, she would take your money, and she would generally make Barack Obama look like William F. Buckley.
Sometimes we forget that Tulsi is a leftist, and that she would screw up health care, open the borders and impose all sorts of climate hoax nonsense. A key difference from us, when you get past the surface similarities, is that she and her ilk have faith in the idea that government can take on more and more responsibilities, despite the fact that it has demonstrated that it cannot handle those responsibilities it already has, which themselves are mostly far beyond what government should be doing in the first place.
There’s another issue, the fox in the room if you will, that we need to address, and it is not an indictment of Tulsi Gabbard. It’s her storied looks. She is pretty, and she does not give off the man-hating vibe of the rest of her competitors (this also goes for the nominal men on the stage). Tulsi certainly plays it up – those yoga-pants workout videos are not just to reassure us about her cardiovascular fitness. But the fact that she is a woman comfortable with being traditionally feminine gives her a leg up on that squad of bitter, spinster librarians she is running against.
Gabbard isn’t a left- or right-wing politician. She is a spiritual revolutionary, defying the categories of material and contractual politics –– overcoming them, as Blavatsky and Nietzsche had it. Her positions fit no party template because they are what Peter Viereck called ‘metapolitics’. She wishes to overcome the intolerable binaries and compromises that have, as she rightly observes, gummed up the works of government and reduced swathes of the public to destitution, dependency and desperation. Being a modern Hawaiian rather than a 19th-century Bavarian, the voice of her inner authoritarian is as soft as the lining of her wetsuit. Still, it speaks quite clearly.
Like Gandhi and George Harrison, who were also promoted beyond their competence, Gabbard is influenced by a strange medley of self-help and pop-Hinduism. Hence Gandhi’s George Bernard Shaw routine in a dhoti, or George Harrison’s deeply spiritual objections to capital gains in ‘Taxman’. Hence too the paradoxes of Gabbard the soldier-pacifist who supports our troops but dog-whistles about the ‘war machine’; who smilingly shares apocalyptic visions of government failure and corruption from her lush Hawaiian garden; and who supports human rights but never says a harsh word about Bashar al-Assad.
It was squalid of Hillary Clinton to imply that Putin’s people were manipulating Gabbard as a ‘Russian asset’. In a season of universal political folly, every candidate is an asset to any rival power. No Russian or Chinese meddler has messed with the American system as successfully as a chorus of millionaires threatening war overseas and further legislation on public bathrooms at home. The blend of petty managerialism at home and delusional universalism abroad is a winning combination –– winning, that is, for Putin and Xi.
That blend also happens to be the recipe of religious cults like the one in which Gabbard was raised, and whose members she appointed to her campaign staff. This crankish background shapes the attitudes which make Gabbard a Democratic misfit, like hostility to homosexuality, gay marriage and Islam, fondness for Narendra Modi’s Hindu revivalism. Even the attitudes which might endear her to the Democratic left, her metapolitically mixed feelings about the Jews, have been a core feature of spiritual revolution from Blavatsky to Nietzsche, Gandhi to John Lennon.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Snit fit: “On Friday, the campaign of presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced the senator will skip a forum on criminal justice reform in South Carolina this weekend. Her reason for that decision was the equivalent of an adult woman throwing a toddler-style temper tantrum. She is angry that the organization holding the weekend forum honored President Trump with an award Friday.”
“Right here in New Hampshire, last weekend,” Klobuchar said, “we were at a meet-and-greet, and everyone had these little stickers on: ‘I’m a Supreme Court voter.’ ‘I’m a climate-change voter.’ And there was one guy that had no sticker on at all. And he came up and whispered in my ear — true story — ‘I’m a Trump voter. I don’t want anyone to know. But I’m not voting for him again.’ If we want to win big, we have to build this coalition.”
The enthusiastic reception in Nashua for Klobuchar’s message of cross-party appeal capped a 12-day stretch that has been the best to date for the Minnesota Democrat’s campaign for president. Now all Klobuchar needs is to do even better. And time is running short for a candidate who still distantly trails the race’s front-runners.
For months, Klobuchar struggled for attention in a huge field of rivals. But, following a widely praised performance at the Oct. 15 Democratic debate, she’s seen a spike in fundraising and national press coverage. In her most aggressive showing yet, she prodded several other candidates about some of their more hard-to-deliver promises, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on her support for Medicare for All.
“We’re feeling a lot of momentum since the debate,” Klobuchar said in a live TV interview later Friday night from outside a Democratic Party banquet in a Manchester restaurant.
In the days following the debate, Klobuchar tallied 3% in separate national polls. That’s far below candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but it was enough to qualify her for next month’s Democratic debate in Georgia.
On Thursday, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan dropped out of the race to focus on his reelection bid in the House. On the surface, the congressman’s electoral pitch as a moderate, blue-collar Democrat from the traditional swing state of Ohio had a fair bit of potential, too. But unlike South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or even Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Ryan failed to attract enough support to carve out some sort of lane for himself in the primary.
Some of Ryan’s struggles came down to the nature of the field and his relatively low profile coming into the race. As a House member, Ryan might have started out at a disadvantage compared to some candidates who held or had held higher offices. If Ryan had been, say, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown — who opted not to run for president — things might have gone differently. Even after six or so months of campaigning, Ryan wasn’t that well known. Only about half of Democrats had an opinion about him back in late August, and recent polling suggests that he wasn’t becoming better known, either. Of course, if former Vice President Joe Biden hadn’t gotten into the race, it’s possible that some moderate Democrats would have considered Ryan as an alternative. In the end, Ryan wasn’t even able to attract the very low threshold of support necessary — 2 percent in four qualifying polls and 130,000 unique donors — to qualify for the third and fourth debates (he wasn’t on track to make the fifth debate, either).
Ryan’s lack of financial resources also factored into his campaign’s difficulties and eventual demise. In the second quarter of 2019, he raised roughly $900,000, which would have been a great fundraising haul for his House race but was woefully inadequate for a presidential candidate (and the second-lowest amount of any “major” presidential candidate at the time, per FiveThirtyEight’s criteria). And in the third quarter he fared even worse, bringing in only $425,000 with just $160,000 in the bank. Although Ryan could theoretically have stayed in the race for months to come — Ohio law permits someone to run for president and the House at the same time — it’s tough to maintain a presidential campaign if you have virtually no money, so Ryan’s poor fundraising was probably the nail in his campaign’s coffin.
Even if Ryan’s candidacy fades to the insignificance of a footnote in the story of the 2020 presidential election, the fact that Ryan was so thoroughly ignored and dismissed by the rest of his party is indeed significant.
Here’s a guy who doesn’t just represent the demographic that Democrats lost to Trump in 2016, he embodies it: a 40-something white guy from the Youngstown area who hunts, hates China’s guts because he thinks it steals jobs, and supports natural gas plants because they create union jobs. He wanted a gradual approach to Medicare for All, thinks you can’t pay for health care for illegal immigrants while Americans pay for their own, and when people started complaining about tax breaks to lure Amazon’s headquarters, he declared, “I would love to have Amazon’s HQ2 in northeast Ohio. We need the jobs . . . We need the free enterprise system. If we’re going to try to compete with China, if we’re going to try to innovate our way to reduce carbon in the United States, we need the innovation and entrepreneurship of the free market, we can’t be hostile to business.”
Trumble County, Ohio, voted for Trump, 51 percent to 45 percent, over Hillary Clinton. When reporters want to talk to blue-collar union members who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump, they go to Trumble County. About 45,000 people in Ryan’s congressional district voted for both him and Trump in 2016.
Tim Ryan was probably the least wealthy Democrat running for president; according to financial disclosure forms required of members of Congress, his net worth ranged from just under $65,000 to $48,998. He’s a populist who’s done his research, noting in speeches that eighty percent of venture capital goes to three states: California, New York, and Massachusetts. (The most recent figures I can find suggest 82 percent goes to four, which includes Texas.) He could echo Trump’s rhetoric sometimes — “We collectively should be helping the people who have gotten screwed for the last 30 years, and not apologize for it.”
To the extent Ryan got any attention in this race, it was as an ambassador from the rural Midwest, trying to explain his strange and alien culture to the rest of the party: “I think Donald Trump is a complete slimeball, but he doesn’t want to take my job, or take my health insurance. My friends work at GM, in the building and construction trade. These are the guys I drink beer with. I know ‘em. These positions [the rest of the Democrats] are taking are untenable with the vast majority of them.”
Around here, the usual suspects who read the headline but not the rest of the article will scoff that Ryan sounds like a Republican and should run in that primary. Never mind that Ryan is completely pro-choice, denounced the Trump administration’s treatment of children crossing the border, and changed his mind on universal background checks and lost his ‘A’ rating from the NRA. He wanted to ban states from enacting Right-to-Work laws and Janus v. AFSCME. (There goes any hope of a National Review endorsement.) His September 24 statement on impeachment consisted of two sentences: “President Trump is a mobster. We must impeach.” Heck, the guy wrote a book on yoga. He’s voted with the Trump administration position 18 percent of the time. If Tim Ryan isn’t considered a “real” Democrat, it means the criteria for being a Democrat is now set entirely by the Woke Twitter crowd.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “OSSIPEE — Joe Sestak, the long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful and former congressman who walked across the width of New Hampshire, met with the Sun on Wednesday night at a local McDonald’s to outline his plans to take on China and make the United States united again.” With this picture:
To tell you the truth, I’m starting to dig the Dadist vibe of Sestak’s anti-campaign…
So a big part of the story here may be less about Warren and more about the large Democratic field and the lack of a clear front-runner, just as it was with Republicans in 2016. The big field, in particular, creates incentives for elected officials to remain neutral for as long as possible.
“For the faction of elected Democrats who want the party to move to the left, the fact that both Warren and Sanders are in the race and polling in the double digits makes it tough — and somewhat politically risky — to publicly choose between them at this point in the process,” David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College and co-author of “Asymmetric Politics,” said.
Or take members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “At this stage,” Hopkins said, “with Harris, Booker, and [Julián] Castro in the race and many of their constituents backing Biden, these members have other considerations besides candidate ideology — both in terms of their own personal objectives and their political incentives. Again, a wait-and-see strategy seems much safer.”
Democrats may also be gun-shy after the outcome of the 2016 election. Hans Noel, a scholar at Georgetown University and co-author of “The Party Decides,” said of party elites: “They controlled the process, and they lost.”
Also:
Warren has two obvious problems with party elites. First, there is the perception among some of them that her left-wing stands, such as Medicare for All, are too risky for the general election and decrease the party’s chances of defeating President Trump. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not outright endorsed Biden or specifically declared that she does not support Warren, but Pelosi has argued that the party needs to have a big, sweeping electoral victory in 2020, and that such a win requires more moderate policies, likefocusing on improving Obamacare instead of pursuing Medicare for All. Those are sentiments decidedly on the side of Biden and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and against Warren and Sanders.
Secondly, electoral considerations aside, there is a center-left wing of the Democratic Party that fundamentally disagrees with Warren’s more leftward positions. It’s hard to imagine some of these figures endorsing Warren before she has effectively already won the nomination. (That fits with Shor’s findings — Warren’s endorsers at the state legislative level are more liberal than the endorsers of any of the other candidates.)
These problems are not unique to Warren. Sanders was perceived as too far to the left by many Democratic elites in 2016; he got very few endorsements back then and is not getting many this cycle, either. (Sen. Amy Klobuchar actually leads Sanders in endorsement points.)
Warren also has a third challenge with party elites that is less obvious. The Massachusetts senator clashed with senior aides to President Obama for much of his tenure in the White House. She, like Sanders, isn’t quite in line with the party’s establishment. A Warren administration would probably be less likely to hire former Clinton (Bill and Hillary) and Obama aides in key posts than, say, a Biden, Booker or Harris one. So people connected with the party establishment (like many DNC members) may be fine with Warren but prefer other candidates for more self-interested reasons.
It’s all about the Benjamins. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Kevin Williamson says that Warren wants to shear the rich:
Jeremy Corbyn has a kindred spirit in the United States currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination — two of them, in fact: Senator Bernie Sanders, an antediluvian Brooklyn red who literally honeymooned in the old Soviet Union as dissidents were being shipped off to the gulags, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the counterfeit Cherokee princess who holds forth on “accountability” from her comfortable sinecure at Harvard Law, which once put her forward as the first “woman of color” on its faculty. The wretched old socialist from Vermont is making a good scrappy show of it — and I sincerely wish Senator Sanders the very best of health after his recent cardiac episodes — and, the times being what they are, apparently anybody can be elected president of these wobbly United States. But Warren — in spite of being a plastic banana of titanic phoniness, an ass of exceptional asininity, an intellectual mediocrity, and a terrible campaigner on top of it all — seems the more likely threat. Sanders, who cannot resist that old Soviet liquidate-the-kulaks-as-a-class rhetoric, insists that “billionaires should not exist.” Warren has a ghastly imbecilic plan for that.
Snip.
The most extreme of those is renouncing U.S. citizenship in favor of securing legal domicile in some more wealth-friendly jurisdiction. There was a boomlet of that during the Obama years, reaching a record in 2016. But it is a very small number: 5,411 in 2016, down to the numerically ironic 1,099 in 2018. Some of those former U.S. citizens renounce for reasons that have at least something to do with tax, but these decisions usually are complex and involve many factors. Tina Turner, who has been a resident of Switzerland for decades, “relinquished” her U.S. citizenship (which under U.S. law is slightly different from “renouncing” it) a few years after becoming a Swiss national. Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship in favor of Singapore just before the firm went public. Filmmaker John Huston died an Irishman. A common pattern is that of actor Jet Li and businessman Ted Arison, each having been born abroad (China and Israel, respectively), become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and then renounced that citizenship later in life (Li is a citizen of Singapore, while Arison returned to Israel). Uncle Stupid imposes an “exit tax” on those who are leaving, in essence collecting whatever capital-gains tax would be due on the renouncer’s assets if they had been sold the day before renouncing. There is also a fee of $2,350, because somebody has to pay the parasites to audit your portfolio, and it’s going to be you.
But this is not good enough for Elizabeth Warren, who proposes to build a financial Berlin Wall to keep the rich guys in. That’s a little bit funny: Billionaires are awful, evil, wicked, and should not exist — but God help them if they try to grant Bernie Sanders his dearest wish and skedaddle. Singapore doesn’t think billionaires should not exist. Neither does Sweden. Neither does Switzerland. Neither does Italy. Why not let those horrible pinstriped social diseases just go where they are wanted?
Because this is not about revenue. This is about revenge.
Warren’s proposal would see the federal government expropriating 40 percent of the wealth of any American who decided to emigrate, provided that American has enough money to make it worth worrying about. And that number is not as high as you might expect: The current law ensnares those whose average income in the five-year period before renunciation was $162,000 or more, meaning that there are a lot of high-school principals who would need Washington’s permission to split.
It is difficult to accept the proposition that in a free society the freedoms enjoyed do not include the freedom to leave. The right of exit is the great discipliner of social, romantic, and business relationships, and it is essential to the relationship between citizen and state, too: Ask all our of new neighbors lately arrived from Venezuela. They did not come to Houston for the weather.
Walls have ideological purposes. The infamous one in Berlin was, officially, the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “anti-fascist protection wall.” Senator Warren’s wall is, in theory, about “inequality.” But that is really hardly plausible as a rationale. “Inequality” simply refers to the financial distance between x and y, and reducing that inequality would be as effectively achieved by improving incomes and savings at the lower end as by reducing incomes and diminishing savings elsewhere. But that’s a rather trickier proposition than sticking a gun in somebody’s face and saying, “Hand it over.” Which is, of course, what Elizabeth Warren proposes to do.
For what? Some trivial sum in federal tax revenue? No — for the joy of it. For the pleasure of exercising power. For vindictiveness. Elizabeth Warren’s Berlin Wall will not make one poor person in the United States any better off. It might make Elizabeth Warren better off, but she’s far from poor.
Snip.
Elizabeth Warren, like Donald Trump, wants to build a wall. The idea behind Trump’s is keeping certain foreigners out, while the idea behind Warren’s is locking Americans in, penning them in order that they may be shorn and milked as though they were livestock, which is more or less how Warren thinks of them.
The media love Elizabeth Warren. She’s everything they want in a candidate. Someone to whisper sweet nothings into their ears and make them feel really smart. She’s got plans, the right amount of shrill in her voice, and is just focus grouped enough to get them excited.
This love affair has led to an incredible amount of hype surrounding the Massachusetts Senator, who’s only accomplishment appears to be supporting an unconstitutional agency in the CFPB. It’s gotten to the point where she is routinely described as the presumptive front-runner. To be fair, I’ve bagged on Joe Biden to the benefit of Elizabeth Warren a bit in the past few months as well. I mean, he’s Joe Biden.
Following the most recent debate though, where Warren stumbled repeatedly when pressed about raising middle class taxes, we are seeing some problems emerge.
For starters, she’s still nowhere near the national front-runner.
CNN poll snipped.
Not only is Warren behind by double digits, Biden is enjoying his biggest lead since April, a time when it was all but assumed he’d be the nominee. There are other polls as well showing bad news for Warren. Emerson released their latest offering and she’s 6 points behind Biden. Worse, she’s 4 points behind Sanders, who just suffered a heart attack a month ago.
In fact, in the last seven polls published, six of them have Warren down by at least 6 points. The only poll which continues to show her close is YouGov, which has held an incredible house effect for Warren throughout the primaries. You can view all these results at RCP here.
But perhaps she’s leading in the early states? In New Hampshire, yes, but that’s to be expected. In Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina, and California, she’s behind Biden still. If Biden wins two of those four states, he’ll enter the southern primaries all but guaranteed to clean up, leaving Warren no real path.
Supported by its friends and sponsors in the corporate media, the Democratic National Committee has sought to narrow the field of presidential candidates at the very moment when it should be opening up. Placing a political straitjacket on our primary system, controlling the process via money and ridiculous rules, the party is risking disaster.
The establishment’s paternalistic insistence that, in essence, “it’s time to shut this thing down” — making sure only its preordained category of people, discussing its preordained category of topics, is placed before the American people for consideration as contenders for the nomination to run against President Trump — has created a false, inauthentic piece of high school theater posing as the Democratic debates.
Last night’s debate was a lot of things, but it was not exciting. It contained no magic. If anything, it reduced some very nice people to behavior their mothers probably raised them not to engage in. Which woman who claims feminist ideals can be the nastiest to another woman? Which young person can show the greatest arrogance toward those with decades of experience under their belts? Which intelligent person can best reduce a complicated topic to pabulum for the masses?
Oh, this is brilliant, guys. Apparently, the strategy is to engage the American people by showing them the worst of who we are.
The outsider entrepreneur who refuses to wear a tie at the Democratic debates is attracting some of the same people as the outsider senator who spurns brushing his hair for rallies. Fifty-seven percent of Yang’s potential supporters are considering Sanders, according to a recent Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll. The mutual interest works in the other direction, too: 16 percent of Sanders’ potential voters are eyeing Yang.
Though Sanders and Yang differ in significant ways, they’re both running anti-establishment campaigns that speak to an electorate frustrated with the status quo, wary of Democratic insiders, and looking for economic help. For Sanders, their overlapping bases may give him a small boost if Yang drops out of the race down the road or if he works to woo the so-called #YangGang.
But it’s also a potential threat to Sanders even if Yang continues polling in the single digits. If Yang shaves off a few percentage points from Sanders’ voting bloc, particularly in early-primary states such as New Hampshire, that could turn a second- or third-place finish into something worse.
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
