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We’re now halfway through the six months of 2019 Democratic debates, so this seems like a good time to take stock of where we are. (It’s well overdue, actually, but this is the first time in a while I’ve been able to take on this sort of undertaking.)
1. A Meandering Meditation on More-Minor Matters
(Long-time readers know that if you want to start with something less discursive, just skip down to section 2.)
As a Democrat, I’m happy that things are looking pretty good for my side in the Presidential race. All six of the candidates above would have a decent shot against Don Trump, though none is a shoo-in against our Wrestler-in-Chief who will likely bring a knife and folding chair (them’s metaphors) to general election debates — if he agrees to participate in them, which he may well not.
My number one priority for 2020 is oddly specific and not even that partisan: if it looks like Trump is losing on election night, Mike Pence had better get the Cabinet secretaries’ names on the papers to invoke the 25th Amendment and “temporarily” remove Trump from office for the remainder of his term. I don’t want to see how Trump would get his revenge on the country — pardoning all violent federal prisoners? ordering the contents of Fort Knox to be moved to Doral Country Club for safe-keeping? nuclear strikes on San Francisco and LA? — in the two-and-a-half months he’d have remaining to him. I’d trust Acting President Pence solely to land us safely before he himself is sent away, despite that he too would probably try to appoint every last judge in the federal judiciary on his way out. (I know that getting rid of Trump might be a better top priority, but I really want to make sure that we still have a functioning country left once he’s gone.)
The best news for Democrats is something that many of us probably haven’t even realized we should care about: that Trump will have at least three credible (albeit doomed) challengers on the Republican side. Why is this important? Because without them — and especially without Trump on the ballot, if Gavin Newsom’s pointless crackpot scheme to condition ballot access on showing income tax returns survives its lawsuits — Republicans would have good reason to declare themselves as independents, seek Democratic ballots, and therefore choose the weakest candidate to run against Trump. (This, in my mind, has long been Marianne Williamson’s best pathway to the nomination.)
(No, I’m not giving Republicans a bright idea they haven’t already thought of; Republicans in the Trump-obsessed local Facebooklandia have attributed their losing the Orange County voter registration edge to Democrats to exactly this maneuver.)
But, with Trump likely to have libertarian Bill Weld (more or less New England’s Tom Tait) Tea Partier Joe Walsh (more or less the Midwest’s Lucille Kring), and Mark Sanford (more or less the Southeast’s Carlos Bustamante) on the ballot against him, (aka a flavor for every taste) — and with the wholesale cancellation of primaries and caucuses across the country on the grounds that the frightened and thin-skinned Trump “has no credible challengers”) — California Republicans will have to stay with their party to get a ballot to either defend their President or, if they choose, to stick a fork into him. And that means that Democrats can choose their own best candidate without being, as the old OC saying goes, “rat-fucked.” (Sorry, Ms. Williamson, you’ve lost your best shot at the nomination.)
While it may seem premature to discuss where we stand after the third debate without discussing the third debate itself, that piece actually takes longer to write and, if all goes according to plan, will appear by Friday. Meanwhile, you can check out the transcript of the debate (Washington Post version) here.
2. This Vale of Tiers
Discussing the horse-race aspects of the primaries seems to employ concepts of both “lanes” and “tiers.” While it has become fashionable to look down on the former, I don’t think one can avoid it — it just doesn’t necessarily mean what people imagine. This year, for example, there is a left-progressive “lane” containing two candidates — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — and it may well eventually lead to fratricide (or sororicide) between them. Not yet, though! [Note: that last sentence was written last weekend….] For now, these two Senators are propping up one another’s positions in debates. Warren, especially, benefits from Sanders’s presence in the race: he’s the one that corporate and party interests truly can’t stand, and so he catches flak that would otherwise be headed for her. The day that Sanders leaves the race, should it ever come, is the day that the mortar rockets turn definitively onto Warren, with the dial set to 11. Her best hope is that that day doesn’t come until it’s too late.
The polls are still largely based on name recognition, which is why amiable goofball Joe Biden still sits along atop them, though Sanders and Warren (or Warren and Sanders, if you prefer) spit the leftward vote. But the debates are having an impact, and they aren’t working to Biden’s benefit. But qhile Biden remains in front of the moderate lane, candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Cory Booker can’t implement their strategy of rushing in to fill the vacuum his absence would leave. Two other candidates from the third debate, Kamala Harris and Julian Castro, defy description as centrist or lefty — Harris seems sort of like a centrist pretending to be a lefty and Castro a leftist pretending to be a centrist, or maybe I have that backwards == while the final candidate, Andrew Yang, defies ideological pigeonholing at all, as befits someone whose candidacy is apparently successful largely due to denizens of 8chan pushing him mostly for fun. (That doesn’t mean that he isn’t serious; it means that his standing in the polls isn’t serious.) Finally, the two candidates who will be in the October debate — Tom Steyer (who has qualified, largely by carpet-bombing early states to get to the 2% level) and Tulsi Gabbard (who is one 2% showing in a designated poll away from qualifying) are also ideologically mixed.
Gabbard — who famously quit the DNC in 2016 in protest of its rigging the nomination process against Sanders (though she has now apparently gotten over that) — is a veteran, definitely anti-war, perceived as anti-Muslim, and unfortunately close to India’s Hindu right wing. Steyer is vocally liberal on some signature issues — climate change and impeaching Trump — but has the credibility issues one would expect from someone who became a billionaire by hedge fund management. (He touts his business experience as a qualification for office. Heard that before….) He’s also reportedly the largest individual donor to the Democratic Party — though it’s hard to verify due to dark money contributions — which is a good thing when he doesn’t want anything but effective activism in return and less good once he starts to want things like, oh, becoming the party’s nominee for President.
Of these, Biden, Sanders, and Warren are all in what I, showing little originality, will call Tier 1. But I’m going to incorporate lanes here and put Biden in Tier 1A and the others in Tier 1B. In the RealClearPolitics poll aggregator right now, Biden has 26.2% of the vote, while Warren has 17.0% and Sanders 16.8%. But, Sanders also is far more likely to pick up support from Biden than is Warren, which turns out to be important in true caucus states such as Iowa.
Tier 2 would be Harris and Buttigieg, with 6.2% and 5% of the national vote respectively. Harris has been declining since July, though, while Buttigieg has been flat since May. These two are supposedly the picks of party leaders should Biden fail (though I’ve also been hearing that about Warren), but again Sanders is the one who right now would pick up most of Biden’s voters, ideology be damned.
O’Rourke (3.0%), Yang (3.0%), and Booker (2.6%) comprise Tier 3. O’Rourke — who, you might remember, is “Beto the Anglo” — and Booker are both smooth-talking centrists waiting for the Biden collapse. Yang is just out there to promote the Guaranteed Annual Income on the grounds that giving people $1000/month would take care of the problems of job loss due to automation. [Narrator voice: It wouldn’t.]
In Tier 4, we find Klobuchar, Castro, Gabbard, and Steyer — the first three tied at 1.2% with Steyer at 0.8% (but likely to rise.) Klobuchar was the centrist whom lots of people expected would benefit most from the impending Biden collapse (which may never come). Castro has become known for having the sharpest tongue in the race, going after Biden and O’Rourke, which is odd given his prior reputation as pretty much of a sweetie-pie. Gabbard made her one mark in the race by rapid firing fully half of the simmering attacks against Harris in the August debate — an attack for which, unbelievably, Harris was not prepared, leading her to make a sheepish shit-eating-grin face heretofore mainly seen on TV in “I Love Lucy” re-runs. Steyer — well, he hasn’t yet been in gear (There is a Tier 5, candidates at 0.6% and under, but that material will not be on the final exam.)
To save you the addition (that you probably weren’t going to do), right now Tier 1 has 60% of the votes and Tiers 2-5 combined have 27.6%, leaving 12.4% apparently unaccounted for. Standard polling models would expect the uncommitted to follow the committed, so we’re really probably looking at 68% for the top 3 and 32% for everyone else. (Steyer, due entirely to his fortune, is a potential disruptor here.) So when people say that it’s a three-way race, or maybe a five-way race (which makes the split 71.2% to 16.4%, or 81% to 19% with undecideds distributed), you can see why. Still, based on present numbers, that’s only a 2-of-3 chance that the winner comes from Tier 1 and a 4 of 5 chance that it comes from Tiers 1 or 2 — so things that improbable do happen all of the time. (One just doesn’t bet on them without odds.)
(Note: the above is a simplified statistical analysis. I’m not going to get all Bayesian on you here.)
INTERLUDE: Here — because it might as well go here, as it doesn’t fit anywhere else is an Emerson College poll (rated B+ by 538.com) of California Democratic primary voters that came out the morning of 9/17, which shows Harris dropping way down (below Yang!) in her own state and the two progressives at 46% of the combined vote. (Bernie and Liz should divide up Congressional district turf to maximize their joint delegate allocation!)
3. Changing Lanes
We’ve already discussed the main “lane” in the race — the ideological one, into which no one but the top three candidates fits really cleanly — so now it’s time to consider the other ones. These are mostly demographic ones: gender, race/ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, veteran’s status, religion, and region. (And then we get to issues of intersectionality….)
(A) Gender is probably the most significant one, because Democrats have very good reason to want at least one woman on the ticket. Hillary voters are still highly upset over the historic first gemale federal executive officer falling out of their grasp in 2016, and those of us who supported Sanders over Hillary partly because Hillary herself was so unpopular with voters would welcome the chance to show that it really was truly Hillary herself, not her gender, that was the problem. VP consideration goes well beyond the four women among the twelve finalists (or two among the five, whatever), but the issue here is the extent to which female see other women as the obstacles to their personal advancement to the final round … and so try to scuttle them.
(Yes, “Sisterhood is Powerful” — but so is personal ambition!)
We saw the clearest example of this sort of takedown when Gabbard went after Harris in her bid to become front runner in the “women of color” lane — and in doing so derailed Harris’s campaign without much helping her own. We’ve also seen it a bit in Klobuchar’s dealings with Sanders — and thus with Warren, who famously agrees with him — on health care. Warren has stayed away from attacking other women (and mostly anyone else); Harris took a counter-swipe at Gabbard in August — depicting her as, in effect, jealous of her higher social status — that made her look worse than Gabbard’s original attack did. (That reading of Harris’s post-debate interview may be unfair, but it did seem to have been the general reaction.) Standing next to Harris also undercut Kirsten Gillibrand in one of the first two debates for reasons I can best explain, given my generation, as Mary Ann looking uncomfortably plain standing next to Ginger.
Marianne Williamson also made gender — femininity, at lest — an implicit part of her pitch, though her failure seems more related to a reaction to her New Age religion, which has largely female adherents but lacks the political standing within the U.S. of, say, Mormonism and charismatic Christianity, despite their being no less invested in the imprecatory and miraculous. (Yes, there’s an essay to be written on that, but not by me, not now.)
Gabbard is the only one who has acted like there is a “woman’s lane” and she needs to edge other women out of it. If there is one, Warren and Harris are the ones competing for it, but Warren has been able to treat her gender as something mostly incidental and unsurprising at this point. (Is there one? Consider the reaction if the final trio turned out to be Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg. People — mostly but not only women — would take notice of that in a highly perturbed way, but such a result seems unlikely.)
That Emerson poll shows is that there certainly does seem to be a gender lane — and that within it Elizabeth Warren is running roughshod over Kamala Harris. She’s doing nonchalantly, without putting too much special emphasis on her being a woman, but also without downplaying it. To my mind, she’s playing it perfectly. I don’t know what if anything Harris should or could do to “recapture the lane,” though. Warren’s “woman story” is as good as, and probably more relatable than, her own.
(B) Race and ethnicity seems like it should be more of a basis for internecine warfare this year, perhaps because immigration and racism (in policing and otherwise) have been so much more internally contentious issues than, say, abortion and pay equity. But is it a “lane” in which candidates are competing?
Five of the twelve finalists — Booker, Castro, Gabbard, Harris, and Yang — are persons of color. (Two others, O’Rourke and Warren, have gotten in trouble for cultural appropriation, and Sanders would of course be the first Jewish federal executive officer.) And that, frankly, is great! But are people jostling each other in the expectation that, say, there’s room for one and only one candidate in the “person of color lane” among the final three? It doesn’t appear so.
Gabbard is a Hindu convert but not Indian (she is partly of Samoan ancestry, and was born on American Samoa). She is the only one of the candidates of color who has not made her personal background a major part of her presentation to voters.
Harris is half-Indian (and half-Jamaican) but not Hindu (she visited India and had exposure to Hinduism as a child, but is now Baptist, while her husband is Jewish). Harris has made her Black (though not African-American) ancestry a focus in the debates, most clearly in a well-premeditated attack on Joe Biden for his 1960-70s opposition to school desegregation through busing.
Booker is African-American, raised in the AME Church but now a Baptist, who has made his living in an underprivileged Back-majority neighborhood in Newark a focus on his campaign. To the extent that there’s a land, he’s squarely within it.
Castro has made his Mexican identity, and his positions on immigration — about which he picked a fight with O’Rourke — a focus of his campaign, often addressing the audience at some length in Spanish.
Yang has made repeated reference to being Chinese (from Taiwan), including his deadpan (and somewhat bewildering) joke that due to this he knew a lot of doctors. Ha-ha … huh?
Except for some friction between Booker and Harris, and again from Gabbard towards Harris, this does not seem to be a real “lane” that leads to candidates elbowing others out of the way.
(C) Age has unexpectedly turned out to be a dominant theme among many candidates this year. There’s no “lane” for older candidates — the three oldest in the race are the three front-runners. Of them, only Biden is having his faculties called into question due to his age — he’s 76, a year younger than Sanders and a six years older than Warren — and frankly his being a bit hazy and loose in his recollections is not new for him. It does seem to be getting more pronounced, though, and both Castro and Booker (more subtly) have already gone after him over it.
If there is an age lane, it seems to belong to youth. That category excludes Steyer (born 1957) and Klobuchar (1960) — and probably even Harris (1964) and Booker (1969) — but O’Rourke (1972), Castro (1974), Gabbard (1981), and Buttigieg (1982) do form a lane from which we might expect one and only one to survive. Buttigieg is so brazen about his youth — and so obviously a young man a hurry, after already having run for DNC Chair — that many consider it unseemly, but it’s Castro who in this past debate put in the best pitch for a young nominee:
But first, we have to win. And that means exciting a young, diverse coalition of Americans who are ready for a bold future. That’s what Kennedy did, it’s what Carter did, it’s what Clinton did, it’s what Barack Obama did, and it’s what I can do in this race.
It’s a good point. But while it weighs against Biden, I don’t think that it undercuts elderly but vigorous reformers like Sanders and Warren. (If Castro drops out, my bet is that he endorses Warren — and perhaps becomes her Vice Presidential pick. That would be one seriously energetic ticket. Sanders’s pick should probably be Warren … or, conceivably, the still-young-at-55 Michelle Obama.)
(D) Sexual Orientation, Veteran’s Status, and Religion are all selling points for various candidates — the first for Buttigieg, the second for Buttigieg and Gabbard, and the third for Buttigieg (again!) and maybe Booker and Biden (though Sanders and Gabbard are the only ones whose religious affiliation would break new ground, JFK-style), but I don’t see this as a “lane” per se. If none of Buttigieg, Biden, or Booker made it into the final three, I don’t think that anyone would be shocked by the absence of any candidate relying heavily on faith as a selling point.
(E) Region usually becomes a consideration mostly for choosing the Vice-President, but it’s playing a role this year. Klobuchar has been pushing her Midwestern roots as an electoral rationale for her candidacy. (So, to an extent, has Buttigieg, but what people really look forward to is how he as a VP candidate would take on Pence in a debate.) O’Rourke and (to a lesser extent) Castro have been pushing their Texas ties as a prize that would make people forget about Ohio or Florida in the electoral college. (If Democrats win Texas and other states where they are leading, including Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Virginia, then they literally can get to 270 without winning Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, or Florida. How do you like them apples?) Sanders is proud of Vermont, Biden is proud of Delaware, and Warren is proud of — well, not so much Massachusetts, but her Oklahoma roots, which along with her past Texas residency could make her competitive there. But, except for the two Texans, this is less a land than a matter of whose selling points you want to buy.
4. Conclusion
Since I started drafting this piece, Biden has been fading a bit and the competition between Sanders and Warren — driven mostly by their own “more faithful than God” supporters — has heated up several degrees. I’m personally sad to see the latter and am doing what I can to squelch at least the worst of it. To me, a race between Sanders (an outsider with broad appeal to party-averse independents) and Warren (a relative insider who will have the party machinery behind her, as well as highly ironic corporate support from those who hate her but despise Sanders) is the best of all possible worlds. They’re both good; they’re both honest; they’re both decent. We literally could not go wrong.
I favor Bernie (ideally with Warren as his VP — and, if not … maybe her understudy Katie Porter?) because no one has his proven track record over decades, few can match his knowledge of how to goose along the legislative machinery in DC, and his “theory of change” — which involves building a lasting political movement that can either replace GOP Senators or scare them into moderation — is stronger than Warren’s moral suasion alone. (DC has a history of grinding up Democratic moral suasion — as Carter, Clinton, and Obama all found out. But none of them had the sort of movement behind them that Sanders would: Obama came closest, but he quickly cut it off at the knees himself in the spirit of “statesmanship.”)
The problem with Bernie is that the powers that be don’t just hate him, they hate him with the power of a thousand suns. The DNC (and state and local parties) have already tried to rig an election against him once, and only sunlight might prevent their doing it again. (Be attentive to the dreaded “second ballot,” when superdelegates get to vote and would very likely scuttle Bernie, even if it meant possibly electing Trump. They just would refuse to believe that such an action would have negative consequences.) Official DC — the press, the cocktail party hosts, the lobbyists — would try to destroy him as soon as the results came in, if not before. (Unlike with Warren, there is a serious question as to whether non-Fox News major media outlets would prefer Trump to the Democrat. My guess is that they’d prefer Bernie on the grounds that they could neuter him once elected — but only barely.) Warren will have her own problems with them, but they’ll be nicer to her if they know that she’s keeping a snarling Bernie and his followers on a loose leash.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but I do: the notion that one should give in to the unelected elites and honor their veto of Bernie is absolutely disgusting and despicable, as well as anti-democratic — and that’s one reason I plan to dig in my heels. However, I expect that less committed people — given the option of a pretty damned good Liz Warren (and I’m just not going to pretend that she isn’t just for political purposes) — probably will be willing to give into them. That’s much of why Warren’s doing much better than Warren on the betting lines, even though in the absence of Bernie she’d be catching almost as much flak herself.
Biden — or Klobuchar, or Buttigieg, Booker, Harris, and O’Rourke — might be able to beat Trump even with the grudging-at-best support of the Bernie bloc (who I think would support Warren strongly once they got over their disappointment, as he’d make a strong case for her, at least if treated fairly), but they won’t turn the Senate and won’t scare the Senate into compliance. And then Democrats will only reinforce the reputation of being unable to win a knife fight in DC. Democrats seem to be realizing that we have to look past the 2020 Presidential race to the Senate and House races — and especially to the legislative fights of 2021. If we’re really headed to a race between the two elderly but young-at-heart and energetic-in-spirit candidates in the leftward lanes, then things really are looking up.
[Ed. note: We’re still having problems with comments. If you can’t comment here — and we’ll try to approve moderated ones as quickly as we can — then try the most recent open thread. Thanks for waiting out our repair work!]
“This year, for example, there is a left-progressive “lane” containing two candidates — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — and it may well eventually lead to fratricide (or sororicide) between them.”
I’m seeing a huge uptick in ‘fake news’ memes and attack graphics allegedly from Team Bernie targeting Team Warren.
– Warren’s daughter founded a pharmaceutical company, so she’s a fraud on M4A? Uh, no. She founded a student health discount company that was later purchased by an insurance company.
-Warren sponsored a bill to put $6000 max med caps, a threat to Bernie’s M4A? (Meme reads, plans are good, good plans are better). Uh, no. She cosponsored Bernie’s bill, he cosponsored her bill – both of them keep supporting one another on the bills.
-WFP is fake sellouts (Jacobin’s piece plus AOC v. Crowley where they endorsed Crowley). Uh, no. Crowley won the WFP primary and couldn’t remove himself from the ballot (except by moving out from NYC). WFP did ‘ranked choice’ voting with 7 candidates, increasing weighting for grassroots teams from 12% to 50% of the weight. Jacobin is being a bit unfair (possibly because they never thought much of WFP – preferring DSA).
-Warren is ‘fake’ progressive-come-lately (as if 20+ years never happened? As if public schoolteachers aren’t ‘authentically progressive’ because they’re not legislating? Wtf?)
And on, and on. It’s probably going to get worse. I nudge folks on Team Warren who get feisty towards other Dems (even little Delaney, esp after debate 2, but lately, mainly, Harris and Biden), but havent seem ‘fakes’ from my side yet. Wondering if you’ve encountered them on your side.
A real Berniecrat probably wouldn’t knowingly spread fakes. I’m guessing much of this is growing from Team Red ‘junior varsity’ operatives pretending to be Berniecrats: the only Berniecrats I know in real life are conscientious and wouldn’t knowingly spread such bs.
the only one of those I wouldn’t disavow (and indeed the only one I’ve even heard from my fellow Berniecrats) is criticism of WFP’s endorsement of Warren, which seems to involve giving party leaders (perhaps the ones you say are “grassroots teams,” but that’s not the impression I had gotten) a highly disproportionate share of ability to control the outcome.
If it was a change made long ago without respect to who was running, then so be it. The more recently it arose, the more it strikes of fitting the rules to match a desired result. (I agree on the AOC thing, which was simply unfortunate and a reason to be wary of fusion voting in a first-past-the-post system.)
I agree that lots of the criticisms on both sides will be coming from “false flags.”
That said, the evidence suggests you’re wrong on this point (as of August):
“But, Sanders also is far more likely to pick up support from Biden than is Warren, which turns out to be important in true caucus states such as Iowa.”
(1) Warren is in a dead heat with Biden already in Iowa.
(2) Warren has higher favorability ratings than Biden, Sanders, and anyone other than Pete (with whom she’s tied).
(3) ranked choice polls show Warren beating Sanders if Biden drops, and beating Biden if Sanders drops. On most polls, she’s 2nd choice for Biden AND Sanders voters.
I’ll add cites to the sites if needed.
In terms of the DNC, they tried to rig 2008 against Obama and for Hillary. They’ll come around: end of the day, Biden = job preservation for them, but any Dem = potential promotion to safer govt posts rather than gig dependency on certain friendly donors to pay their mortgages. Talk of deep reform may scare some of them; revolution scares all of them. They’ll cuddle Uncle Joe for now, but come on board for any Dem – but if the fakes keep ticking up, theyll be reluctant to join either (making for a contested convention – the one outcome every donor will fear, and will instruct their operatives to fight against at all costs – if the candidates negotiate among themselves without the big money in the room, they’ll lose control over outcomes).
A contested convention may actually be the best way for Bernie to get on a ticket. It could also be the best way to get Medicare 4 All as the Dem platform rather than just the progressive wing’s battle cry.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I’ll comment mostly (or only?) on the points on which I disagree. (And yes, cites to the sites would be welcome sights.)
I don’t think that Warren will have the organizing Death Star that Bernie is building, without which I’d say she’s the better bet. At this point, I’d think that she will take Iowa (because Bernie will give her the delegates where she needs them to beat Biden, and hopefully she’ll reciprocate) but that Bernie will win New Hampshire. So long as the race between them is polite all the way to California, which I expect to be deeply split, I’m fine with it.
The info I’ve seen suggests that Bernie is the second choice of Biden voters. (I think that comes from either RCP or more likely 538.) Tactically, he should be, because Warren would be harder for him to beat. But if you’re right, then I’m wrong!
RCP has Biden 28.5, Warren 18, and Sanders 17.5 in Iowa. They only beat him as a team. Warren’s advantage would come from delegates for Tier 2+ candidates, because she’s less polarizing than either.
DNC hates Sanders in 2019 way way more than they hated Obama in 2008. They did hate Obama then, sure, but 2016 has driven them crazy. And at any rate, he won that race coming from their blind spot on Super Tuesday, thanks to Mark Penn being an idiot and not knowing the delegate selection rules. In 2016, they blamed Sanders for even existing. So I don’t know that they’ll come around. I doubt that they will without foot-dragging and sniping, at a minimum.
I don’t think that donors fear a contested convention. They’ll own Biden if he comes out ahead, or anyone else besides Sanders and Warren. In fact, I expect the party apparatus to be working for one.
It follows that I don’t think that a contested convention is the best way to get Bernie chosen (I doubt if he has any desire to give up his Senate role to be Warren’s VP); I don’t even understand why you think it would be the best path to get M4A on the platform. The best way to do that is to have a majority of Sanders and Warren delegates, period!
A pleasure trading thoughts with you, as usual!
Greg – I sense a rematch of our Thorburn v. Cisneros debate at hand…so, since that’s part of our history, I’d like to update where we left that: Thorburn is running for Board of Education, after backing down from the County Supe race to avoid vote splitting? Those choices wipe his slate clean in my book: I’ll knock doors for him if he asks me.
Policywise, the contrast between Warren and Sanders is much more nuanced than that between Gil and Andy. Plow through them, you’ll find nuances – but every nuance is a theoretical possibility about a theoretical possibility of what Congress would do (2nd order theorizing about theories?). That said, are you still sure that a ‘wealth tax’ is unconstitutional now that Bernie made that a big part of the financing in his housing plan? 😉
IFairvote/YouGov’s poll using ranked choice, gets closer to who wins if someone drops out than most polls (WFP also did a ranked choice vote among the candidates they were willing to tolerate – excluding Biden, but accepting 7 others). RCP and 538 are a bit like reading tea leaves at this point: weight an A-level poll (like Fox?!?) heavily, you can find evidence to support any belief. But there are several others that show Warren (since July) as the preferred 2nd choice, and with higher favorables than others.
But end of day, Dems vote in primaries. That might change in 2020. Probably won’t.
“I don’t think that Warren will have the organizing Death Star that Bernie is building,”
(1) Bernie built something more durable than most campaigns in 2016. The grassroots is clearly necessary to win – not just a race, but the political games to follow. BUT
(2) There are a lot of older, deeper organizations out there, which go back much further. Warren is doing the work of winning them over, and then it comes down to who they like better. That’s how she won WFP.
Building a new ‘organizing Death Star’ is likely to antagonize the Rebel Alliance. Better by far to work with and welcome the folks who never stopped fighting, than to tell them they’ve done it wrong, sold out, were apostates (and you know the Bernie fans who will spread that sort of story).
I don’t think that donors fear a contested convention. They’ll own Biden if he comes out ahead,
Maybe. He’s old enough that he doesn’t actually have to sell his soul anymore. And in any event, they won’t be in the room managing him (most folks who buy politicians are very cautious to make sure they stay bought) – neither Warren nor Sanders would let them.
That said, do you really see Bernie getting a majority of Dems to vote for him? It’s possible they learned their lesson after Hillary, Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale, etc. – don’t just vote for the party loyalist, vote for a vision that inspires you. But more likely, they need to see loyalty to their own group first, and then vision. Biden is top of the heap because loyalty is crucial. But it’s a good vision (or the appearance thereof) that enables Dems to beat the money machine (at least, in the era of Cable News, which may be at its twilight).
*Biden/Harris 2020! Not only is it a logical choice….it is the ethical choice, which is the most important part of the entire election! Andy Yang is a good one for sure. Elizabeth and Bernie need to stay in the Senate …..as Leaders. Tulsi Gabbard will make a wonderful Ambassador to the UN. Cory Booker should be the next HUD Secretary or Secretary of Health Education and Welfare! The whole field is basically applying for jobs after the election.
If Biden/Harris win the White House, I won’t complain much. Problem is, I don’t think they will.
It smells more like the fearful choice that led to the Hillary/Kerry/Gore/Dukakis/Mondale chain of ‘safe, logical’ caretakers – the kind of people who thrill party loyalists, but who bore cable news to death. What looks ‘electable’ on first impression seldom actually wins presidential elections (Congress? different story…).
Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama all seemed (at first impression) like ‘interesting outsiders.’ Carter proved less appealing pretty quickly, but the latter two worked the ‘inside’ to stick around (just like every other insider). We need to bring in the outsiders.
That’s the part Bernie gets right – and it’s important. Think about it this way: what demographic gets by far the most public benefits? Seniors. What demographic votes the most? Seniors. Not an accident. If we want young voters to vote (and if they do, we win), then student debt relief shouldn’t be seen as a gimmick, anymore than Medicare/Medicaid are gimmicks to buy loyalty from seniors.
But while Biden/Harris err, Bernie also errs. We NEED the insiders to actually get anything done. They’re crucial to the process. (The president CAN pick which ‘insiders’ to listen to though – attacking Wall Street does push Biden up a bit, but it’s a calculated risk, and we all know Wall Street will back Trump – donor dollars will never approach even an order of magnitude what Fox does 24/7 for Republicans).
Warren gets the best of what Bernie gets right, and adds the best of what Biden/Harris get right – it really is an ‘outside/inside’ fight, not just for the presidency, but for the country. Always has been, since long before either party existed.
Birris isn’t gonna happen, ‘Ships. Neither is Haden.
Sadly for me, Sanders isn’t seeming as likely to happen this week either. Happily for me, there’s strong reason for him to stay in the race either way, as argued here: https://theweek.com/articles/865176/either-warren-sanders-need-drop-defeat-biden-not-fast.
It’s a disgrace that Tulsi wasn’t included in the last debate, despite the fact that she has higher poll numbers than Klobuchar, Castro, Steyer, and even golden boy Beto in many polls. Clearly the DNC didn’t want to risk Kamala or one of their other beloved Centrists getting embarrassed again. It’s a disgrace that Mike Gravel wan’t included either, I don’t trust the DNC at all.
FoxNews is the only source I’ve seen that questioned the reasoning for Debate #3 (they’re not a source of anything legitimate). One could question whether the ‘approved pollsters’ were rigged, but then we’d be awash with a thousand ‘fake polls’ showing the Sun set in the east.
These folks are quite sharp at watching (and assessing) polls: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tulsi-gabbard-is-the-12th-candidate-to-make-octobers-democratic-debate/
As they saw it, Gabbard failed to qualify for Debate #3, but she – along with Steyer (for the first time) qualified for Debate #4 in October – so we’re back up to 12 unless someone drops or they break up into 2 nights.
I’d expect Gabbard to target Warren this time, and pick up some questions through Jacobin, Intercept, etc. Will be useful to see how Warren handles a direct attack from Tusi (she shrugged aside Biden in Debate #3, but rather skillfully shut down the attacks from rivals in Debate #2 who have since withdrawn their candidacies).
Gabbard will probably come after Warren with a “Gish Gallop” approach that makes them literally impossible to answer within the time period allowed. Harris dealt with this poorly, because she’d been evading them. Warren has to have videos already up about each of the attacks she can anticipate and promise to have new videos up before noon the next day for attacks that surprised her.
LOL, never heard the term ‘gish gallop’ before – in many forms of high school/collegiate debate, that’s just called ‘debating.’
Tulsi repackaged The Intercept’s claims to come after Harris: those were fluff. Kamala SHOULD have batted them aside skillfully, but didn’t.
Biden landed a glancing blow – 1000 prisoners released! – but could have landed a much harder one by comparing Harris’s initial ‘judicial bias’ claim to Trump. Either Biden was pulling the punch, or he didn’t see how to connect.
In terms of the attacks currently lobbed at Warren in the press…the only guy who knows what he’s talking about is Nathan Robinson. He knows his gut intimately. Luckily, his gut isn’t running for president. But I’d still take a gander if I were you, because I think his gut comes close to yours, Greg, and if you cared to follow that (very long-winded) line, I’d be happy to continue the debate in that direction.
Who is Nathan Robinson? Am I going to be happy that I found out?
Robinson is the Editor of Current Affairs, one of the smaller cogs in Bernie’s ‘death star.’ He would chortle to hear himself described that way. The mag strives to be a witty, semi-millennial-oriented Jacobin. You’d probably like him.
Current Affairs is part of Bernie’s Death Star? Nobody from the campaign tells me nothin’!
The Death Star I’m talking about is the many many volunteers patched in to Bernie’s campaign app. The bright side of that is the Warren is probably the only candidate to whom Bernie would pass them along (or who would accept being passed along.) The even brighter side of that is that his price might be choosing Ro Khanna as her Vice President!
I will go check it out. “A Current Affair,” you said? My wife used to watch that. (jk!)
It’s not a “disgrace”; they were just following their own — well publicized well ahead of the qualification deadline — rules. She wasn’t registering highly enough in the polls, that’s all.
I’m glad she’s in, largely because I like having two separate groups of six in October. That’s dinner party argument size!