Election 2020

[BoSoxGal]

Florida will have 4+ million more voters in 2020, potentially. Some of them may support Trump because of his criminal justice reform efforts, but some may find his policies repugnant. It’s definitely a hard to predict factor in the cycle this time around.

[BoSoxGal]

There are way too many Democrats running for the WH.

[RayThom]

There are way too many Democrats running for the WH.

Money drives campaigns. There is less than half of this group who can sustain past summer's end.

And half that by July 13, 2020.

[Big RR]

And after last night, I won't miss some of them.

One thing for future debates--get rid of the pep rally audience (that's more of a Trump thing) and get reporters who just ask the questions and don't try and make themselves the point of the broadcast.

[Guinevere]

I didn't even bother to watch (which is kind of making me feel guilty), but I'm 1000000000000000000% invested in whoever isn't el trumparone, and the live blogging and tweeting and commenting (without being tortured by the actual watching) was really entertaining. Catch me after the group is whittled down a bit, and I have someone I can send $$ to.

[Big RR]

That makes sense; at bst, I was introduced to a few candidates that I hope disappear soon.

[Econoline]

I watched the whole thing, and I have 3 observations: (1) My own preferred candidate (who is, as I've probably mentioned before, Elizabeth Warren) did not disappoint. (2) The candidates who seemed to me to be not very well equipped to handle the job were the ones who really don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting the nomination anyway. (3) There was absolutely nobody on that stage who I could not vote for if the alternative was Trump.

[Lord Jim]

Warren doubled down on her hugely unpopular promise to throw 180 million people off their private health insurance...(the Mandatory Medicare For All plan that I refer to as "The 13% Solution"...in honor of the 13% of voters that polls show support it...)

Not to be outdone, Julian Castro, already a supporter of The 13% Solution, decided to make himself an even more unelectable candidate by embracing decriminalizing illegal immigration...

He then challenged all the other Dems to join in him in walking off that cliff...

Il Boobce likes to characterize anyone who doesn't embrace his inhumane, draconian, racist border enforcement solutions as favoring "open borders", but making all immigration legal would pretty much be the very definition of the term...

If the Democrats want to nominate a candidate who supports open borders and stripping private health insurance away from the 70% plus of Americans who say they like their current insurance, they might as well just concede to Trump right now...

The good news for the country is that all the polling indicates that is not the intent of of the majority of Democratic voters...

The big winner of last night's debate was Joe Biden. The three candidates who could challenge him in the electability lane... (Klobuchar , Ryan and O'Rourke) didn't score particularly well, (especially O'Rourke...I could hear "Na na na nah, na na na nah, hey hey hey, good bye" cuing up in the background for him) and the rest all seemed to be competing for that 1/3 of the Democratic voters who polling shows put "progressive purity" over being able to win the election...

We'll have to see how he does tonight when he's actually onstage, but absolutely nothing happened in the first debate that would knock a single percentage point off of his huge lead...

And, oh yeah...

No critique of last night's debate would be complete without a comment on Tulsi Gabbert's incredibly idiotic claim in her closing statement that "the world has never been closer to nuclear war"...

Cuban Missile Crisis? Hello?

[Scooter]

Not to be outdone, Julian Castro, already a supporter of The 13% Solution, decided to make himself an even more unelectable candidate by embracing decriminalizing illegal immigration...

He said they could be dealt with as civil cases i.e. the way most such cases were handled before the current administration decided to prosecute all or almost all such cases criminally. I don't know what all the implications are of repealing the provision in question (can't remember the section number he kept repeating), but it certainly doesn't mean permitting all and sundry to cross the border unimpeded.

[Lord Jim]

Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang (neither of who have snowball's chance in hell of getting the Democratic nomination) qualified for this debate...

But a guy who actually could win the election, a Democrat who has won state-wide election three times (once as attorney general and twice as governor) in a solidly red state, (each time in a Presidential year while the GOP Presidential candidate was winning the state by double digits...including Trump in 2016) Montana Governor Steve Bullock, doesn't make the cut...

And he doesn't qualify because, silly Steve, he thought it was more important to actually be doing the job he was elected to before he went out campaigning for a new job...

There's something wrong with that picture....

ETA:

But of course not having Steve, (and also MA Congressman Seth Moulton) in the debate meant two fewer center/left moderate-liberal candidates on the stage...

Which benefits guess who...

[Guinevere]

You and David Brooks:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opin ... 2859460628

I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?

[Lord Jim]

Excellent, (though somewhat depressing ) analysis...

Joe Scarborough (who also very much wants Trump defeated) made some similar points this morning as well...

[Lord Jim]

Since I know some folks here have problems accessing NYT articles, I'm going to go ahead and post that Brooks op-ed in it's entirety:

Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away

The dynamic pulling the party leftward.

By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
June 27, 2019

I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?

According to a recent Gallup poll, 35 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, 35 percent call themselves moderate and 26 percent call themselves liberal. The candidates at the debates this week fall mostly within the 26 percent. The party seems to think it can win without any of the 35 percent of us in the moderate camp, the ones who actually delivered the 2018 midterm win.

The progressive narrative is dominating in part because progressives these days have a direct and forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it. It’s dominating because no moderate wants to bear the brunt of progressive fury by opposing it.

It’s also dominating because the driving dynamic in this campaign right now is not who can knock off Joe Biden, the more moderate front-runner. It’s who can survive the intense struggle between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others to be the surviving left-wing alternative. All the energy and competition is on the progressive side. Biden tries to bob and weave above it all while the whole debate pulls sharply leftward.

The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much dissent.

First, there is health care. When Warren and Kamala Harris raised their hands and said that they would eliminate employer-based health insurance, they made the most important gesture of the campaign so far. Over 70 percent of Americans with insurance through their employers are satisfied with their health plan. Warren, Harris and Sanders would take that away.

According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.

Second, there is the economy. All of the Democrats seem to have decided to run a Trump-style American carnage campaign. The economy is completely broken. It only benefits a tiny sliver. Yet in a CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say that the economy is very or somewhat good. We’re in the longest recovery in American history and the benefits are finally beginning to flow to those who need them most. Overall wages are rising by 3.5 percent, and wages for those in the lowest pay quartile are rising by well over 4 percent, the highest of all groups.

Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus that inflicts the Trumpian right. They take a good point — that capitalism needs to be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it so one gets the impression they want to undermine capitalism altogether.

Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally for open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.[I'll repeat what Steve Schmidt said; "Americans deserve better than having to choose between internment camps for children and eliminating border enforcement"]

Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist v. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1 percent. This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.

But the big divide in America is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. It’s between the top 20 percent and the rest. These are the highly educated Americans who are pulling away from everybody else and who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to make sure outsiders can’t catch up.

If Democrats run a populist campaign against the business elite, Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things. After all, he is actually despised by the American elite, unlike the Democrats.

Finally, Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.

Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.

[Burning Petard]

I don't think Donald Brooks includes Marianne Williamson on his short list of those he could vote for over POTUS.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... a0c4255be3

Was Williamson on the panel last nite as the comic relief from heavy policy?

snailgate

[Lord Jim]

Was Williamson on the panel last nite as the comic relief from heavy policy?

In my opinion she was just taking up the space that should have gone to Steve Bullock...

When your debate inclusion criteria awards a spot to a no-chance, no-qualifications wingnut like Williamson, but excludes someone with the bona fides of Gov. Bullock, it's time to take another look at your criteria...

[Big RR]

Jim--

Not to be outdone, Julian Castro, already a supporter of The 13% Solution, decided to make himself an even more unelectable candidate by embracing decriminalizing illegal immigration...

He then challenged all the other Dems to join in him in walking off that cliff...

I don't think Castro came across particularly well, but in calling to decriminalize illegally crossing our border he was not calling to open the border, only to eliminate a criminal sanction for doing so, which is the pretext Trump and his minions are using to jail people upon entry. It would still be civilly illegal and persons could be put into deportation proceedings and even detained if there was a concern of their showing up for them.

[quote/]

No critique of last night's debate would be complete without a comment on Tulsi Gabbert's incredibly idiotic claim in her closing statement that "the world has never been closer to nuclear war"...

Cuban Missile Crisis? Hello? [/quote]

True, but then we had adults in the White House who reduced that threat--not the idiotic children we have there now. None of those in charge would have opted for a first nuclear strike; I don't think that sort of reason is in the Shite House today.The very presence off Trump with his finger on the button makes the threat arguably greater than what we saw with the Cuban missile crisis.

[Lord Jim]

My nominees for most obnoxious debate performances:

Night One: New York City mayor Bill De Buttinski...

Mr. Mayor, people who want a rude, entitled, it's-all-about-me asshole for President already have a candidate...

Night Two (and overall winner in this category): California Congressman Eric Swalwell...

This guy exudes an almost Jared Kushner-like level of smug, smarmy factor...

As he kept blurting out in Tourette Syndrome fashion his mindless "pass the torch" refrain, I started to think:

"Yes, would somebody please pass the torch so we can set this smirking douche on fire"....

[Big RR]

The sad thing is that I don't think any of them came across particularly well; some were worse than the others, but none looked particularly good. I blame it more on the format than the candidates but I hope we get better debates and discussion of the issues as time goes on--60 seconds just promotes simplistic discussions and repetition of pointless one sentence ideas or slogans. And the idiotic "raise your hands" polls last night were completely pointless--most issues are more nuanced than "yes or no", but we can't have that.

[RayThom]

Biden didn't seem to care, like he had other places to be. I get the impression he considers himself the default nominee so why should he work so hard for his acceptance speech in Milwaukee.

Harris was impressive, Warren is really workin' it, and Buttigieg just seems right even without having big time experience.

Mix and match any of the above and that's who I'm voting for on 11/03/20 -- regardless. I can only hope every registered Democrat feels the same way. Without any true candidate consensus it's the only way we'll beat the Grifter-in-Chief.

A little bit of democracy, and some rule of law, is better than none.

And God bless America.

[Big RR]

I was pleasantly surprised by Gabbard and Klobuchar and agree Buttigieg looked pretty good, but I am concerned whether any of those could generate enough support to beat Trump. And while I also agreed with ryan's repeated ( far too many times mantra) of bringing back the working class into the democratic party, it didn't seem he was the person to accomplish that. I kind of got yhe same opinion about Warren's performance that you have of Biden, she seemed almost bored to be there, except when she could work in some sound bite. Giffords and Harris were impressive to me as well.

I'm just not sure any of these has the gravitas to bring the people together to beat Trump--all have their own baggage and problems, and I was hoping for Biden, but he just has that propensity to put his foot in his mouth, and then to make it worse when he pulls it out. I'd like to see a more substantive debate before, but I don't see any giving use the slam dunk position I think we need