They dont mention Biden's consistent lying during the debate?
Or perhaps the folks who spent last summer trying to force Biden out for being handsy now realize he is their only hope for evicting the orange menace.
And, to their credit, they have begun to get behind him and push.
I can understand that reaction from centrist partisans generally. But the media which is pretending to be even handed should mention it. And of course the reason Joe Biden is our only hope, is because the these same establishment folk did everything they could to stop Bernie throughout the process.
I really don't think they did. Sanders was supposed to bring in younger people who didn't usually vote in the same numbers as older ones. These are people the least likely to hear anything the establishment said. Unfortunately for all concerned, they didn't show up to vote. That's all there is.
these same establishment folk did everything they could to stop Bernie throughout the process.
The Establishment Media political problem is much, much bigger than Bernie, and doesn't have a whole lot to do with what ended his shot at the presidency. Bernie has pissed a lot of people off, and some of his supporters (including some near the top of his campaign) are just godawful about antagonizing people who should be allies.
Contrast that with Trump, who understands instinctively (even unconsciously) what voters want, and who seized the nomination away from the Republican Establishment in 2016 by delivering the goods.
I'm not sure what I think of debate audiences. Debates back in the day sucked, too.
I will say it was very strange seeing Bloomberg, in that second debate, getting ridiculously favorable treatment from the crowd. I wonder if anybody ever went to the trouble to report his technique for packing the hall.
Roger, I saw at least one story in the last week or so that included something about the Sanders campaign having what turned out to be bad internal polling from South Carolina.
5 I don't think the whole Bernie Bro thing meant much, except at the margins. Just like in 2016, he's losing because he hasn't made the sale to Black people over 30. There are a ton of reasons for this, but since this is what happened 4 years ago, the lion's share of the responsibility has to lie with the Sanders campaign. What was he doing in 2019 to change that dynamic -- which was visible all year, from the polling that put Biden in first place pretty much from the day he announced?
We're putting on candidate forums for our statewide races -- so far we've done AG, and our 7-county PSC race, and I should be working on questions for our US House candidates (forum on April 21). Not having an audience is just fine. (We do a live feed, and so (a) anyone can watch in real time; (b) any can watch later; and (c) the candidates can select excerpts for their websites.).
I don't even give a shit if Bernie Bros feel the need to insult me repeatedly. Call me a centrist sell-out if you want. Bring in new voters and I'll concede the point.
If the media had reported evenhandedly on the primaries, I don't think Biden would have had the success he had. It's a counterfactual, it's not really something that you can prove. But I certainly think the massive, unprecedented age divide in support is partly because people under 45 don't watch cable news.
The Sanders campaign was wayyyyy too confident that they had won all their 2016 primary votes by the pure power of being right, & that voters who joined them only out of (highly mediated) antipathy toward The Clintonz would stick with them in 2020. It was obvious by last summer that this wasn't true. Other than trying to paste a Hillary mask on Biden, I never saw evidence of any thought toward building a coalition that would go beyond their ideological base.
I saw a note today that the campaign thought they were organizing when in fact they were only mobilizing. Bernie's base just isn't as big as the mad emperor's base. It's just not. The fact that he couldn't consistently break 30% in the elections most favorable to him, with no serious effort made to campaign against him, seemed to pretty much guarantee that he couldn't break 50% in the country as a whole, much less in the right combination of states to take the Electoral College.
Every case I've seen made against the Sanders campaign has been met with the same argument, which boils down to "But he's right!" That's mostly true & entirely irrelevant. I'd rather have seen a movement to build a coalition around doing what's right, but instead we'll need a movement to make the person who has a coalition do what's right.
OK. I only disagree with the first sentence in 4. 5-2 no you are wrong on the internet. 6-2 yeah there was. 7 yes I think older black people tend not to be impressed with young white people volunteering. It wasn't really in his power to win them over I think.
9 I'll call you a sell out if it makes you feel any better. I tried and failed.
It was always a real long shot at best. Partly because of stuff connected with why 5-2 is wrong.
Bernie's supporters weren't any more offensive than anyone else's supporters. There was a study done, but I already knew that. I've definitely been a jerk on here. I apologize for that. I think I had good intentions, but I'm going to try to talk less about politics going forward. Still I've been extremely online for many years now and most of the examples I've seen where where the vitriol directed at the leftist by the centrist dems was much worse than the reverse. This is of course true throughout American society and has been all my life. The Republicans attack the Democrats more harshly than the reverse and even within the left there is still hippie punching.
You should also consider the fact that the Russian were posing as Bernie supporters and trying to instigate when you think about Bernie Bro behavior.
As a Bernie Victory Captain I saw all the requirements that the campaign put on us, and we pledged not to go negative on other candidates and not to be insulting to the supporters of other candidates. I did notice we had hostile infiltrators at the last meeting.
10 and others suggest to me your problem isn't so much The Media as people under 45 not voting.
I think the Bernie and the campaign made various mistakes, like all campaigns do, but overall it's been an impressive campaign and the best this cycle. I don't see how you can argue Biden won by running a better campaign than anyone else.
I agree the Sanders supporters weren't worse than others. Better than some, probably. I don't know what a Gabbard supporter it's like.
13: Well, in the sense that you got to war with the media environment you have, I agree. A lot of campaigns like Gillibrand and too some extent Harris didn't go anyway, since they didn't start off by finding a niche and a core constituency, but Bernie could have done more sooner to broaden his message. Maybe he believed what he said, that he couldn't win without massive turnout. I think that was mistaken. He always had high favorables.
He also seems to be unwilling to court politicians and ask for their endorsements, and had other weaknesses. But it was always going to be an uphill climb, and coming so close to winning it all is impressive even if it doesn't count for much, unfortunately.
"A lot of campaigns like Gillibrand's and to some extent Harris didn't go anywhere since they didn't start off by finding a niche and a core constituency"
Every case I've seen made against the Sanders campaign has been met with the same argument, which boils down to "But he's right!" That's mostly true & entirely irrelevant. I'd rather have seen a movement to build a coalition around doing what's right, but instead we'll need a movement to make the person who has a coalition do what's right.
Yeah, this. On policy, I'm with Sanders (I mean, of course M4A would be fairer, more efficient, and also less expensive in the end, even if it involved tax increases [which it surely would]). But the Sanders campaign made no serious attempt to expand its base; and, more specifically, as Mr Carp points out in 7, made no serious attempt to appeal to Black voters over the age of 30.
Bernie's supporters weren't any more offensive than anyone else's supporters.
So many people have a lived experience that is contrary to this, including me. I mean, I am a Bernie supporter (now that Warren is out), and was a Bernie supporter in '16 -- and I'm a nice guy! I'm very polite! But even I catch a lot of weird shit online because I'm insufficiently fervent. Online Bernie supporters (real ones, not Russians) in 2016 tended to be more hostile to me than Hillary supporters, and more offensively stupid.
Bernie's vocal online crew is composed disproportionately of Nader-types -- people with real contempt for democracy, a contempt that Bernie himself does not share. Look for Warren supporters (for example) talking about a third-party run, and you won't find them. How hard is it to find a Bernie supporter talking about sabotaging the Democratic Party with an independent candidacy?
Bernie doesn't get the votes of older, black voters for good reasons -- and only one of those reasons is a lack of outreach. It's a sad fact of life that the only way he is able to reach out beyond his youthful base is to appeal to old, sexist white men, and he fails to sufficiently confront their sexism and racism -- for good political reasons as well as out of a certain amount of genuine conviction. Criticism of "identity politics" is very difficult to reconcile with Bernie's -- real! -- anti-racism and feminism. There is a reason that in the 2016 primary, his supporters were, on average, more conservative than Hillary's.
The other "flaw" in Bernie's campaign is his unwillingness to go for the jugular against his opponents -- even though he has branded himself as a revolutionary anti-Establishment figure. "The American people are sick and tired about hearing about your damn e-mails" is not a thing a "serious" politician would say in this modern age of disinformation. And Bernie has declined to go for the jugular to highlight Joe's manifest fealty to big money. (Yes, Bernie complains about it, but the words "Hunter Biden" never pass his lips.)
This is because Bernie himself is genuinely serious about his mission, which is to improve the lot of the American people.
Beyond that, I'll cosign Rah@11.
I think older black people tend not to be impressed with young white people volunteering. It wasn't really in his power to win them over I think.
I'm fine with the first sentence. I think the second is probably not correct, but we'll never know because he didn't really try. And that means, to me, that he wasn't really trying to fix what went wrong for him in 2016. I wanted him to win, because he's mostly right about policy, but he could only win, and get even the most watered down versions of his policy enacted, if he could build an electoral coalition. The first step in doing so is wanting to do so.
I don't think anyone is saying that Biden is running some kind of exemplary campaign. He appeals to a whole lot of the people who actually vote in Democratic primaries.
But the Sanders campaign made no serious attempt to expand its base
I actually do want to dissent from Rah and JPJ on this in a small way, and offer my own bit of heartfelt Bernie Bro-ism: If people can't be brought around to Bernie's point of view when he is manifestly correct, then fuck 'em. They don't have to vote for him. But for myself, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to vote for someone just because he's right on the merits on so many things.
I mean, I haven't had a chance to vote yet, and I think he should drop out before I get a chance, but I'm glad he ran and I wish he'd won, and I would have voted for him when it mattered, and will vote for him even when it doesn't.
He appeals to a whole lot of the people who actually vote in Democratic primaries
And he appeals to a whole lot of people who just want to stop Trump. They already know about Biden's negatives and shortcomings, but they are willing to forgive him, and to support him, nevertheless. They just want to stop Trump. That is the mood, and the "all-hands-on-deck" imperative, amongst registered Democratic voters these days.
21 is why I voted for Warren after she suspended her campaign and Biden was pretty much a lock.
Warren was great; but she, too, did very little outreach to the Black voters over the age of 30 who are the Democratic Party's base.
@25
Not sure what is meant by "outreach". African American voters are generally more conservative than the college-educated, white democrats who made up Sanders' and Warren's base. Why would they want to vote for politicians that are to their left? What does outreach change? Biden can give them what they want without the things they don't want.
"college-educated white voters" is not an accurate description of Bernie's voters.
26: You need to show up, and tell a voting constituency that you actually hear them, that you actually care about them.
Bernie did not show up.
I mean, spend a goddam year listening. There are a bunch of things that the man might have learned, and there are a bunch of people who might have experienced first-hand that he was willing to listen and learn.
My hot take is that I'd probably be happier with the eventual nominee if neither Biden nor Sanders ran, even if Warren also still didn't win. I'm still not going to vote for anyone but the Democratic nominee, but that's been true since 2016. The whole long primary, including the year+ without voting, has felt like an extended exercise in killing time. It seemed extremely unlikely that extended debates among well-established people would reveal anything decisive, and it's hard to say that much of it really mattered. This is not to say that the outcome was foreordained and predictable, more that it probably would be the same with a shorter campaign.
Maybe someone who dropped out early is now on a path to leadership; hopefully the gap isn't like the 32 years between Biden 88 and now.
28: From everything I've read Warren, perhaps unlike Bernie, did try to do this. I'm not sure why she wasn't more successful. Was it that she was too winking? A woman trying to court an electorate that was scarred by HRC's loss? Or were her policies too far to the left for them? The last is as good a reason as any.
Apple autocorrected wonkish to winking. That was not intentional.
It's not easy to determine if a computer did something intentionally or not.
31 last is correct. Are you surprised that the presumptive nominee is the most centrist, most electable (largely because well-known already) person left standing? If you are surprised you haven't paid much attention to the actual opinions of even the Democratic Party, much less the electorate as a whole.
The person to beat Trump should come zooming out of an overwhelming primary victory. Sanders was never going to do that, Warren was never going to do that, not to mention any of the other mini-candidates. I'm not at all convinced Biden can do that either. Where the hell IS he? Drowned by all the COVID-19 coverage? He should be out there genially but assertively picking apart the Trump agenda, reining in the House Dems (who are busy trying to remind America that Democrats are too far left to support), putting out an agenda of his own, etc. Maybe his strategy is to lie low until the COVID-19 epidemic wanes, assuming it will. I dunno. It's like there is no campaign at all. Who are his advisors and strategists? Are they all being ventilated and unavailable? Blaming the media (which doesn't seem to cover him at all) won't work. Trump is running against the pandemic and the Democrats, Biden isn't running against anything.
(Sorry. I'm grumpy this morning.)
ISTR sees Biden is doing "shadow" Covid-19 briefings: the leadership Trump should be providing but isn't. That sounds like a winner but evidently isn't catching on.
35: First was just yesterday. I think it is *very* hard to say what the correct thing to do now is (although all the twitterati are certain they know). So much future path dependency on how things will look, and that path is not under the control at all of the Dem nominee. And my experience is that what happens in the spring is generally irrelevant to the election. I think Trump continues to get approval bumps no matter what because wartime president, our aggregate shortcomings s as an informed citizenry, and willful ignorance concerning and bigotry. I think Trump is clear favorite by early summer almost no matter what. Then we'll see*.
*My fatalistically pessimistic take is he will win easily in these circumstances but I clearly don't know shit which is why I've constrained this to a footnote since they don;t really count as predictions ...
Media coverage of the the "rescue" bill negotiations and the daily hate briefings have not left me sanguine.
IDK. Apparently pandemics come in waves and there'll be another bigger one in the fall. And if Pelosi & C have literally put money in everybody's pocket, in the face of McConnel (&Trump, who knows)...
38: Yes a big second tap would be a the one path where I *think* Trump definitely goes down ( the core of the trumperati are hooked so deep that they cannot spit out the hook, but I think on the margins it would be enough to swing it in the key EC needs). And that is why I was willing to put my early summer Prediction into the body of my comment while the actual election one was relegated to the footnote. I didn't make the "bindingness of body versus footnote predictions" rule but I respect it.
I'd sincerely love to be shown to be utterly wrong of cource.
Biden isn't the nominee yet, and has to avoid looking like he is claiming victory prematurely. There's one particular individual who could help with this problem, but, up to now, hasn't thought it worth pulling that trigger explicitly.
(For example, once Biden is the nominee, he can do a joint appearance with Pelosi and Schumer. Until then, it's not possible. Even that joint appearance might not be enough to break through the current palace drama, but it's a better shot than any series of fireside chats that Biden might launch on his own.)
Is it mathematically possible for Biden not to be the nominee at this point?
38 There is simply no such thing as Pelosi putting money in people's pockets without Trump's signature. People who would be able to distinguish the relative roles each had are people who are already committed in the general election.
42: Absolutely. ~1600 left and he is ahead by 300.
The Pirates are already mathematically eliminated.
42 He does not have 1,991 committed delegates, so no, it's not a matter of math yet. Biden is going to win, and Sanders knows it. As in 2016, he thinks that staying in to have influence over the platform has some sort of value. I mean, why not have a bunch of people at the convention booing Biden, Michelle Obama, and a host of other 'establishment' figures? Surely no one would draw any inference that voting for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot is other than ideal.
It's also very important that trusted voices spend the next 3 months telling Democratic voters that Biden is senile. Because once the deal is cut, Sanders endorses Biden, that'll all be forgotten. And no Democratic voter will believe it when Trump says it.
44: Right. But shit is spiraling absurdly. A reconciled stimulus bill with a veto-proof majority? Why not!
44: CharleyC is unquestionably right on this. The political question is: How badly are things (the economy, public health) going to be fucked up in November?
Trump is getting a significant polling bump right now, but I don't think he can escape consequences forever if the consequences are dire. This isn't 9/11 or the Iraq War, where politics favor fucking up. This is closer to the 2008 economic crisis, where (if it continues to deepen) the Democrats could win even if they nominate a Hispanic socialist woman named Kim Saddam bin Laden.
A lot rides on 1.) Trump's competence and 2.) The willingness and ability of others to mitigate Trump's lack thereof. The governors, public health authorities, Federal Reserve, Democrats, etc., could very well bail out Trump. I think I have stumbled here onto something previously unthinkable: a scenario where I hope Trump is re-elected.
I guess if the Democrats were to nominate Covid-19, even I would probably regard Trump as the lesser of evils.
50.2. Don't forget it took a long time (a year) to get the 2008 stimulus/recovery/pork/whatevah bills passed. Neither the country nor the party nor Biden himself have a year.
50.last. They don't have to nominate Covid-19. Trump will portray it as Biden's running mate regardless. At this point the major hope is that Trump will continue on his current path to an own goal of terminating the anti-pandemic efforts (social distancing, etc.) prematurely and the epidemic will spike up. This is not a hope one wants to be depending on or hoping for.
Trump's refusal to use the DPA is going to hurt him, big time. Come November, everyone is going to be no more than 2 degrees of separation from a death, or a near death should have been treated in the hospital case. Trump won by a hair on weak turnout. He tried hard to nationalize 2018, and got whacked (everywhere but in those red states where he got a Kavanaugh bump). Turnout is going to be higher this time, pretty much no matter what, and if registration and id-getting drives through the summer have any success at all, it won't be close enough for cheating to win it.
The DPA thing is just so weird. Is there really no one in the White House left who can make him do it? He's the literal only person in the world opposed to it, right?
I think Bannon would have been able to get him to see it as the winning play.
+1=53: No there are some "hard right" free marketeers who have urging him not to do it. Seem some names I recognized but I forget who.
Socialism bad!
Blue state deaths good!
Dying in a pandemic
is kinda bad
on the other hand
profits must be had.
Burma Shave!
51: I'm not sure if we disagree, but my point was basically that the available futures fall roughly into two paths: A Covid-controlled future in which Trump has a strong shot at re-election, and a rampant disease/economic collapse future in which he does not. It's a tough call -- how confident can we be that uncontained coronavirus is worse than Trump? -- but if pressed, I think I prefer the pro-Trump future.
And if pressed, I'd predict the anti-Trump future.
The rampant disease/economic collapse future might benefit Trump as well. These things can always be blamed on others. How many people are ever going to hear about the possible options that the federal government could have done but failed to do? These are things the government never does so it's hard to convince people they exist.
And we've long known that it's hard to convince people of the facts of Republican policies because they sound so villainous that we refuse to believe they are real. "Kill lots of people with a virus to help the hotel industry" is a typical Republican policy in that way.
56 is good, in a horrifying kind of way.
The rampant disease/economic collapse future might benefit Trump as well. These things can always be blamed on others.
"Chinese flu" can only get Trump so far, and (contra 51.2) there's really no mechanism for blaming the Democrats.
Bush didn't blame the Democrats for the disasters of 9/11 or Iraq - he took credit for his actions. People literally said that the US wasn't subject to a terrorist attack in Bush's first term, and Bush got a lot of credit for being a wartime president. (His father made the mistake of winning).
The question is: Can Trump continue to succeed in taking credit for the coronavirus response?
The Republicans worked hard to blame Democrats for the financial crisis (the Community Reinvestment Act did it! Fannie Mae did it! etc.) but it didn't work. This isn't because the American people weighed the facts judiciously and decided the Republicans were responsible -- the American people really aren't that smart. It's because a bad economy works against the president and his party. Period.
Presidents get credit/blame for the economy, regardless. Trump actually has a pretty good excuse for a tanking economy. It won't matter. People are just going to be pissed off and looking for someone to blame.
And it doesn't matter much at all if coronavirus spreads because of a Trump fuckup, or if it's just because the virus couldn't be stopped no matter what anyone does. If it isn't controlled over a period of months, Trump will be blamed.
I do think it's a real possibility that other actors will do a lot to mitigate the damage. The company I work for, for instance, has everybody working from home. A lot of people have a lot of incentive to save the world and its economy, even if Trump isn't one of them. Nancy Pelosi is prepared, out of basic human decency, to give a huge boost to the Trump presidency if the Repbulicans let her.
Chinese Fish Tank Cleaner Ingestion .
Today I came to the conclusion that the way Trump is handling the epidemic is another aspect of his genius. He has the Republicans in the Senate fighting to all our deaths for a slush fund of a half trillion dollars. Even if now there will be some supervision of that money, a lot of it is going to end up in his hands, the hands of his family, the hands of his friends. If he had acted quickly and effectively to stop the pandemic here, panic wouldn't be running so high as to let these kinds of crazy ideas get through.
there's really no mechanism for blaming the Democrats
You say that like facts matter.
You say that like facts matter.
My intent was actually the reverse -- that's why I used "mechanism" rather than, say, "factual justification." I do indeed understand that facts don't matter in this context.