2020 Democratic Primary

[Essence Lumin]

What about Tulsi? She is still running. Also she has not gone third party as she promised she wouldn't. I'm just in a mood and being an inflammatory pain.

 

[bubblesort]

Huh? Yes, she does. She also supports a transition period, so I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but her end goal is to get us to Medicare For All..



Ending the Stranglehold of Health Care Costs on American Families | Elizabeth Warren

Bernie also appears to have a 4 year 'transition' plan.

Kinda. I mean... yeah, she has a Medicare for All plan, but it comes across as soft. She talks about frameworks and focuses on the transition. To a lot of people, she seems like she's already giving the health care industry concessions, before the negotiation has even begun. Bernie supporters don't want to hear that. They want to hear that we're gonna put them out of business. Bernie gives us that. Warren has a habit of retreating into wonkery when the subject comes up, which mangles any perception that she is assertive enough to end the private health care system. Bernie supporters just don't believe her.

 

[bubblesort]

What about Tulsi? She is still running. Also she has not gone third party as she promised she wouldn't. I'm just in a mood and being an inflammatory pain.

Tulsi didn't get much scrutiny, but I dug into her past a bit because a lot of my friends were behind her after she spoke at an American Atheists conference.

Turns out, she's an ex-cultist... or maybe a current one, depending on who you believe. She was a part of a religious sect called the Identitarians. They call their church the Science of Identity. They were Krishnas, who were expelled from mainstream Krishna worshiping groups for being too extremist, and engaging in terrible religious abuse. I read that the founder of the identitarians is in prison for a long time, for massive international drug smuggling between Afghanistan, New Zeland, and California, among other places. His operation was reportedly big enough to effect the prices of narcotics across all of CA when he got busted.

She is also best buds with Indian PM Modi, who is a Hindu nationalist, whose party violently oppresses minorities, and openly calls the Nazis as heroes for protecting their blood lines. So when she said at the debate that she's the biggest anti-islam hawk in the race, I believe her, and it scares me.

That's on top of her homophobia. Yeah, I know she apologized. I don't care. Her apology was weak. I'm not in the business of rehabilitating bigots. If she wants to change her ideas, she can go do it in the private sector, as far as I'm concerned. Just like Hillary Clinton.

So she's doing ok in obscurity, where she can't do much damage. I don't think she will drop out, though, because she wants to get a handful of delegates because she fantasizes about playing king maker at a contested convention, which isn't going to happen. I bet that's what she's thinking, though.

 

[Shiloh Lyric]

Bernie supporters just don't believe her.

With the way she manages to accomplish things, they should. She was the driving force behind the establishment of the CFPB, for one thing, and she succeeded in what she set out to do. And then, when not appointed as the director, as she should have been, she went on to run for the Senate, defeated an incumbent Republican to become the first female Senator from the state of Massachusetts. So, again, succeeded in what she set out to do. Before that, she was a pretty influential professor, especially when it came to Bankruptcy law. A woman succeeding in what she set out to do. I mean, it's not a bill to name a Post Office, but it's still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

But, yeah, I could see where her credentials would be doubted when put up against Bernie.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Bernie supporters don't want to hear that. They want to hear that we're gonna put them out of business. Bernie gives us that.

And Trump tells Kentucky and West Virginia miners that the coal industry is going to make a big comeback!

Doesn't make it true.

 

[Pamela]

Hate Is on the Ballot

The hidden dynamic that’s transformed our politics—and will loom large in the 2020 election

newrepublic.com

“Even though most analysts continue to look at 2016 as a frame for 2020, that reflex bespeaks another failure to size up a dramatically shifting electorate. The complacent voting ranks of 2016 who believed (at the energetic prompting of polls and pundit forecasts) that Donald Trump could never be president have been replaced by the terrified electorate of 2020. These voters know all too well the hazards of granting great power to a figure like Trump and view the president as a Terminator-like political figure who simply can’t be stopped.

After threading the 2016 Electoral College needle, Trump has acquired an almost mythic aura of invincibility for most people, election analysts included. And in some key ways, the unsettled character of this political moment—together with the structural inequities of the Electoral College and a battery of GOP-orchestrated voter suppression drives—has inoculated President Trump from political gravity.

But as Andrew Yang would tell you, math matters, and Trump has a basic math problem. As the electorate is currently constituted, there are more potential Democratic voters out there than there are Republican, and not just in California. There are more in the Midwest and in the Sun Belt. There are so many more in Virginia and Colorado that both states have moved off the swing state map.
The 2020 election will be a battle of the bases, with nothing less than the country’s survival as a functional democracy on the ballot. Partisanship is a hell of a drug—especially when it’s cut with a heavy dose of existential fear.


Rachel Bitecofer is an election forecaster and analyst, a Senior Research Fellow at the Niskanen Center, and a political scientist at Christopher Newport University.“

 

[Shiloh Lyric]

 

[Beebo Brink]

Hate on the ballot, eh? Those who ignore history are doomed to... putting up with old geezers who look it up on Wikepedia to show you nothing is new under the sun.

1968 Democratic National Convention - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Pamela]

Hate on the ballot, eh? Those who ignore history are doomed to... putting up with old geezers who look it up on Wikepedia to show you nothing is new under the sun.

1968 Democratic National Convention - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1860 comes to mind. Lincoln was elected and the south seceded. And 600,000 died.

 

[Cristalle]

He's a bro because he's a white male?

How about she's rewriting history?


It makes for great applause when you don't tell the truth and nobody holds you to account for 1) your own past statements and 2) misrepresenting what actually happened.

Better video history of her own statements and what happened:

 

[Pamela]

 

[Brenda Archer]

Hate on the ballot, eh? Those who ignore history are doomed to... putting up with old geezers who look it up on Wikepedia to show you nothing is new under the sun.

1968 Democratic National Convention - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

But there is something different now. We don’t have the same Republicans anymore, and the voters are getting polarized, as Bitecofer explains. It’s not that conflict as such is new. It’s that this conflict is not just the past recycling itself.

The Republican Party the pundits and “moderates” want to appease has been shoved out of power.

People are *still* not willing to see we’re dealing with the hard Right. Certainly, we can take in the moderates, but Bitcofer argues there aren’t that many of those. I’m inclined to agree.

I recall McConnell saying some time ago that the Republicans can’t survive only on working class male votes. He knows the demographics are against their current incarnation.

This is new. Bitecofer is arguing it’s all about the demographics.

Now the argument can be made that the establishment will just extralegally crush the opposition. If that’s really inevitable, what the Left should be seeding now is insurrection and disobedience, not appeasement.

I’d say if all that fails, we’ll eventually wind up in a war (foreign war.)

 

[Brenda Archer]

1860 comes to mind. Lincoln was elected and the south seceded. And 600,000 died.

The main thing that might keep that from happening now is the aging of the hard Right base. It’s unlikely a hard Right rebellion, as dangerous as it would be, would be able to steamroll large blue states. There have always been pockets the hard Right controls locally, and that’s bad enough, but it’s not where the economy is going.

 

[bubblesort]

With the way she manages to accomplish things, they should. She was the driving force behind the establishment of the CFPB, for one thing, and she succeeded in what she set out to do. And then, when not appointed as the director, as she should have been, she went on to run for the Senate, defeated an incumbent Republican to become the first female Senator from the state of Massachusetts. So, again, succeeded in what she set out to do. Before that, she was a pretty influential professor, especially when it came to Bankruptcy law. A woman succeeding in what she set out to do. I mean, it's not a bill to name a Post Office, but it's still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

But, yeah, I could see where her credentials would be doubted when put up against Bernie.

Oh yeah, I totally agree with all of that. She has a great story. Like I said before, I loved her in 2008, but things have changed since then. I'll agree that her healthcare policies aren't too far removed from Bernie, if you really dig into the details. What I've really been talking about is why she has problems with Bernie supporters as a community, more than with me, personally. With the larger movement, her theater just isn't that great, and national politics is usually all about theater. To give a few more examples, attacking Bernie for allegedly saying that a woman can't win the presidency years ago, and clapping for Trump when he basically said socialism is unamerican... those things are very bad theater. I know it's theater, though, so I personally don't care that much.

As far as why I personally like Bernie better than Warren... there are a lot of reasons, but one of my biggest problems with her is that she hasn't come out in opposition to the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal on March 15. Bernie has. I want a president who will outright veto The Patriot Act. If a candidate won't even vote against renewing now, I question their understanding of civil rights. I know that issue is never going to get any mainstream press coverage, but it's important to me.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

DNC Superdelegate Pushing Brokered Convention Is a GOP Donor

“I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides,” William Owen told The Intercept.

theintercept.com

 

[Grandma Bates]

He's a bro because he's a white male?

How about she's rewriting history?


It makes for great applause when you don't tell the truth and nobody holds you to account for 1) your own past statements and 2) misrepresenting what actually happened.

Better video history of her own statements and what happened:

Ugh, why do these people think if they speak slowly for 12 minutes and just keep repeating the same thing that it will make it more believable? Those videos are straight up gas lighting. The misrepresent what Sen Warren said, she did not say she approved of the super delegates but that it is the deal she agreed to when she signed up. Also, they cherry picked and carefully edited what Sen. Sanders said about super delegates because he tried a number of different angles to get more of them on his side in 2016.

If you want the whole version there is a complete audio of an interview on VPR with Sen. Sanders' 2016 campaign manager. He explicitly said that the super delegates should vote for Sanders because Sen. Sanders has a better change of beating Trump even though Sec. Clinton had a greater share of the vote. That was one of the things they pushed leading up to the convention. I was a supporter of Sen. Sanders in 2016, and I remember what Sen. Sanders was saying about the super delegates and how he tried every angle to coax them. That includes the angle they showed in those videos which is only one of the things he tried. There is nothing wrong with that, that is the way the system was set up, and everybody knew it. To pretend that he did not try other ways to get the super delgates is straight up lying.

My candidate has dropped out, and I have been on the fence. Every time I come around and start leaning toward Sanders again I end up watching one these idiotic, long winded, repetitive videos that substitutes snark for facts, and I go right back to where I was. And the way his supporters act matters. It matter for the same reason why Trump's base matters. Once in office the President has to rely on his base for political support to move the agenda. That means playing to the base and keeping them active. If Sanders' supporters are turning me off I can only imagine how it will be for the larger population who does not want to deal with politics and are already sick of it.

"You know, they're going to take a hard look at which candidate can really beat Donald Trump in November," says Weaver. "One of Bernie Sanders' strengths, and why he beats Trump by a much larger margin than Sec. Clinton does, is he has a tremendous amount of support with independents. The truth of the matter is there just aren't enough Democrats. You can't elect a president with just Democrats. You have to bring in independents."

 

[Essence Lumin]

The polls about which democrat will beat the orange one don't mean a thing at this point. For instance if 100.000s are dying from Coronavirus in October and November or whatever calamity may fall upon us will make a big difference.

 

[Cristalle]

Ugh, why do these people think if they speak slowly for 12 minutes and just keep repeating the same thing that it will make it more believable? Those videos are straight up gas lighting. The misrepresent what Sen Warren said, she did not say she approved of the super delegates but that it is the deal she agreed to when she signed up. Also, they cherry picked and carefully edited what Sen. Sanders said about super delegates because he tried a number of different angles to get more of them on his side in 2016.

If you want the whole version there is a complete audio of an interview on VPR with Sen. Sanders' 2016 campaign manager. He explicitly said that the super delegates should vote for Sanders because Sen. Sanders has a better change of beating Trump even though Sec. Clinton had a greater share of the vote. That was one of the things they pushed leading up to the convention. I was a supporter of Sen. Sanders in 2016, and I remember what Sen. Sanders was saying about the super delegates and how he tried every angle to coax them. That includes the angle they showed in those videos which is only one of the things he tried. There is nothing wrong with that, that is the way the system was set up, and everybody knew it. To pretend that he did not try other ways to get the super delgates is straight up lying.

My candidate has dropped out, and I have been on the fence. Every time I come around and start leaning toward Sanders again I end up watching one these idiotic, long winded, repetitive videos that substitutes snark for facts, and I go right back to where I was. And the way his supporters act matters. It matter for the same reason why Trump's base matters. Once in office the President has to rely on his base for political support to move the agenda. That means playing to the base and keeping them active. If Sanders' supporters are turning me off I can only imagine how it will be for the larger population who does not want to deal with politics and are already sick of it.

The problem is, she's said a number of things. And there is explicit video where he says that he'd just want the superdelegates in the states he won. Everyone in the media had the delegate numbers for her because they all (rightly?) presumed that she had the superdelegates sewn up. And yes, while I do recall that hail mary, the point is that he wanted them gone in the (dis)unity negotiations afterward. The supers being on the second ballot is a compromise.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]