New @EmersonPolling and @Suffolk_U polls show Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar as the top three candidates in New Hampshire
— Julia Manchester (@JuliaManch) February 10, 2020
New Hampshire’s reputation for volatility is already on full display. Buttigieg is +14 in less than a week in one tracking poll, and other pollsters warn big shifts are still likely in #FITN.
Plus, what CNN is doing to prevent another Iowa poll meltdown.https://t.co/bODgy7rdDf
— Steven Shepard (@POLITICO_Steve) February 8, 2020
“We can’t afford it” is literally the state’s proud motto (Live Free or Die Trying). The general aim of their much-advertised #FITN primary is to be ‘Not Iowa’, because midwestern nice makes Granite Staters puke. No surprise some of them are abandoning their original favorite (bastard) son for two candidates whose current positioning is very much in line with the ‘make it do, wear it out, use it up, or go without’ New England puritan ethos…
In Nashua, Pete Buttigieg draws more than 1,800 people to first town hall of the day, biggest crowd of the year. pic.twitter.com/OT4JAMR6Fs
— Jonathan Easley (@JonEasley) February 9, 2020
In Salem, ?@amyklobuchar? sets the tone for the next two days in New Hampshire as she barnstorms the state:
“I have been bolted down and I am finally unleashed.” pic.twitter.com/gnePkSXFe2
— Jasmine Wright (@JasJWright) February 10, 2020
10 Democratic candidates spoke in Manchester tonight in front of an arena full of different campaigns’ supporters. Only one got booed, and only one group did the booing: Bernie Sanders’s supporters booed Buttigieg (after he took a dig at “revolution” being the only option)
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) February 9, 2020
Buttigieg responds to Sanders hitting him for taking money from wealthy donors: "Bernie is pretty rich and I would happily accept the contribution from him."
— Dan Merica (@merica) February 9, 2020
Sanders and Buttigieg aren’t fighting over the same pool of voters. Instead, each is trying to energize his supporters by vowing to block the other from winning the Democratic nomination, and the accusations are flying. Via @WaPoSean and @chelsea_janes . https://t.co/TBstgLSr2b
— Matt Viser (@mviser) February 9, 2020
One thing to think about too:
If Sanders wins NH, that might deflate Buttigieg a bit, giving Biden a chance to be the main rival to Bernie after all.
If Buttigieg wins NH, Bernie could be in a fair bit of trouble; someone like Warren might get another look. https://t.co/H1nokiWR7s
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 7, 2020
Bernie triangulating to keep up with Pete. https://t.co/BwfwdixdrF
— Iowasca Tripper (@agraybee) February 10, 2020
“Don’t nominate candidates with broad appeal, nobody will vote for them” is not a theory that holds up well historically https://t.co/ca71kEgjB3
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 11, 2020
Don’t stop believin’…
Deval Patrick: "Defeating President Trump is not enough"
— Julia Manchester (@JuliaManch) February 9, 2020
800 people showed up for @DevalPatrick at this party dinner in New Hampshire tonight. Hundreds were a few blocks away at a @MichaelBennet event earlier. Neither were on the debate stage last night. The race goes at least a little deeper than what’s showing up in the polls.
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) February 9, 2020
Libertarian Gary Johnson offers 'whatever I can do' to help Tulsi Gabbard in New Hampshire amid third party talk around the candidate https://t.co/vtb8XgJpqI
— Politics Insider (@Politicsinsider) February 9, 2020
janesays
Sooooo… if Biden finishes as poorly tomorrow as it sure looks like he might (4th place or worse), it it fair to say he’s running a dead campaign walking? No candidate in the last 30 years has gotten creamed in both of the first two contests and gone on to win the nomination
I have to think if he loses that badly in the first two, his numbers in South Carolina are gonna nosedive. Kind of a reverse Obama 2008 (his numbers soared in SC when African-American voters saw that white people would be willing to vote for him in large numbers).
Martin
@janesays: I don’t think so.
Normally a 4th place candidate is pulling in nearly zero votes. This is a field where 4th has been pulling in about half of the leader. Biden is polling in the lead in some of the larger Super Tuesday states.
I don’t think any of the top 6 should bow out (Biden, Bernie, Warren, Pete, Bloomberg, Amy) based on the polling until at least Super Tuesday, provided they have the money to keep going.
Percysowner
I’m a Warren girl all the way, but I will say that Klobachar impressed me in the last debate, far more than the other candidates. If I HAVE to switch at some point, it will be to her. Pete needs political “seasoning” i.e. experience before I can support him. Yang and Steyer are vanity candidates. Biden is old and isn’t showing the fire in the belly that will be needed to beat Trump. I think he could have in 2016, but now, I just don’t see it. Bernie is Bernie. If he wins it, I’ll vote for him and do whatever it takes to get him elected, but I don’t think he has what it takes to get his policies through AND I think he may be as autocratic as Trump, just with principles I agree with.
@Martin: I keep throwing money at Warren to help keep her in and I’m taking telephone training on Thursday and canvassing training on Saturday, so I can do that when the time comes.
Martin
A Bloomberg consequence people aren’t really picking up on, but our local Dems are starting to complain that they’re losing campaign staff because Bloomberg is hiring, like, all of them. And paying them pretty damn well from what I hear.
So he’s not just running ads, he’s building ground infrastructure. Apparently he’s building a lot of ground infrastructure.
cokane
Sanders does have broad election appeal, as much as any Democrat really. Matchup polls consistently show Biden performs the best, but just a tick below in second is Sanders.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Martin: I saw a tweet suggesting they get iPhones. Signing bonus?
Be BernieAPOSTROPHEs Valentine
Bernie’s gonna fuckin crush it. K’RUNCH!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Has he obliquely referenced how even more than trump wants to run against him, Susan Collins, Martha McSally and Cory Gardner– and Mitch McConnell–want to run against him?
Steeplejack
Testing . . .
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
won’t someone think of the
childrenI mean the down-ticket candidates?Steeplejack (phone)
And again.
Brachiator
I like this bit of pushback. I am sick and tired of Sanders’ faux revolutionary BS. Any day now I expect him to propose re-education camps for millionaires.
These are strange times. I can’t really see support moving from Biden to either Sanders or Mayor Pete. Not sure about the other candidates.
Martin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What I’ve seen is he’s paying about double what the other candidates are paying.
Field organizer earns $6K/month, with benefits (vision, dental, etc.), iPhone, MacBook Pro, 3 catered meals a day. Higher responsibility positions can earn twice that. Remember when Bernie had to raise pay to $15/hr?
I understand Mike has over 1000 paid staff already.
Adam L Silverman
I wrote this in January 2019 (emphasis mine):
https://balloon-juice.com/2019/01/27/a-preliminary-strategic-cultural-assessment-of-the-us-2020-political-and-election-operating-environment/
Adam L Silverman
I’ll just leave this here.
Brachiator
@Martin:
So he’s not just running ads, he’s building ground infrastructure. Apparently he’s building a lot of ground infrastructure.
How much of this is building infrastructure, and how much is it just disabling opponents by hiring away their staff? Trump might have done something like this in 2016 if he had any real money.
Bloomberg will disrupt his competitors’ campaigns, but this is not the same thing as actually winning voter support.
Bloomberg has a net worth of $61.5 billion. He could, I guess, eliminate the middle man and buy my vote.
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: “A lot of his platform was incorporated into the broader Democratic platform in 2016 when Secretary Clinton was the nominee and more of it has been incorporated since then.”
That’s not a sign that primary voters won’t vote for him. Quite the opposite.
chris
I laughed at Josh Marshall on Tulsi. (Article attached.)
clay
HRC: A certain unnamed candidate might be groomed as a spoiler.
Tulsi: Lies! Neo-liberal! Shillary! Lawsuit! …. Now excuse me as I start my third-party run.
Adam L Silverman
@cokane: That wasn’t my point. My point was then and is now that given his real negatives, not to mention the metric fucktons of 40 plus years of negative information/oppo that is going to get dropped on him like mass drivers from orbit if he is the nominee, his smartest play was to declare victory, state that he’d won the war of ideas, and made himself the kingmaker. Instead he’s going to do to the Democratic Party nationally what he’s done to it in Vermont: burn it down in service of his ego and megalomania.
ruemara
Ah, the way two small primaries with nearly white demographics just is a sign of what all voters are thinking for the rest of the primaries. I leave y’all to unpack why the media and so many are behaving that way.
different-church-lady
So it’s Klobachar’s turn to be flavor of the month, eh?
Anya
Trump is such an embarrassment. No dirty fight is beneath him. What kind of a president gets himself personally involved in dirty tricks and campaign ratfuking? I jut don’t understand how anyone sees this man as deserving to be POTUS. These are the same people who were screaming about the tan suit.
Adam L Silverman
ALEXA!!!!!! Order all the popcorn!!!!! And whiskey!!!!!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I heard about this today, it’s not as clear as it was described to me, but if this is an accurate report it might just tip me into the Klobuchar camp. Hi Bernie People!
Adam L Silverman
@different-church-lady: Can Minnesota hotdish be a flavor of the month?
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: This is a weird, delusional ire. Sorry, but to people who aren’t extremely online, Sanders is the Democrat they know the best after Biden.
He has some general election weaknesses, but all the candidates seem to. Nonetheless, matchup polls look as favorable as anyone else.
Lastly the candidates I’ve generally seen boostered here get less minority support than Sanders, according to polling. Even Warren, who I favor.
ruemara
@cokane: You must be on cocaine.
Martin
@Brachiator: No, apparently this is a real operation. From what I hear, these are good people and part of the operation is coordinating with other races on the ballot. They also feel like this is designed to be a 10 month operation through the general. I think he’s got paid staff in 30 states right now. I don’t think Warren even has paid staff in 30 states.
Honestly, it sounds like the kind of operation we think the DNC should be building. I don’t know if it will remain in place if Mike doesn’t get the nomination, but it sounds like it will.
I admire good execution, and this looks like someone who is serious about winning. Wish I could have put this in Harris’ or Warren’s hands instead.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Both things could be true. A serious campaign effort and deliberately hurting his opponents.
What do you base this hope on?
They mainly needed the cash that Bloomberg has access to. When are the first debates where he might be on the stage?
I also noted earlier that Bloomberg has avoided being interviewed by newspaper editorial boards. This is not the actions of an honest candidate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@cokane:
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: The claim that Sanders burned down the Vermont Democratic Party doesn’t seem to square with the facts.
The national congressional delegations is 2 Dem Senators and an at large Dem rep. The statehouse overwhelmingly Dem in both chambers. That only leaves the Governorship, which is Republican now, and seems to switch hands pretty regularly. But I suspect that office doesn’t matter much given those legislative majorities — same thing is true right now in Warren’s home state for example.
Adam L Silverman
@cokane: As I’ve written here repeatedly: Senator Sanders IS NOT actually a Democrat! He’s still listing himself as an Independent in the Senate and he has reregistered to run for reelection in Vermont not as a Democrat, but as an Independent. Senator Sanders is a Democrat in the same way that I’m a little bit pregnant. He isn’t and I’m not!
Now for a few specifics.
Bill Arnold
@Anya:
Linked by OzarkHillbilly a month ago, but still good:
The Daily Show Presents The Top Ten Obama ‘Scandals’ (Frances Langum, 1/03/20)
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
RE: Bloomberg, 22 percent.
One Twitter comment:
Steeplejack (phone)
@Adam L Silverman:
Mmm, Tater Tots . . .
Adam L Silverman
@Martin:
He stated last week that he’s building an organization to remove the President through the election. And if he’s not the nominee, what he’s building will be deployed on behalf of the eventual Democratic nominee against the President.
Martin
Just saw that Bloomberg today had a call with tech companies asking them to temporarily release their best staff to come work for his campaign. That’s smart – that’s more or less what happened with Obama. What’s different is Bloomberg is asking the companies to vet the staff first – only people that will stay the duration, and only their best staff.
Apparently this is through Nov. regardless of who the candidate turns out to be. And apparently they’re hiring hundreds of tech staff.
This is looking more like a displacement of the DNC for operations than a campaign effort. This is weird.
Adam L Silverman
@cokane: Senator Sanders is not a Democratic senator. He is listed in the Senate as Senator Sanders (I-VT). He is currently registered in Vermont as an Independent and has stated that if he doesn’t win the presidency and runs again for Senate from Vermont he will do so as an Independent. He has been able to pull this off by cutting a deal with the head of the Vermont Democratic Party. They endorse and nominate Senator Sanders, which locks out any actual Democrat who would challenge him, then he refuses the nomination while accepting the endorsement, and runs as an Independent.
Martin
@Brachiator: He should be on stage on Feb 19. Looks like he has the polls now. The number of donors requirement is dropped, but anyone who has earned a delegate also qualifies.
I base the suspicion it will remain from the campaign saying it will, but also the folks getting hired recognizing the difference between a one month tip-up until the primary effort, and a building campaign infrastructure effort. I mean, Bloomberg is rich enough to make the former look like the latter, so I do take it with a grain of salt, but at least on first appearance it looks like the real deal.
Adam L Silverman
@cokane: One final point. I don’t dislike Senator Sanders. I don’t even disagree with him on his central premise, I just think he is monomaniacally focused on it to the exclusion of other significant drivers of problems in the US and internationally. What I don’t like is being gaslit about who he is, what his affiliations are, what he is proposing, who he has surrounded himself with, and what he will or won’t be able to do.
PJ
@Martin: Why would Bloomberg build this to serve anyone other than himself? Do you think he’s just going to turn it over to the DNC if he is not the Democratic candidate? Bloomberg didn’t become a billionaire by giving his terminals away for free.
No matter what he’s said in the past, if this is what he’s doing, I wouldn’t be surprised if he runs as a third-party candidate if the Democratic candidate is Warren or Sanders.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Sanders’ supporters, including people like Robert Reich, always talk about how Sanders’ is running against the Establishment. And the Establishment consists of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
Some supporters that I have gone back and forth with elsewhere in social media have this fuzzy idea of Sanders presiding over some form of direct democracy. Whenever Congress refuses to go along with him, they envision the masses rising up to “correct” Congress.
During the next debate, someone should ask Sanders if he sees himself, as president, as leader of the Democratic Party.
Hell, just ask him if he believes in representative government.
Eolirin
@PJ: He hates Trump.
Lyrebird
@Adam L Silverman:
…but reparations? Apparently still too “divisive” for him. 2019 Coates article here.
Sigh. Am not saying we can only nominate a candidate who supports reparations. I have more respect for the candidates who say “okay here I am in the middle of the road being practical” than ones who cry revolution but don’t listen well to their comrades.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: Revolutionaries who cannot define revolution or rebellion.
Martin
Maybe. Though, since he owns one of those newspapers, he might also recognize the utility of such efforts.
One thing that I think will probably infuriate a lot of Dems (and maybe rightfully so) is that Mike is probably the kind of candidate that will just skip all of the unproductive stuff and insert a whole bunch of new stuff that will work better. Obama did a bit of this with his massive rallies and such, but still kept with all of the traditions.
For example, the major national news right now is that every network went to see 5 votes counted in Dixville Notch.
I mean, is there any better illustration of how pointless our political traditions are? I mean, beyond Iowa?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just saw a tweeted video of The Strokes playing at a Bernie rally. It says so much, a bunch of early-middled-aged white guys who formed their band at some of the toniest private prep schools in Manhattan and Switzerland (Le Rosey fercrissake) playing their ten year old hit for dewy-eyed fans of the millionaire socialist
Adam L Silverman
@Lyrebird: I support reparations, I’m just not sure how you develop the policy and create the legislation and legislative strategy to get it to pass. Same way I feel about a lot of important things. Great idea, now explain to me how we make it happen and how you sell it to the members of Congress who have to vote on it, the citizenry who will have to accept it, and how you will defend it successfully against judicial challenge.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Honestly, when they say establishment, they tend to only mean Democrats not even Republicans. There’s never any real effort to hold the right accountable, everything is always the Democrats’ fault.
That’s what concerns me the most about Sanders. Win or lose against Trump, if he’s the nominee there’s a good chance he burns the whole party down by the end of it all. Everything that goes wrong will be blamed on the party, even the things the Republicans are responsible for. And it won’t just be coming from the media, it’ll be coming from the ostensible head of the party itself, or at least his surrogates and staffers.
Martin
@Eolirin: Yeah, this.
Bloomberg has hated Trump before either of them were politicians.
New York upper class is it’s own thing. Bloomberg is part of that class, Trump is not. Trump has spent his whole life trying to get into that club, and he’s always been rejected because he’s a clown.
But really, I think Bloomberg feels that Trump is a threat to us all.
Morzer
@Adam L Silverman: Congratulations on your impending non-parturition! It’s a sad measure of the depths to which the Democrats have sunk that they didn’t whip Sanders into line on this nonsense years ago. He can’t keep playing the “I am independent” game and then run for the Democratic nomination. It’s utterly ridiculous.
Mandalay
@Adam L Silverman:
This is what Sanders has publicly stated:
Do you think Sanders was lying when he said that?
Eolirin
@Mandalay: Sanders had not made that commitment back when Adam posted that.
Adam L Silverman
@Mandalay: I wrote that before he made the statement. I take the statement as truthful until I have evidence to think otherwise. At this point the problem isn’t with him keeping his word, it is the fact that all of the data we have indicates at least a third of his supporters will not support the Democratic nominee if it is not Senator Sanders. That is the problem. And I’ve yet seen that he has any interest in addressing it.
Morzer
@Mandalay:
Should we trust Bernie the Independent who disowns the Democrats as soon as his latest attempt to use the party for his own purposes has failed? Why did Sanders immediately flip back to being an Independent once his attempt to seize the Democratic nomination had failed? Where’s the trustworthiness in that?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mandalay:
I for one think the demented, narcissistic old zealot will support the the nominee with all the passive-aggressive sullenness he brought to campaigning for Hillary Clinton
Brachiator
@Martin:
RE: Bloomberg not being vetted by newspaper editorial boards.
Well, what is Bloomberg doing with his own news organization?
From media reports:
And what will these people be doing instead?
So much for an independent press.
You know who else thinks that political traditions are pointless? Trump.
I am surprised that Bloomberg pulls a kinder, gentler Trump, with real money, and people who should be more critical of his efforts all start to swoon.
The only things I know about Bloomberg is that he hates Trump and has real money where Trump’s fortune is largely vapor. But I see nothing so far that indicates that Bloomberg should seriously be considered as a presidential candidate.
Martin
@Mandalay: Do you think Bloomberg is lying saying the same thing?
Just curious.
Morzer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s not the Messiah. He’s just a naughty very very old boy.
Mandalay
@Adam L Silverman:
So? You still chose to repost your accusation again tonight.
Well if you take his statement as truthful you have no business posting in this thread that “his supporters and his monomaniacal focus on economics issues, coupled with his ego, will drive him to run as an independent”.
Well fine, if that is your opinion. But stop accusing Sanders of planning to run as an independent in this thread, especially since you no longer even claim to believe that.
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
This is not unusual for some types of purity party lefties. They always hate people who would otherwise be allies with greater ferocity than they hate their supposed real enemies.
Martin
@Brachiator: No, I agree regarding the news organization. I don’t know how we can have candidates that not only own a news outlet, but one with his name on it.
But that’s a larger problem for the country. Expect every Republican to decide that Citizens United is the worst USSC decision ever once Bloomberg News starts going after Trump economic policies, without explicitly endorsing a candidate.
I’m not saying this is a good way to do this. I’m saying it is how we do this now, but you can only change things after you win, not before.
Mandalay
@Martin:
Link?
Morzer
@Mandalay: Out of curiosity, what did Sanders run for Senate in 2018 as? Was it as a Democrat? Or was he magically reborn as a pure and virgin Independent despite having run for the Democratic presidential nomination just 2 years earlier?
janesays
@Martin: Well, I guess it will probably all come down to South Carolina for Uncle Joe. If he loses as badly tomorrow as he did in Iowa, he needs to either win South Carolina outright, or come in a very, very close second (within 5 points or less) to a candidate who is doing no better than him going into that primary. If he finishes behind Bernie and Buttigieg in New Hampshire and then finishes behind one of them again in South Carolina, it’s hard to see how he could possibly have a path to the nomination from there, given that the only thing keeping him going right now is the belief that the black vote of South Carolina will be his salvation. If he loses there as well, he’s got absolutely nothing left.
Adam L Silverman
@Mandalay: Your really do NOT want to be telling me what I do and do not have any business doing. Have I made myself clear?
Morzer
@janesays: I think that any sort of loss in South Carolina (or South Cackalackie, as SNL would have it) is the end for Biden. Second place in a state that’s supposed to be proof that African Americans love the Bestest Friend Of Barack really won’t cut it.
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: “In a five minute keyword search I can get returns on enough negative information from Senator Sanders’ 40 plus year dalliance with the most extreme left ideas and the most extreme foreign leftist leaders to put together dozens of oppo dumps and negative ads.”
If this is true, then it means these issues aren’t all that buried. I’m aware of Sanders past comments on the USSR and even places like Chavez’s Venezuela. They’re not good, but I don’t think most persuadable Americans will care.
Moreover, the Republican Party will have more than a billion dollars to pile up a mountain of real and fake shit on whoever wins the nomination. I think everyone is vulnerable. You’re engaging in an argument that Josh Marshall just recently described this way: “[The polls] also certainly suggest that if you think Sanders is a weak general election candidate that must be based on the predicted effects of attacks that have yet to happen. Because 51-43 is pretty solid.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-polls-suggest-dems-should-chill-the-f-out
But that’s a speculative argument. And it’s one that I don’t think will have much sway. Americans don’t give a big crap about foreign relations, nor especially the Soviet Union anymore. Trump heads the Republican party after all. Matchup polling isn’t necessarily rock solid evidence, but it is better than speculation, imo.
Martin
@Mandalay:
Kent
They put up with his bullshit, because the alternative: having him take all his marbles and run to the Green Party or some new Sanders-created Democratic Socialist Party and running as a 3rd Party candidate like Ralph Nader 2000 on steroids, is MUCH worse.
It’s like the old saying. If you owe the bank $100 dollars, that’s your problem. If you own the bank $100 million dollars, that’s the bank’s problem.
Probably all we can do is wait for him to get old and die. Which would probably be the end of it as he hasn’t put any effort in developing a bench to follow him.
Adam L Silverman
@cokane: We don’t run national elections for the presidency.
https://balloon-juice.com/2020/02/10/public-service-announcement-ignore-the-national-polls/?updated=1581397775#comment-7579365
Morzer
@Kent:
But…but… what of the intellectual and spiritual colossus that is Nomiki Konst?
janesays
A few points…
I hope you’re right that he doesn’t get the nomination, but I think it’s extremely Pollyannish to be saying “when he doesn’t get the nomination” at this point. Statistically speaking, his odds of winning the nomination are as good as any other candidate in the field right now, which is why the prediction markets are where they are right now. If he wins New Hampshire tomorrow, he’s the frontrunner. No getting around that.
Having said that… Bernie Sanders does a massive ego, a bit of a messianic complex, and a monomaniacal focus, but he’s not a complete moron. There is no path to the presidency for him through a third party candidacy, and he knows that. Not only does he know that, he knows that he’s got enough support behind him that a third party run would
all butguarantee Trump’s re-election. If Bernie Sanders runs third party, it’s over. And by “it”, I mean the United States of America, literally. Because Donald Trump will 100% get re-elected if that happens. Sanders would come in a distant third place in that scenario, but he would absolutely siphon enough votes away from the Democratic nominee to assure Trump retains Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and pretty much every other state he won in 2016, and might even pick up a few more.Now, if Sanders goal is to go down as the man who single-handedly ended America by selfishly running a pointless third party candidacy that handed Donald Trump a second term on a silver platter, I guess I could see it happening. But I don’t think his goal is to be the most despised man in the history of the Democratic Party. However much anger we felt toward Ralph Nader in 2000 or Jill Stein in 2016, go ahead and multiply that by a thousand, because the damage Sanders would do would be so much worse not just in its immediate impact of swinging the election to Trump, but in the long term negative impact a second Trump term would have on all of us. The man would probably have to have private security around him every day for the rest of his life.
Anywho, I’m not gonna spend much time freaking out about this scenario, because if it happens, I’m immediately making plans for my life as an American expat living in Canada. If Sanders runs third party, it’s over. Trump gets re-elected. We’re finished. The end.
Tulsi Gabbard can do whatever the fuck she wants, because she’s an irrelevant nobody. She doesn’t have the pull to cost the Democrats the election in November.
Kent
The DNC has two measures of seriousness for political candidates: Fundraising and polling. Bloomberg is doing pretty well on each measure. He’s also smart enough to know that it’s not a good look for someone worth $50 BILLION to be pleading for donations from working class people, just to meet some DNC fundraising criteria for the debates.
I’m not a particular fan of Bloomberg, but he is a damn serious candidate. And he has more executive government experience than everyone else in the field except Biden.
Mandalay
@Martin:
Well I hadn’t seen those recent comments from Bloomberg before, but they are very reassuring, especially this:
It’s impossible to envisage him running as an independent after publicly stating that. He’d have zero credibility if he did.
Morzer
@Kent: I don’t feel any particular passion for Bloomberg’s candidacy, but I will say that his news platform is generally interesting, informative and has done some of the best coverage of Trump in recent years. That speaks well of Bloomberg to me.
janesays
Is that merely anecdotal, or is there actually solid empirical evidence to back that up? People say a lot of things in the heat of primaries and don’t always follow through on them in the general election. The percentage of Sanders primary voters in 2016 who voted for Trump in the general election that year was lower than the percentage of Clinton primary voters in 2008 who voted for McCain in the general election that year.
Anyway, if it’s actually true that at least a third of his supporters won’t support the eventual nominee, then we’re probably completely fucked. So I really hope it isn’t true.
Mandalay
@Adam L Silverman:
Oh get off your high horse with your veiled threats, internet tough guy.
You posted something really dumb and got called on it. No biggie.
Grow up.
Adam L Silverman
I’m going to make one last point and then I’m done for the night before I write a comment that we all regret.
I posted that excerpt from my 27 JAN 2019 post not to specifically focus on Senator Sanders, but Congresswoman Gabbard in light of Gary Johnson’s recent activities on her behalf. That is why I both highlighted that part of the paragraph and reposted the tweet reporting Johnson’s activities on Gabbard’s behalf. The reason I didn’t parse the excerpt is it wouldn’t have made any sense out of context.
If you want to be pissed because you’re part of the Revolution, that’s nice. Enjoy yourselves. As someone who is a specialist in low intensity warfare, I’m going to say it again, since the first dozen or so times hasn’t seemed to sunk in: The last thing anyone should want is a revolution in America. They are never non-violent and peaceful. They are never run from or by the grassroots. And the people who get hurt the worst are the ones who least deserve to suffer.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: I think Bloomberg would make a great presidential candidate, in a universe where there’s a not insane Republican party and he’s running on their ticket.
He’s an awful candidate for the Democratic party, but he isn’t an awful candidate.
Anne Laurie
The Woke Hipster bitching I’ve seen about Klobuchar’s hotdish is just this side of delusional. Maybe their parents didn’t serve that stuff — because the noisiest of them all seem to be third-gen trustafarians who grew up with nannies and high-end food delivery services — but the average American voter is perfectly happy with ground beef and tater tots. Even cream of mushroom soup (which, like those tater tots, is a house brand at Trader Joe’s).
Hell, from my experience of ‘higher end’ burger joints, if you studded the name-brand version of shepherds pie with terms like angus beef, bechamel, and gruyere... these guys would pay $20 a pop for it, and coo about “comfort food reimagined”.
Kent
We taste-tested it in our house last week. I was faithful to the recipe posted to her web site despite my desire to jazz it up. The kids were kind of meh but they ate it. Couple of days later I swapped the filling out for a traditional shepherd’s pie recipe and used the tots for the topping and they ate that up.
If she catches fire I guarantee we’ll see variations on hot dish suddenly appear on the menus of hipster brew pubs all over blue country.
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: Nobody serious is advocating for a revolution that breaks with the rule of law. This strikes me as a straw man argument. Just to take one example, Sanders has said he’s against packing the Supreme Court. Buttigieg and Warren have said otherwise. That’s kind of more revolutionary along the lines you’re talking about than anything out of Sanders’ mouth.
cokane
@Adam L Silverman: The national gap is large enough to be noteworthy in national polling. But, fine. Check the battleground state polling. My point continues to hold.
janesays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This takes us back to the debates of old about generational designations…
Is it accurate to characterize people born right on the cusp of Gen X and Millennials as “early middle-aged”? Three of the five members of The Strokes were born in the 1980s. Using this logic, Anna Kendrick is just shy of becoming “early middle-aged”. Does not compute.
Damn, I’m getting old.
Martin
@cokane: Keep in mind that California’s size and magnitude of leftward bias is probably good for around 3%-4% in the polls. NY is another 1%. So, in national polls the top 4%-5% Dem advantage yields zero electoral votes. So just subtract them right now.
There are no red states with comparable effects. In fact the next two most lopsided states are IL and MA, both in favor of dems.
So in that Quinn head to head poll, read it as Pete/Warren even to -1%, Amy +1%, Biden +2%, Bernie +3%, Bloomberg +4%. If CA and NY break even harder for Dems (as I suspect they might) then you might need to take another point or two off of those.
janesays
@Kent: Bloomberg is not doing well on fundraising, because he’s not doing ANY fundraising for his own campaign – it is 100% self-funded. He’s paying for the whole operation out of his own pocket. And relatively speaking, it’s chump change for him – ho could spend $1.5 billion on his own campaign and he would still have a net worth of $60 billion.
The metrics initially set forth as criteria for debate qualification included benchmarks for the number of donors each candidate needed by a certain point, with a minimum number of donors in a minimum number of states. The point of that requirement is not to reward the candidate who raises the most money, but to reward candidates who can demonstrate they have broad enough appeal to convince hundreds of thousands of people to give money to their campaigns.
Mnemosyne
@janesays:
Those numbers don’t take into account the people who voted for Jill Stein — as several of Sanders’ top staffers did — or who didn’t vote at all. His numbers on those measures were much higher than Hillary’s disgruntled voters in 2008.
Also keep in mind that, as with Hillary-to-McCain voters, there was probably a certain percentage of Sanders-to-Trump ratfuckers who never intended to vote for the Democrat in November and were just hoping to cause problems. This is why open primaries are a terrible idea.
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
You realize that Adam is a front-pager who can mute or temporarily ban you at will, right?
Anne Laurie
Bloomberg’s a technocrat. He’s made himself a fortune by seeing how tinkering at the edges of a system, to make (individually) tiny improvements, can snowball for the right person. Remember, the paradigm-breaking Bloomberg terminals originally sold stock data to traders just a little bit quicker than they could get it for ‘free’ — and that minimal advantage was valuable enough to the traders that they made him a billionaire. Maybe they were stupid to let him get away with it, and maybe in a just world such ‘corner-cutting’ wouldn’t be needed (or permitted), but Mike saw his path and took it.
He’s done essentially the same thing in his political career, to date: Seen a path through tiny, incremental improvements to get what he wants. He ‘bought’ the best advisors, and also a lot of important political activists, by spending judiciously for small local initiatives & party machinery. He bought cooperation from the high-dollar taxpayers on one side, and the city unions on the other, by promising each of them a carefully calibrated minimum of what they wanted. Nobody loves Bloomberg, but everyone whose help / vote he’s needed has been willing to bargain with him, because he puts his money into places where other politicians are too aloof or too partisan to bargain — and his offers might be so low as to be just this side of insulting, but he doesn’t demand more than he can pay for, and he pays what he offers.
This (AFAICT) is pretty much removed from what ‘normal’ politicians do, because ‘normal’ politicians want to be noticed & applauded — the best of them, e.g. Barack Obama, for being really good at what they and making a mark on history. Mike Bloomberg wants to smooth some of the unnecessary edges in our current regime, to make the things he finds desirable more likely to occur. Because humans don’t always know what’s “best” for them, this is gonna cause controversy when he fails to understand, for instance, that stop&frisk damaged a lot of individual lives while performing the laudatory goal of ‘getting the guns off the street’ (and also, covertly, giving the police union the support they felt former mayors refused them).
I didn’t think, after all those years of ‘free media’ poll-testing, that he’d ever actually jump into the presidential race… but Trump has been a norm-breaker for Bloomberg, as in so many other ways. I’m sure Mike would like to be President, but I’m still not sure how much he personally thinks he’ll be President. But what he will be — and this will happen even if he drops out right after Super Tuesday — is the national kingmaker. Whichever Democrat eventually wins the nomination, and if Mike has anything to do with it the White House, will owe Mike, for judicious cash infusions, for helpful ads at the right time, for campaign ‘volunteers’ from Amazon. He won’t insist on a good spot on the inaugural dais… but he won’t need to!
ETA: Think Harry Hopkins, under FDR.
janesays
@Mnemosyne: That’s entirely possible, I honestly don’t know. But the two studies highlighted in that WaPo article on the 2008 Clinton to McCain voters showed a shockingly high defection rate of 24-25%. The 2016 Sanders to Trump defection rate was between 6-12%.
Mnemosyne
@janesays:
1. The original “Operation Chaos” as touted by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show was in 2008 and was specifically designed to take primary votes away from Obama. That means that there was some percentage of outright ratfuckers at work who never intended to vote for any Democrat in the general election.
2. That 6 to 12 percent defection rate in 2016 was FAR more consequential than in 2008. It actually flipped the election, while the larger 2008 rate didn’t have any impact on Obama’s margin of victory.
I suspect that the number of defectors was very similar between 2008 and 2016 — the main difference was that there was a plausible third party candidate in 2016 who absorbed the other 10-15 percent of the votes.
Also, as far as I know, Hillary never hired anyone who bragged about voting for McCain over Obama as a major staffer for her campaign.
Mnemosyne
@janesays:
Or, to put it another way: in 2000, Ralph Nader got a tiny percentage of the votes in Florida, but those votes managed to tip the state to Bush. If Gore had won, no one would give a shit about Nader voters and their stupid “Republicrats” rhetoric.
Martin
@Anne Laurie: Yep. Though he doesn’t seem to be setting himself up as kingmaker. That’s what’s kind of cool about this.
If he were kingmaker, he’d be funding the candidate that he wants. Instead, he’s funding the candidate that can come out on top of a billionaire who controls the levers of power. If they can beat him, they can probably beat Trump – and they’ll have his money to do it. If they can’t beat him, then he’ll have proved his point – that you need to be a billionaire who controls the levers of power to do it.
But I agree on your assessment of how he sees this. In a raw capitalistic sense, this is all efficiency. Bloomberg terminals are just a more efficient way of doing the task, and efficiency is worth money. I suspect this is just efficiency as well – rather than watch the DNC bumble through this (I don’t think they’re bad at this, but they’re spreading money far and wide and not building much infrastructure) he’s just going to cut a check.
And for the people wondering why Mike will blast through $1B on what looks like a charitable effort, that’s like 2-3 months income for him. I doubt he’s even bothering to add it up yet.
janesays
The largest state with a substantial Republican lean (>15%) is Tennessee, which is one state behind Massachusetts in population (but equal in Electoral Votes). After that is Indiana and Missouri. The Democrats have five states larger than Tennessee where they won by at least 15% last time – California, New York, Illinois, Washington, and Massachusetts, and New Jersey just missed that mark in the last election (14.1% MoV).
Republicans have a 15+ point advantage in 14 of the 25 smallest states, while Democrats only have a 15+ point advantage in 3 of those 25 states (Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont)
Makes sense – the largest states have more major urban centers, so the likelihood of a Republican blowout in such a state goes down dramatically. Trump won seven of the ten biggest states in the nation in 2016, but he didn’t win any of them by more than 9 points, and four of them he won by less than 4 points.
jl
@Martin: “There are no red states with comparable effects. In fact the next two most lopsided states are IL and MA, both in favor of dems.”
I’m not sure you’re correct. When I look at Fivethirtyeight state polling, I see a lot of red states with +20 to +30 for Trump: Alabama, West Virginia, Utah. None as big as CA or NY, but there are more of them. Some of those states haven’t had any polls for six months, but not sure they changed much. The lists of current swing states I see have about 37 percent from supposedly reliably blue states around 33 percent from reliably red states, and 30 percent from swing states.
I don’t see any reason to try to back out of national polls in an unreliable way that is unduly depressing. Just look at prospects in swing states
@janesays: you are talking about 2015 results, right? I think current polling for 2020 is more relevant. but, thanks for the informative breakdown.
Anne Laurie
@Martin: Yup — efficiency, for couch change. And there’s the ‘very publicly shivving Donald Trump, for all the world to see & admire.’
And one more factor: Mortality. Bloomberg, technocrat that he is, probably has his own mortality calculated to within months, using the best available medical advice. He now has the chance to add President Bloomberg to his eventual obituary, and more money to spend than he otherwise seems to have a use for. His kids are doing perfectly fine on their own, he’s not interested in high-end wine or food, buying expensive art or other collectibles, fancy travel, competitive manor-building, being seen in public with the greatest possible number of high-dollar women, or any of the other methods rich people use to build virtual pyramids for themselves. Might as well take a shot, while he’s got the health for it!
John Revolta
@Anne Laurie: Or think Richard J. Daley of Chicago. A lot of people think Da Mare got Kennedy the Presidency. You can argue the point, but the fact is, Daley and his wife were the first people Kennedy invited to the White House.
John Revolta
Aaaannnd DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. delivers a landslide victory- 3 out of 5 votes- to Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
janesays
@jl: I assume he meant lopsided BIG states that have more than ten Electoral Votes. There are a gazillion lopsided small states that lean heavily Republican, but they have much less impact on the overall national popular vote. If a Democrat wins California by a 30% margin, it can have tilt the overall national popular vote by 3 or 4%. If a Republican wins Wyoming by 50 points, it’s still not going to move the national popular vote by more than 0.1%, at most. Alos worth noting, California has 12.1% of the entire U.S. population, but they only get 10.22% of the electoral votes. Wyoming only has 0.18% of the U.S. population, but they get 0.56% of the electoral votes. California got 1 EV for every 258,000 voters in 2016, while Wyoming got 1 EV for every 85,000 voters in 2016.
My numbers above your post were from the 2016 election.
Mnemosyne
@John Revolta:
I just saw some more Bloomberg ads on Facebook and I’m starting to think that people are underestimating one of his biggest draws for Democrats: he is VERY anti-gun and has been supporting groups like Moms Demand for quite a few years. That’s a very appealing message for most Democrats, including African Americans. ?
Martin
@jl: But the size matters. It matters a lot for national polling. ⅛ of all voters are in California, so a poll of 100 people will hit 12 Californians, and if 8 will vote for Dems and 4 for Trump. The Dem is already showing a 4% advantage in the polls even though those extra 4 Dem votes yield no EVs.
No other state has that kind of effect – where standard polling inside a state can exceed the MOE of a national poll.
Sab
@Mnemosyne: I know my mayor endorsed him, which was quite a surprise. His anti-gun position is a big deal. A lot of mayors support him, because he has been the only big voice out there helping them on the gun issue for years.
Sab
OT: Have we heard from our jackal in Lancashire UK? NW Europe just had a hurricane (in February!) and I thought she was near Morecombe Bay on the west coast. We have heard from Sloane Ranger and Tony Jay in the last couple of days, but not from her. I hope she is okay, and checks in with us.
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman: 218-60-1-5.
The formula hasn’t changed.
Chris Johnson
@Mandalay: I don’t assume Bloomberg isn’t a lying sack of shit, because there’s no such thing as an honest billionaire. BUT. I can make an argument for why he’d want to do that and keep his word.
If he completely replaces the Democratic Party with his own loyalists, by bribing and hiring and dumping money on them, and then uses the result to elect Sanders or Warren, we’ve got a President that’s elected, a Republican former president that’s out and that was completely owned by Russian billionaires, a Republican party that is mostly owned by Russian billionaires, and a Democratic party that is owned by the guy who wanted to get all the Russian billionaires to move to New York City.
That’s pretty dark, though it doesn’t preclude letting one of the lefties win the Presidency. Then what?
I feel like if the Republican party is solely the voice of Vladimir Putin, and the Democratic party becomes solely the voice of Michael Bloomberg, that doesn’t count as ‘democracy’. And it is literally what people like Bernie and Liz Warren have been warning about for years. Maybe it’ll just have to happen. I don’t know what the end game will be.
Still won’t vote for Bloomberg if he takes (buys) the nomination. I will vote Dem even after the entire party is purchased by Bloomberg: one thing about it, it looks like it’ll end up Bloomberg vs. the lefties and Biden doesn’t stick around under those circumstances.
When people are puzzled by polling that shows black support for Bloomberg after what he did in NYC? That’s the same pragmatism that was supporting Biden. ‘which Dem will defeat trump’. Bloomberg says ‘yeah, but I’ll spend a billion dollars to defeat Trump’, and there are some black voters who go ‘that’s plausible, you have the money, you’re spending it, okay’.
I don’t agree with the logic of it: Bloomberg is only a more capable Trump and is literally breaking our democracy by the day. He is sabotaging our admittedly fucked system, because he can. I do understand how people can see that as power.
Morzer
@Martin: Every time you say “Size matters” a very small part of Trump shrivels further into insignificance.
yellowdog
@Brachiator: From what I’ve seen in polling, Biden is losing voters mostly to Bloomberg.
jl
@Martin: OK, but you need to work the math for all the states. When I do what I think is your calculation for CA I get 1.5 to 3 points in national polls due to CA. But I do same calcs for groups of red states with bigger margins for Trump, I get similar offset. So seems to even out with the polling data I see in 538 aggregates..
I still think better to just look at swing states.
Brachiator
@Kent:
This is in part how the Democrats ended up with Bernie Sanders.
Nonsense. His past experience does not translate to president-level abilities.