While explaining the way voters ping-ponged from Biden to Bloomberg after Iowa and New Hampshire and then back to Biden after the Vegas debate, Joy Reid described Warren’s evisceration of Bloomberg as a “murder-suicide” because Warren slayed Bloomberg — without helping herself.
Fair enough!
In case you need another one, here’s a reason to be glad it’s looking more like a Biden vs. Trump general election than Sanders or Bloomberg vs. Trump: we won’t have to hear pundits call it a “subway series” election.
Open thread.
guachi
I sit here bizarrely hoping Bloomberg maintains 15% threshold (especially in CA) so he can give all of his delegates to Biden instead of them mostly going to Sanders.
dmsilev
Acela series election?
lamh36
Every time there’s another vote dump in Texas, Biden leads grows!
ya’ll w/66% in Bidens got 30.3% and Bernie’s got 28.8% and the areas still out are the ones with heavier population of African Americans. The same day votes have been breaking for Biden. So everytime there’s a dump…the early vote numbers run for Bernie…but the same day voting ticks Biden up!
Ya’ll Biden may actually WIN Texas…wow! Biden ahead by about 20k votes!
These are numbers from AP
MobiusKlein
I get the impression that Warren is more a darling of the online world, versus the general Democrat. I don’t quite understand it, but she has under-performed her blog side reputation.
Is it that Dem voters are gun shy about picking a woman, after 2016?
Betty Cracker
These hours-long lines at the polls are a disgrace. We’ve got to fix this shit.
mapaghimagsik
@Betty Cracker:
Agreed. Its not like you can’t deploy more machines.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Remember the Maine! And all down-ticket races
I am disappointed
RandomMonster
Okay, I’ll admit I’m an idiot. What is a Subway Series Election?
dmsilev
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
But is your brow furrowed? That’s important.
dmsilev
@RandomMonster: From baseball, an all New York series.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: Joey B does like trains.
guachi
@RandomMonster:
New York City where two different NY baseball teams play at different ends of a subway line.
So Trump/Bloomberg would be the political equivalent.
Morzer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thoughts and prayers for Susan Collins. Now, bring up the heavy artillery!
Betty Cracker
@guachi: Or Sanders, since he’s from New Yawk.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Joy Reid also told a very illuminating story about Biden and Bloomberg at the Brown Chapel AME Church, the church where the Selma March was organized, where the commemorative marches begin. Biden was invited up on the dais, Bloomberg had to sit in the Pews. When Bloomberg got up to speak, people stood and turned their backs. Bernie’s absence was… noted. As was Pete Buttigieg’s presence.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I prefer “public service.”
Ken
@RandomMonster: “Subway series” doesn’t quite work, since Trump has changed his residency to Florida.
(I go back and forth. Does he imagine this makes him immune to prosecution by New York? Or is planning to dump Pence and have one of his kids as VP candidate? Or am I attributing thought and planning to what is fundamentally a howling void of pure instant id?)
Betty Cracker
I wonder if Warren will hang in there long enough for me to vote for her in two weeks. Maybe not. This has been a very bad night for her.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@RandomMonster: Bloomberg against Trump.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken: Why not both, and the kid’s name is Ivanka.
Betty Cracker
@Ken: Lots of New Yorkers move to Florida. We Floridians call them “New Yorkers who moved to Florida.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: you can always write her in, can’t you?
I think the O’Bros said she raised thirty-five million last month. I can’t imagine that won’t last her a while.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: I can’t explain the OC situation. I’ve never seen lines in OC. We do a great job of running elections here.
That said, OC is a voter choice county, so everyone is mailed a ballot. You can mail it back, drop it off in person anywhere, or go hit a voting machine. I think the Registrar expected most voters to mail back or drop off, and UCI students all decided to hit the machine. I think most ballots are now drop-off, not machine.
NotMax
@Ken
In that case, schlubway series.
;)
RandomMonster
@dmsilev: @guachi:
Thank you both. There are poor benighted men like myself who were never raised with any sports appreciation, and who took no natural interest in it either. It’s been a mild deficit for my career.
guachi
@Betty Cracker: It has been. Won’t hit 15% in any of the four largest states voting. She’s only viable in white states.
Exit polling shows her constituency is white, female, college educated, very liberal. I can see why she does well among BJ commenters as we are largely white, college educated, and liberal.
Jackie
Lyrebird
YAYYY may it continue!
re: various remarks about Joey O’Biden, Biden was condescending to Warren back in the day, and worse to Anita Hill, true. He also was the main force behind the violence against women act, like that it exists at all. His smile is not going to make McConnell cooperate, but some of that glad handing he does is how he got the first VAWA passed. He married and clearly still loves a really smart woman. He stood up for his debate with Alaska person, I forget her name thank FSM, and won because he is a real human being.
My 2 cents.
Okay my 2 cents’ worth, just for the cool pedants who hang here.
West of the Rockies
@MobiusKlein:
I think you’re right: some are fearful of electing a woman. I voted HRC. I voted Warren in the primary (but really wanted Harris). Maybe we’ll get our first female VP this year?
Fair Economist
@guachi:
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Huh, Kornacki– whole seems to be running on fumes– is pretty much saying Biden has moved out of reach with delegates
catclub
From just this morning:
Bloomberg came third and got 16% in Arkansas. Polls. Biden got 40%
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
If (BIG if) her campaign’s strategy evolved to aiming at the chancy opening of hanging in until it is a three-way race, then it could (vigorous emphasis on could) be game on for her.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Bloomberg is never going to live down Stop and Frisk
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@catclub:
Polls aren’t destiny, for good or ill
Jackie
@Ken: I’m looking forward to the Donald/Ivanka ticket.
Amir Khalid
@guachi:
For some reason, “subway series” makes me think of sandwiches.
lamh36
@Betty Cracker: she’s fund raising tonight, I think she’ll will
I saw many EW supporters saying that the strategy is a brokered convention. Which I assume to mean she stays in?
IDK enough, but I assume a brokered convention would not be a good idea?
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Looks like Bernie made an error insisting “most drug dealers are Black”
Morzer
@Ken: Trump has better connections to the GOP crooks like Pam Bondi in Florida.
guachi
According to exit polls, Sanders is beating Biden among hispanic voters by 34 and he won Texas hispanic voters by 21.
NotMax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
Kornacki is such a knob.
As for Williams – well, the less said the better. Cringeworthy but scratches the surface.
pattonbt
Question re delegate proportioning if you do not make the 15% threshold. if Candidate 1 has 35%, Candidate 2 has 25% and all others under 15% and the state has 100 delegates. Does Candidate 1 get get 58 delegates (35/60*100) and Candidate 2 get 42?
AxelFoley
So where’s that new Bernie troll now? Don’t see him talking shit in this thread.
Redshift
@MobiusKlein:
Absolutely. 2016 was so close that any one of a number of different factors could have flipped it. I know people whose reaction was that if we’d nominated a safe white guy instead of a second groundbreaking candidate in a row, we would have won. And I don’t think they’re wrong, but I do think it’s way too easy for that kind of thinking to turn into a perpetual “it’s not quite time yet,” so I’ll always fight it.
clay
@MobiusKlein: I don’t know that Dems are gun-shy about nominating a woman, necessarily. But Warren is in a different situation than Clinton was in 2016.
Clinton earned her way to the nomination by spending decades forming relationships among Democratic leaders and constituents. Warren, for her many strengths, just hasn’t been involved in electoral politics for that long, and doesn’t have those kinds of connections. She had to build her goodwill and presence during the campaign, instead of it being “pre-loaded”, as it were.
This also explains why Joe is gaining. Like Hillary, people are coming out to support him because he has come out to support them, for years.
Fair Economist
Because Warren is a genuine movement/policy candidate it makes perfect sense for her to try for queenmaker at a brokered convention. She will be quite content to have somebody else nominated, as long as they will support enough of her policies. I would think she’s far more likely to cut deals with Biden – she has a lot of great plans, and he could certainly find some to support, and believably commit to supporting them.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I wouldn’t mind personally. I think the Dems can comport themselves well while hashing out an agreeable deal. And the novelty of a brokered convention in a modern election could generate some publicity.
It’s all in how they handle it.
Miss Bianca
@guachi: I wonder why that is? I mean, I really do wonder. That result does not seem intuitively obvious to me.
NotMax
@pattonbt
Not that cut and dried. Of the total delegates there are some who state-wide delegates and then there are also delegates awarded on the basis of wins in each Congressional district. Plus there are superdelegates, on paper officially uncommitted.
Kent
MSNBC is saying how Biden lucked out in that Bloomberg is mostly viable in the states that Sanders won and non-viable in many of southern states where Biden ran away with it. So the net effect of Bloomberg is to supress Sander’s delegate haul and inflate Biden’s delegate haul.
Raven Onthill
@Fair Economist: How is she going to earn enough delegates to pull that off? And how is she going to get anything useful out of Biden? They’ve been diametrically opposed for decades.
Ken
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Tonight’s exit polls show that large numbers of people switched their vote preference since Friday. This also shows why you can’t trust polls, at least, not Friday’s.
West of the Rockies
@NotMax:
Just out of curiosity (you don’t like Brian Williams), who do you like as an anchor?
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Fair Economist: Hard to be a kingmaker with only 16 delegates.*
* per NYT delegate counter.
oldgold
@NotMax:
No, she is finished. Probably should have joined Pete and Amy yesterday. Would have avoided the embarrassment she suffered today in her home state. That is going to leave political mark.
That expressed, I hope she does stay in because it hurts Sanders.
guachi
@Miss Bianca: I don’t know why Sanders does so well among hispanic voters. It’s certainly worth looking into as it’s very important in Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.
Unfortunately for Sanders, three of the five states with the highest percentage of hispanic population have already voted.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@RandomMonster: To further confuse you, when the Dodgers and Angels play, it’s called “The Freeway Series”.
lamh36
MSNBC interviews a man who waited FIVE HOURS in line to vote at TSU in Texas.
Texas GOP should be fuq’n ashamed!
Krope, the Formerly Dope
If anything, she has more ambitious goals. If Joe had a slight plurality and Warren could put him over, I think she’d have great leverage to ask him to put her anti-corruption measures or something like worker representation on corporate boards into the platform. Maybe direct some appointments.
Whoever you liked in the primary, they’re still going to be a powerful public official.
Martin
@pattonbt: Yes. Basically anyone under 15% is just ignored.
That was why this move yesterday needed to happen. As of a few days ago Bernie was the only candidate over 15% in CA so he would have taken 100% of delegates.
Not quite because there’s also the district delegates, but he’d still have gotten the majority of them as well.
By removing 3 candidates we got the field down small enough that some of the other candidates would at least have come in over 15%.
Martin
@lamh36: I agree. The situation at UC Irvine is a mystery to me, but I’m confident it’s not deliberate. I’ve voted there multiple times before and never had a line
But Texas is completely deliberate. Their vote by mail rules make that clear enough.
Redshift
@lamh36:
I don’t think it’s a good idea. Were these supporters actual campaign surrogates, or just supporters online? Thing to get more delegates or hold out until the point when her delegates would put a candidate over the top, as leverage for promises to push her ideas, sure, but I hope she’s smart enough not to take it all the way to the convention if she can’t win.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I hope for once and all the media can stop talking about crowd size.
All Sunday long, they blathered about the size of Bernie’s crowds in Boston – and he lost the state by nearly 10 points.
Mike J
Polls have shown that more of her voters prefer Biden as their second choice over Bernie.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/28/new-national-poll-answers-critical-question-who-is-second-choice-democratic-voters/
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: The state of Boston?
West of the Rockies
Pete has 26 delegates. Does he have any say to whom they would go? He’d throw in with Joe if he could.
guachi
@Kent: They can say that but… not really. At least as of now with statewide results. States where Bloomberg is viable and who is leading.
Arkansas – Biden +18
California – Sanders +10
Colorado – Sanders +13
Tennessee – Biden +16
Texas – Biden +2
Utah – Sanders +16
Where it actually matters is California as there are 415 delegates and Sanders is ahead of Biden by 10 (which is about 50% more votes than Biden has so if Bloomberg isn’t viable in CA at the end of the day then Sanders gets 2/3 of his delegates)
EDIT: Exit polling has Bloomberg at 10% but currently he’s at 18%. If Bloomberg falls below viability then Sanders will likely tie Biden for the evening and Bloomberg will drop about 100 of his 200 delegates. If Bloomberg holds on in CA it’s probably over for Sanders.
Fair Economist
@Raven Onthill: She may end up with enough delegates in the end. It helps to be the best on the debate stage. And Biden is a pol. If he needs to do a deal, he will, and she knows he’ll stick to it. As I said above, politics makes strange bedfellows.
I just chipped in another donation to her. Supporting the best is worth it to me.
TaMara (HFG)
People in Texas have stood in line for 6+ hours. God bless them and their dedication.
Wapiti
@Ken: My snark as to the change of residence: Trump and his oldest three adult children are under sanction from running charities in NY. By moving to Florida, they can all participate in the Presidential Library grifting opportunity there.
TaMara (HFG)
@lamh36: I suspect she’d lose a lot of goodwill if she aimed for that. I know I would lose respect for her. But if she’s in it to eviscerate Sanders like she did Bloomberg, I’ll buy the popcorn.
Feathers
@Redshift: She didn’t create all those plans for nothing. She wants them to survive even if she isn’t the candidate.
Fair Economist
@Mike J: Your reference actually indicates Sanders is the most common second choice for Warren supporters.
oldgold
@Mike J:
You are citing a January poll. In terms of this fast changing election the poll you cite from January is so old that Dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.
lamh36
yeah…they are def dragging. all the early voting in mostly in…it’s same day voting that being counted now and Biden has been taking lead in those all night.
Betty Cracker
@guachi: From what I’ve read, the Sanders campaign had a great ground game in the Southwest and CA that focused on Hispanic voters.
m0nty
Not sure when the Biden VP pick talk starts, but it occurs to me that Sanders’ strength with Latinxs is something Biden needs – just not from Sanders himself. Who else in the field has that sort of appeal?
Heywood J.
Biden and Bernie, Bernie and Biden, sprinkled with Bloomberg. Awesome. Every four years, the democratic process is a harsh reminder that we get the people we deserve.
The mediots get some of the blame for their sexism and just generally ignoring Warren, but libraries are free and people make choices. I’m just glad I’ve spent my working life striving to insulate myself from those choices.
It’s still sad. I’ll vote for whoever the nominee ends up being, but I genuinely like Warren, and she’s far and away the most qualified, and would actually do something. To have to settle for one of these doddering fart-knockers turns my stomach. It’s bullshit.
Also, the voting process in this country is a goddamned disgrace.
Martin
@West of the Rockies: The party rule is that delegates for dropped out candidates become unpledged in the first round. However, if the dropped out candidate endorses, then the delegates become pledged to the endorsed candidate.
Endorsements have a functional role for democrats. So assuming Biden makes it to the convention, both Pete and Amy’s delegates are now his delegates. So count them in his lead for now.
Feathers
Oh, joy. Marianne Williamson just referred to tonight’s election results as a Biden coup. https://twitter.com/MollyMcKew/status/1235068946421706753?s=20
DB11
@Heywood J.: Yup. Couldn’t agree more.
Omnes Omnibus
@Feathers: So what?
Groucho48
Speaking of brokered conventions, suppose we go into the convention with Biden having 40% of the delegates and Sanders having 35%. When Sanders suddenly decides that it’s fine if the minority candidate (him) wins, how may hours will it take for all the Sanders supporters to do a 180?
In Texas, my understanding is that Sanders won the early voting, but Biden is winning all the late and today’s voting, and is nursing a moderate lead. I wonder if the same thing will happen in California? His numbers do seem to be creeping up and he’s passed Bloomberg. (YAY!)
guachi
@Martin: That’s what I thought. It’s why it’s so important for Bloomberg to maintain viability in as many places as possible so he can give 100% of his delegates to Biden instead of any of them being allocated to Sanders.
Or if you’re a Sanders supporter why you’d want the exact opposite.
L85NJGT
About 35% of the expected vote in CA is counted and Wilmer can’t break 30%
Just a disastrous night for that campaign – give Tad Devine some credit for getting what he did out of that shop in 2016.
Feathers
@TaMara (HFG): And Sanders needs it. Apparently, Marianne Williamson deleted her coup tweet, but it is only echoing what I’ve been reading all day. I don’t even know if Sanders can reel this back in now.
Scott Alloway
@RandomMonster:Used in Major League Baseball terms for a New York Series when the Yankees played the Dodgers or the Giants, pre flight to CA., Now used against the Mets
(LOL),
.
lamh36
@guachi: MSNBC just projected that Biden WILL meet the delegate threshold in California.
dogwood
@Fair Economist: I guess I’m baffled about all these scenarios where Warren becomes the big power broker at the convention. She had a horrible night. Finishing 3rd in her own state should be humbling and a definite wake-up call. Her base of white, educated female liberals will probably stick with her, which will be good for Bernie.
Raven Onthill
@Fair Economist: but these would be concessions in specifically the areas which Biden has strongly supported for his entire career. I don’t see how he can make them. Still, I grant the possibility. She might be able to get some modest measures out of him, or slide something past him. I for-sure would not like to play chess with Warren.
Feathers
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s just watching the authoritarianism of not respecting elections and the process creeping into the Democratic idea chamber. Yeah, she’s a crackpot, but it is fodder for the Both Sides Do It crowd.
Kent
My experience in TX is that Black and Hispanic voters do not always see eye to eye and do not always support each other’s candidates. I don’t know if that is happening at all here. But there could be a little bit of reverse psychology here. If Biden is becoming the preferred candidate of the Black community, some Hispanics may be looking elsewhere. I just don’t know.
guachi
@Kent: The Democratic party better pick Sanders’ brain because if hispanic voters vote in larger numbers in Texas and Arizona the Republicans are in deep trouble.
Kent
Except they count them in reverse in TX and CA.
In TX (where I used to live) all the early voting is done at regular polling places on regular voting machines. So those machines are set aside and ready to count first thing on election day and usually the first component of the vote that gets counted. Therefore, one would expect TX to trend more towards Biden as the last votes get counted, which would be the late same-day votes.
By contrast, my understanding is that in CA the early vote is on paper and can trickle in by mail for days. So it is often the last component of the vote that gets counted and the late counted votes would be expected to trend more Sanders as the vote slowly gets counted over the next few days.
It also means that Biden walks out with even more momentum on paper after election day and that Sanders may do some catching up later when no one is paying attention anymore.
Martin
@guachi: Right. My guess is tomorrow they run the math and realize that they aren’t helping the candidates he wants to help while he stays in.
Honestly, if he bails out and endorses Biden, that just adds to the momentum.
Martin
@Kent: Yeah. Ballots need to be postmarked today. But most people seem to be dropping them off at a polling center. So they’re in, but they need to be scanned. And at least in a general election, there’s millions of them, so it takes a while…
Groucho48
@Kent:
Ah! Thanks for the explanation.
lol chikinburd
While I’ve lost hope of her being even a brokered-convention-compromise nominee, I’d like to see her stay in as long as possible solely to make Sanders surrogates alienate even more people with displays of entitlement of the kind Rep. Omar has already made.
Eolirin
@Kent: I think it may just be that Sanders has been showing up and no one else has. Biden has been resource and staff poor this whole time, so he wouldn’t have been doing any particular outreach, and he doesn’t have any historical connections to the Hispanic communities or strong surrogates that would appeal to them.
Kent
I’m talking more about a local effect in communities in TX where the Black and Hispanic community often have competing candidates for the same seat and there is some antagonism because the Hispanic population is growing faster and often in the same big city areas like Dallas and Houston and is displacing traditional Black candidates.
When you extrapolate up to voting for a white candidate in the general election it is something different. My comment was more along the lines of all the black folks swinging to Biden because of the venerable Clyburn endorsement in SC is going to be much more of an argument to the Black population in TX than the Hispanic population in TX who aren’t going to care much about Clyburn and what Black voters are doing in SC
Again, just speculation on my part.
Betty Cracker
@Heywood J.: Amen to all that.
Repatriated
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
You know who really ought to be concerned with crowd size?
The guy whose opponents are waiting in 5-hour lines in Texas just to pick the person who’s going to beat him in November.
That is a crowd of committed voters.
Betty Cracker
Talcum X has gone round the bend. ?
joel hanes
@MobiusKlein:
I don’t quite understand it.
The media ghosted Senator Professor Warren in the reporting of results from Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Didn’t even mention her.
And I really wish she hadn’t raised her hand when Chuck Todd took a show of hands for M4A. People with insurance from their employers do not want change.
But I think much of it is spelled m i s o g y n y
And also strategic fear, after 2016, that a woman might not, when the nation so desperately needs it, defeat Trump. I don’t remember a time when so many Democrats I talk to were thinking about voting strategically instead of for the candidate they preferred on the merits.
MuckJagger
@dogwood: The polls — and perhaps they weren’t anywhere near accurate — showed her running neck and neck with Bernie for first place in Massachusetts. While Bernie seems to kept most of his voters, if the polls were accurate it looks like a *huge* chunk of her voters switched to Biden.
The further problem with her being a kingmaker at the convention is that based on tonight’s results, Bloomberg could likely wind up with more delegates than Warren. Given that there’s no way in hell Bloomberg’s delegates would go to Bernie, it’s far more likely that any kingmaker deal would come from him and not Warren.
I’m a Liz fan, but like the saying goes, sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a train.
lamh36
Joe Biden projected winner in Texas per MSNBC
I’ll be damn. Delegate math…Biden just a few delegates above Bernie
JWR
Here in SoCal, Christy Smith, the woman running for Katie Hill’s sadly vacated seat, is winning, (Yay!) but it might go to a runoff, and Steve Knight is running 3rd. But Gil Cisneros seat will likely go back to Young Kim.
Kent
By contrast, no paper ballots at all in TX. Early voting is all done at super-precinct locations. I lived in Waco and I think there were two of them, one on each end of town. For the two weeks prior to the election you just went to the early voting precinct at your leisure and voted on regular touch-screen voting machines. Once early voting was over (usually the weekend before election day) they pulled all the early voting machines, pulled all the stored data, and just saved it to run first thing on election day. Completely different than CA and the early vote in TX is always reported first because it is counted first.
Eolirin
@Kent: Sanders has been doing better than anyone else with Hispanics (though not getting a majority even there) since before the Biden surge, and Biden’s numbers have never been great with them. I don’t think that explains much.
I’d want to see the cross tabs on Sanders’ support though, because it may turn out to be heavily skewed by the under 35 numbers, in which case it may just be a factor of Sanders doing exceptionally well with young people regardless of ethnicity.
Kent
Was that the race with that Sanders Young Turk turd in it…forgot his name??
DB11
For tonight, thrilled that Bloomberg failed and Bernie faded, but Joe Biden as the frontrunner when Liz is on the ballot? WTF? Total malarkey!
Doesn’t anybody else think that there’s a significantly greater than non-zero possibility that one or other of Bernie or Biden won’t make it to the convention intact, for one reason or the other?
In that case, all of the odds must be re-set / probabilities re-calculated — and the stupidly binary, fear-driven potential outcomes that many have seemed to predicate their ‘strategic’ votes on will have come to naught. And they will have failed to vote for the person they really thought was the best potential president.
This is why we can’t have nice things: we lack the courage of our convictions. W.B. Yeats nailed it a century ago :
(and yes, I know this quote is over-exposed, but damn it’s dead on — especially for this moment in history)
lamh36
@lamh36: At this point…even if Bernie wins Cali, it won’t be a blow out and Biden makes the threshold for delegates so Bernie gets majority, but not ALL Cali’s delegates.
Kent
I would not be surprised if the Hispanic vote trends MUCH MUCH younger than the Black vote. A lot of their parents aren’t citizens and not particularly engaged compared to the Hispanic youth. By contrast, older Black voters are the traditional core of the party.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Has any Juicer put on their HAZMAT suit and ventured to DKos to gauge their reaction to tonight’s surprise defeat?
Kent
@DB11: Yes, I think it is utterly insane that in this timeline and in a country of over 300 million people, our three final candidates are all white men over age 78.
But if the choice is three old white men over age 78, might as well pick the YOUNGEST of the bunch….Biden.
VP pick is going to be utterly critical. We need a VP who can pick up the banner and carry it over the finish line at a moment’s notice. No time for on the job training.
Captain C
NBC just called Texas for Biden.
patrick II
@Redshift:
Some theoretical guy would have won, but in practice it Hillary hadn’t run Sanders would have won the nomination and lost by bigger numbers.
DB11
@Kent: Touché!
Eolirin
@Kent: He has the added benefit of being the only one that’s capable of projecting any sense of decency.
Though I think when all is said and done Bloomberg and Warren will have roughly similar delegate counts. If he edges her out, it won’t be by much.
Kent
2016 SHOULD have been a 3-way race between Clinton, Biden, and Warren. But both Biden and Warren stepped aside. That’s what opened up the door for Sanders and everything that followed.
joel hanes
@Martin:
The situation at UC Irvine is a mystery to me
Where I voted in Santa Clara, they printed a fresh ballot for each person as they checked in.
The printers were the bottleneck.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Chris Hayes hilariously tries to downplay Biden’s victory in Texas by saying it’s a small delegate win (4% lead and growing)
Sad.
patrick II
@Kent:
It was pointed out here the other day,but amazing enough that it bears repeating, that if Bill Clinton and George Bush entered the race they would be the youngest male candidates by 5 years.
Omnes Omnibus
@DB11: So you reject the possibility that the majority of people voted for the person who was their top choice?
Martin
@Kent: Oh, yes. In CA that’s massively the case. Median age of latinos in CA is around 27. For african americans I think it’s around 36. For whites it’s something like 51.
This is the demographic sea change that just crushed the GOP. Over 50, it’s a majority white state. Under 30 it’s a majority latino state. This is why CA is moving left to the tune of hundreds of thousands to millions of voters each election.
lamh36
@Kent: this is what Maria Theresa just pointed out on MSNBC.
Majority of Latino voters skew younger, and Bernie does better with younger voters. Black voters skew older, white voters also so Biden tend to do better…except the case with young Black voters, many of whom can be swayed by their older counterparts.
Now the question is, in a general election, can those young Hispanic voters be counted on to vote for Bernie in numbers that will over perform the more reliable Black voters? I’d bet no. The Dem party can do more to turn out those voters that DON’T involve sanders at the top of the ticket especially since he has a deficit with Black voters.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: and Sam Seder still trying to flog the “younger voters will turn out in the general”
Martin
@joel hanes: We don’t do that here. We use machines for in-person voting. I guess I don’t understand why those students didn’t just mark up the paper ballot sent to them and drop it off. Every voter here is mailed a ballot and given the choice to drop it off.
Heywood J.
@joel hanes: Part of it is sexism, part of it is for the same reason they call Sanders a commie who wants to gun Tweety Matthews down in Central Park — because they would actually do something as president. That is unacceptable to the insect corporate overlords, who are furiously masturbating to the prospect of a bland “come together” Biden-Klobuchar ticket that will preserve their tax cuts and fracking and student loan usury.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Of the limited choices for running the rodeo, Joy Reid or Ali Velshi.
Kent
Right, and in the south the Black vote we have been reading about all evening in places like SC, NC, VA, etc. that is landslide Biden is mostly older, like the white population. So completely different population cohort and it is ridiculous to talk about “people of color” like they are all the same thing.
DB11
@Kent: Agree on the VP pick: the only silver lining of a Biden candidacy for me would be a possible Harris choice.
But I see a huge risk to the party (and the country, and therefore the world) of Biden screwing this up again, as he has in every other nomination campaign he’s competed in. I guess I’ll just white-knuckle it until the finish, then start worrying again for the general.
I won’t continue to harp on it (for long!), but sweet baby Jesus… how did we end up in this depressingly familiar place when the process started with such hope and enthusiasm and with so many new, diverse, YOUNG and impressive candidates.
I’ll say it just this once, then shut up: Biden isn’t up to the task.
joel hanes
@Heywood J.:
insect corporate overlords
Do they use N-rays to make the Democratic primary voters do their bidding? Or satanic spells? Or what?
Barb 2
@Jackie:
I saw bits and pieces of the 2016 GOP convention. One clip that creeped me out – Trump as if he were trying to feel his daughter up. He appeared to be on something. She quickly brought up dad’s hand from her butt to her waist. Other women commented on that moment and I knew that I did see what I thought I saw.
So yes he would love to have daughter dearest as VP. There are a few women who can stand him, would do anything to be VP.
Heywood J.
@DB11: Great call. Been thinking about The Second Coming and Ozymandias a lot lately.
JWR
@Kent:
Cenk Uygar, (CA-25), and yes, it’s the same seat Hill held. He’s currently in 4th place, at just under 5%.
PJ
@DB11: Biden trumps that tonight with his quote from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Heywood J.:
because they would actually do somethingas president.
Yeah, Bernie would, like, totally fire the Senate, man
joel hanes
@DB11:
how did we end up in this depressingly familiar place
It was a pretty good bet once both Sanders and Biden had decided to run. That’s why some of us were praying that neither would run.
That said, I’m so amazingly glad that the Democratic Party changed the rules to allow Bloomberg on the stage so that SP Warren could shiv him for the good of the nation.
Kent
I read somewhere, maybe the NYT, that the 2018 blue wave was mostly NOT new voters or young voters at all. It was mostly former centrist Republican voters who flipped. In other words, the electorate stayed mostly the same between 2016 and 2018 but enough people in the middle changed their minds and flipped.
Honestly that’s the Biden target audience, not the Sanders (find millions of new young voters) target audience.
This was the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/opinion/bernie-sanders-2020-election.html
Heywood J.
@joel hanes: They ignore the most qualified candidate in the race, and instead get losers like Claire McCaskill and James Carville to spout their paid mumbo-jumbo about “electability” and such like.
Then they craft a “comeback” narrative for Good Ol’ Joe, the comfortable old shoe. Well, I have flat feet and a bad back, and I can tell you firsthand, there’s nothing better than a new pair of shoes to put a spring in your step.
Heywood J.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: RIght, I have no doubt that Good Ol’ Joe will be able to reach across the proverbial aisle and get Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey to work with him on stuff. Because deep down, they’re really good guys and we’re all ‘murkins.
Have I got that right? I don’t think I have the latest edition of the official hymnal.
Eolirin
@Heywood J.: Please. That narrative only exists because black people decided to make Biden viable. Without Clyburn, without SC, we’re not talking about how Biden’s making this huge comeback. We’re talking about how Sanders has an unbeatable delegate lead after having swept all of the delegates in CA with 30% of the vote.
Kent
Governing is hard work and takes skill and experience. My fear is that the young Sandernista ideologues would rush into power in various Federal agencies and spend their time doing a lot of performative lefty photo-op bullshit like multi-cultural composting or solar panel installations in the Bronx and not to the hard boring work of rebuilding the core of the Federal government after 4 years of Trump.
The work ahead is mostly going to be boring, tough, and bureaucratic. Making up a whole bunch of Green New Deal sort of “initiatives” that generate a lot of meetings and photo ops but don’t actually change laws or regulations will be a waste of time compared to rolling back Trump era regulations and rebuilding the Federal workforce.
Warren is the one who gets this more than anyone. Sanders the least. That is the difference between the two of them.
DB11
@Omnes Omnibus: Not at all. But you must have read here and at other places all of the people that said Warren was their favorite, but they were afraid of Bernie, so they were voting Biden.
The difference between today’s vote and last week’s polls show a big swing. Did people really chance their minds about who best represented the policy preferences and political values? Or were they afraid — having been convinced by a media narrative and some polls of questionable validity — and then acted out of their fear.
Who knows how many people that represented in the aggregate or what share of the total vote — but that dynamic is toxic to democracy. And it was one of the main reasons it was so easy for the media to disappear Warren from contention with so little push-back from the public. ‘Cause too many Democrats quickly bought into the bullshit due to their Trump-induced political PTSD.
Way too easy to manipulate people out of fear of a perceived binary outcome, that’s a constructed, self-fulfilling narrative, not facts or math… as many assert.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Heywood J.: the way to get around them is to beat them. There are no One Weird Tricks. Neither bellowing nor repeating the word fight four times a minute gets around the Constitution.
Kent
Good news then. I knew I was supposed to despise him from this blog. I didn’t know any more about the race though.
DB11
@joel hanes: That was a thing of beauty, forever!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The slow and hard boring of hard boards, as somebody used to say
well, as a certified, neo-liberal corporatist sell-out, I think that would be a fine thing.
Heywood J.
@Eolirin: No, Biden has long been anointed the “electable” one, while the pigskin prognosticators spent months in the fall and winter guessing about the I’ll vote for a woman, just not that woman demographic.
We’ll see. Again, Biden at least can be counted on to surround himself with qualified people. But I’m looking forward to the next round of weird, made up stories about getting arrested with Mandela, or how he’s going to “work with” open traitors like McConnell and Graham.
Some people want a comfortable old shoe, to go back to what they thought they knew. Some want actual change.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Heywood J.:
they just seem to have no idea how to achieve it
Heywood J.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree with that. But when I hear Biden saying he can “work with” the very people who screwed his administration out of a SCOTUS judge — among dozens of other things — I quite reasonably wonder just what in the hell he’s talking about.
All the hard work in the world won’t make a damn bit of difference, if one fails to recognize exactly what one is up against. The Republicans are not his colleagues or his friends. They are openly sabotaging the well-being of the nation, and need to be treated as such.
DB11
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t know: Elizabeth seems to have a pretty good idea (and a track record ) on how to foment, plan and implement change.
Not sure how one can convincingly argue otherwise.
JWR
@Kent:
Was just reminded that there were 13 candidates, so it was always gonna go to a runoff.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Heywood J.: did you hear Biden tonight say he wanted to take back the Senate? Did you hear him endorse and urge his supporters to support Jaime Harrison the other night? Did you see Mark Kelly endorse him? Who do you think Cal Cunningham and Sara Gideon and Barbara Bollier want at the top of the ticket?
Maybe stop obsessing about standard political boilerplate and think about the big picture and how things actually work?
Eolirin
@Heywood J.: He really hasn’t. He’s been struggling to fund-raise, the poor showings in Iowa and NH were damn near fatal to his campaign. No one was banking on him, that’s why Buttigieg was surging. SC completely changed that, and that was driven entirely by black people turning out and voting. And Clyburn had a ton to do with that, but without it, there’s no Biden candidacy. Voters decided this. Black voters decided this.
Media can only amplify what’s already there. We’re not yet at a point where they just make shit up and that flies with enough people. Without actual on the ground support, none of this is possible. He did what Warren would’ve needed to do in order to have had a chance; he won. He won big. That wasn’t because of the media. His momentum was helped by it, but it wasn’t started there.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DB11:
Okay, seems to me you’re putting a lot of weight on the CFPB– a fine thing, but she didn’t “foment” much change as a candidate. Her health care plan fell flat, and her other Big Bold ideas didn’t seem to inspire many voters, so she didn’t get to implement them. Maybe she can do it from the Senate. She’s not gonna do it from the White House.
You should put your energies toward making her part of the majority.
Cckids
Mayor Pete could run in every presidential election for the next FORTY YEARS and would just then be Biden’s age. It’s ludicrous.
SFAW
@West of the Rockies:
Ivanka? [shudders]
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
My (perhaps worng) memory is that Shaun King did some good reporting during/after Ferguson and similar occurrences, but in the last year or so, he seems to have drunk too much Bernie Kool-Aid, or jet-packed the shark, or something like that.
SFAW
@Cckids:
Hell, Harold Stassen might be within spitting distance (age-wise), were he able to run this year.
Chris Johnson
@dogwood: It’s not a question of becoming ‘the big power broker’. It’s a question of getting her platform, which is the Democratic platform, built into… well, the Democratic platform. It’s a question of who runs what.
If we had Bloomberg sweeping absolutely everything, we would be looking at tax cuts, austerity, and a coronavirus response designed to encourage pharma companies to ‘innovate’ by giving them a lock on profits, and it would cost every American $2000 out of pocket. (I can say that as Bloomberg is NOT sweeping everything).
We need pretty much the opposite. Which is NOT Bernie Sanders: he’s like the lefty Bloomberg. We need the ideas expressed by Warren over her career, not ‘Warren as the kingmaker dictating who shall live and who shall die’. It’s policy we need. Biden hasn’t got it: his support contrasted with his record shows that he’s personally faithful to those who help him. Fine, so now Warren has helped him a LOT. Let’s see him keep faith with her and delegate power to her: everytime someone does that, the results are awesome.
Bill Arnold
@Heywood J.:
These made up stories and false narratives do not spring forth fully formed in the minds of journalists. They are fed to them, by other parties, hostile to progressive causes and/or the US. Democrats, and their allies, will, this election and probably forever more, need to fill those minds with other, true stories and narratives, and if necessary make a case or implied case that they would be profitable.
Or at the very least, supply the raw material and relentlessly distribute it. Sucks, but the authoritarians win otherwise.
Richard Guhl
There was always a coalition of voters who were going to be a hard nope on Bernie, and they were just trying to figure out who they were going to give their votes to.
Rep. Jim Clyburn said enough of this dithering, choose one; I choose Joe.
In my opinion this has nothing to do with policy, because all of Bernie’s proposals are within the Democratic wheelhouse.
No, this was a gut level choice based on trust and affiliation. To me, Bernie is simply insufferable and incapable of learning.
How can anyone work with a guy who believes and acts as if he’s the only one who’s right, and if you don’t agree, you’re awful?
Anon in WV
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Yes, indeed. In the long ago when I was around people buying and selling drugs on the open black market (which doesn’t refer to the race of the vendors!) none of the sellers and Very Few of the buyers were black. Perhaps in areas where most of the population is black that might hold true.
I do have the impression that many black sellers have white buyers, which would make those deals 50/50, as drug deals have at least two participants, perhaps Bernie is unaware of that aspect of a market, iot takes both buyers and sellers to make a market, ask Mr Bloomberg! An imbalance in buyers and sellers will cause changes in the price equation, like the stock market lately.