As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Last month, Twitter changed the way it did account rounding. This month, I’ve found a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts. Since the methodology has changed twice in the last two months, consider this a rebasing post, from which we can track actual changes next month. Because of the change, change rates for those with over 1 million followers are taken from Social Blade’s Last 30 Days count. The changes for those with under one million followers hasn’t been so radical, so I can still give rough changes there from the last count.
The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
Warren seems to be adding Twitter followers at a faster rate than Harris, and I actually expect her to pass Harris this week.
Warren seems to picking up new followers at the rate of about 5,000 a day. Bernie seems to be adding about 4,000 followers a day, while Biden adds just under 2,000 and Harris just under 3,000.
For all the eulogies for his campaign, O’Rourke is adding Twitter followers faster than Biden, and indeed slightly faster than Buttigieg.
Both Yang and Gabbard continue to show significant momentum, and I expect Yang to pass Klobuchar in September.
For all the money Tom Steyer is throwing into Twitter advertising (I see tons on my iPhone), I see no signs he’s picking up significant new followers.
Inslee and Moulton are Out, Sanders wants to bring U.S. Postal Service efficiency to powering your house and car, and there’s a rumor Grandma Death may arise from her crypt. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Ten have already hit that threshold: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang.
Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are close. The outlook is currently pretty grim for Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Ryan, and Marianne Williamson.
Gabbard’s campaign is complaining that the DNC has a limited list of “certified polls,” and she seems to have a point; her campaign counted 26 polls that had her at or above 2 percent, and some surveys, like ones commissioned by the Boston Globe and the Charleston Post and Courier, aren’t on the DNC’s “certified” list.
Among the most recent polls, the Economist/YouGov national poll has her at 2 percent, the CNN national poll has her at 2 percent, the Gravis poll of Nevada Democrats puts her at 2 percent, the Politico/Morning Consult national poll has her at 1 percent and the Fox News national poll has her at 1 percent.
That having been said . . . the threshold is 2 percent, people. If consistently getting 2 percent or more of members of your party to make you their first choice is too difficult . . . well, the presidency doesn’t have many easy days. You can picture some of the asterisk candidates muttering that the DNC rules have reduced the debate qualification process to a popularity contest. Well, yeah. A presidential primary is a competition to see who can get the most people to make a candidate their first choice. If Democrats really feel like Gabbard is getting screwed by an unfairly high threshold, they can inundate the DNC with messages of objection. But as is, when YouGov, or CNN, or Gravis, or Morning Consult or Fox News come calling, not enough Democrats are saying that their first choice is Tulsi Gabbard. The Hawaii congresswoman is a heck of a debater who basically vivisected Kamala Harris’s record as prosecutor in the second debate. But for whatever reason, that hasn’t translated into large numbers of Democrats saying, “yes, she’s my first choice.”
For a handful of Democratic candidates stuck at 1 percent (or lower) in the polls, a Wednesday afternoon in the dog days of August could be the moment when their lifelong dream of the presidency dies a quiet death.
August 28 is the deadline for candidates to meet the Democratic National Committee’s heightened threshold for entry into the September debate, and as much as half the field is expected to wind up on the sidelines. Those who don’t make the cut will, at a minimum, be forced to reassess the viability of their long-shot bids. Some of those also-rans may trudge on through the fall, in the hopes of rebounding for the next debate in October, or simply out of a commitment to stay in the race until the first votes are cast in Iowa next February.
But for all intents and purposes, next Wednesday will mark the first great winnowing of the 2020 White House race, when a field of more than 20 is cleaved into two divisions: those who still have a shot, and the rest who don’t.
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, and the author Marianne Williamson are among the other hopefuls who could be on the outside looking in next month.
As of this morning, 10 of the roughly two dozen Democratic hopefuls have secured spots by receiving donations from at least 130,000 individual contributors and registering 2 percent support or higher in four qualifying polls. The billionaire Tom Steyer is close to the marker, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has bought more than $1 million in television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire as part of an aggressive late push to get her to 2 percent in the three additional polls she needs to qualify. (She said this week she has just over 110,000 donors, putting her within reach of that threshold.)
But with a week to go before the deadline, a handful of campaigns have all but conceded they aren’t going to make it, and some have directed their ire on the Democratic National Committee instead.
Hispanic Democrats don’t seem to have a favorite yet.
A lot of polls of the 2020 race don’t include a large enough number of Latino respondents to break out the group’s results. But in its newly released survey, the Pew Research Center interviewed 237 Hispanic respondents who either identify as Democrats or lean towards the party. Biden had the support of 27 percent of Latino Democrats, with Bernie Sanders (15 percent) and Elizabeth Warren (14) the only other candidates in double-digits. Morning Consult found fairly different results among Hispanic voters: Sanders at 29 percent, Biden 22 and Warren 10.
In short, exactly where Hispanic voters stand is somewhat unclear. While basically every poll shows Biden well ahead among blacks, Hispanic voters as a bloc seem more up for grabs.
Perhaps Hispanic voters won’t unify behind a single candidate — unlike black Democrats, they haven’t historically. But if they do, or even if they partially do, that could substantially alter the race — Hispanic adults represent about 12 percent of registered Democrats and will likely be particularly pivotal in Nevada, which votes third in the 2020 primary process, and in California and Texas, which both vote on Super Tuesday.
And Hispanic voters could be especially important to Warren, whose support comes predominantly from white Democrats. If Warren struggles to get traction with black and Hispanic Democrats, that complicates her path to the nomination — both in terms of raw votes and perceptions. White liberal Democrats are increasingly conscious of race, and I suspect that they will be hesitant to coalesce around Warren if her coalition is almost exclusively white. But the Pew poll, for example, found Warren doing better among Hispanic than black respondents (though she still did best among whites), so Hispanic voters represent both a challenge for Warren and an opportunity to diversify her coalition.
According to the Pew Research Center, 2020 marks the first year Hispanic voters will overtake black voters as the largest bloc of eligible minority voters.
Among the national front-runners, Bernie Sanders was the favorite among Democratic Hispanic voters — topping out as the first choice among 40 percent — before Joe Biden declared his candidacy. Since then, Sanders and Biden have been in a dead heat for this group’s vote, with neither breaking away from the scuffle through two Democratic debates.
Black voters still like Biden and Sanders but prefer Harris to Warren.
Also: “Buttigieg overtakes O’Rourke on oldest, richest and whitest voters; both do poorly with black voters.” So much for all that skateboarding…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s whining over the DNC debate thresholds: “Bennet said the debate rules reward ‘celebrity candidates’ with millions of Twitter followers, billionaires who ‘buy their way onto the debate stage’ and candidates who have been running for president for years.” He’s not entirely wrong, but it’s hard to work up much sympathy for someone’s whose campaign was stillborn.
On Sunday, Warren stood on the biggest stage of her presidential campaign for a rally here that drew an estimated 15,000 people — eclipsing an estimated 12,000-person event she held in Minnesota earlier in the week, according to her campaign. Across the country, Biden presided over a series of intimate, subdued events in New Hampshire and Iowa, hosting crowds that numbered in the low hundreds.
Snip.
In June, Warren raised $7.8 million from 320,000 donations, compared to Biden’s $2.2 million from 111,000 donations, according to data from ActBlue, the online fundraising tool. (That is the most recent information available from the site.) Their small-dollar performances have been going in opposite directions, with Biden’s best days coming the week of his launch and Warren gaining steam over time.
But while Biden, for now, has the centrist, establishment path largely to himself, Warren still has Bernie Sanders in her progressive lane. Sanders has an even bigger small-dollar army, and also drew big crowds this week in Sacramento, Calif. and Louisville, Ky. The two are projecting similar messages, railing against the ultra-wealthy, asking people to join a broader movement, and subtly hitting Biden by warning against incrementalism.
Sanders isn’t viewed by Biden’s campaign as having as much room to grow as Warren. But Biden’s camp does see the continued strength of both Warren and Sanders as an advantage, each limiting the other’s ability to expand their base of support. Sanders’ campaign thinks he can eat into Biden’s support because of demographic overlap between their voters.
The two African-American candidates in the race, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have so far been unable to chip away at Biden’s solid lead among black voters, who give Biden a huge advantage especially in South Carolina and other Southern states.
There’s a growing sense that Biden is something of a starter nominee, a candidate that voters can glom onto while they search for someone who better suits their values. “I did not meet one Biden voter who was in any way, shape or form excited about voting for Biden,” Patrick Murray, who heads the Monmouth University Polling Institute (which recently released a poll giving Biden a significant lead in Iowa) told The New York Times. “They feel that they have to vote for Joe Biden as the centrist candidate, to keep somebody from the left who they feel is unelectable from getting the nomination.” JoAnn Hardy, who heads the Cerro Gordo County Democrats, concurred, telling the Times, “He’s doing OK, but I think a lot of his initial strength was name recognition. As the voters get to meet the other candidates, he may be surpassed soon. I would not be surprised.”
“I was the one who taught him the Torah he knows” and what I always emphasized to him is that Judaism’s highest value is protection and preservation of life. This is something that Cory unfortunately violated in the extreme when he betrayed the American Jewish community by voting for the Iran nuclear deal for political gain.
Jewish values are about having core convictions that do not change based on any external benefits, especially when genocide is at stake. While I absolutely agree that President Trump’s words – and not only actions – should be consistent with Jewish values, there can be no question that in action he has been the most supportive President for Israel for security and legitimacy in the history of the United States.
Cory, sadly, has gone in the opposite direction, catering to left-wing extremists who sadly despise Israel and the Jewish people for no legitimate reason. Cory has condemned the moving of the American embassy to Jerusalem, voted against the Taylor Force Act in committee, which would simply have stopped Palestinian terrorists from being payed to murder Jews, and most famously he voted for the Iran deal and refused to even once condemn Iran’s genocidal promises to annihilate Israel.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Buttigieg’s Event in Chicago Black Neighborhood Drew in Mostly White Voters.” He says his campaign isn’t dead, it’s merely resting. Beautiful plumage on the Norwegian Buttigieg. “Buttigieg’s attempts to rally religious voters may not sway evangelicals.” Ya think? His party spent the last few decades telling everyone how much it hated each and every one of them.
In my foreign policy speech earlier this year at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, I called for launching Plan Central America with the same holistic approach that the U.S. brought to Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia, which ran from 2000 to 2015, was successful in helping the Colombian government counter FARC and other extremist groups with a whole-of-government focus on counternarcotics, counterterrorism, sustainable development, human rights, regional security, and trade. Violence was reduced, which encouraged investment to return and the economy to flourish.
It is time to bring that same approach to improve the conditions giving rise to the violence and instability that is sending so many Central Americans to our border.
Plan Columbia is a good model, but applying it to multiple central American countries seems daunting. Because competing drug cartels make taking out one all but inconsequential, and because the immense profits of the drug trade make it far more capable for the apolitical cartels to buy off politicians than FARC (or Shining Path), the problem seems far more intractable. Plus Delaney’s plan is very vague on specifics. Finally, he’s never going to be president, which does rather put a damper on the plan’s chances. Another candidate whose campaign is complaining about the debate rules:
Michael Hopkins, a spokesman for former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, says the DNC had “learned nothing from 2016,” when it was criticized for purportedly favoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the primaries.“By requiring campaigns to hit this arbitrary donor goal it forces campaigns to talk about more divisive issues and not be on the ground and instead go on Facebook and Twitter,” Hopkins says.
He’s not wrong, but Delaney has the money to do social media ad buys to meet the debate criteria, and either he hasn’t done it or his attempts have been ineffective. Almost reasonable moderation doesn’t seem to sell to the Democratic base…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She complained about the DNC’s poll criteria, mainly that Gabbard has broken the 2% threshold in 26 polls, but the DNC says only two are the right polls. More Gabbard attacks on Harris, including the charge Harris put “over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
“I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious,” said a former senior staffer in Gillibrand’s Senate office.
“She comes across as an opportunist to the public. I think that’s the biggest problem,” said the staffer, who criticized the candidate’s flip-flopping on guns and immigration. “I think she’ll have to seriously evaluate her campaign and her candidacy if she doesn’t make this debate.”
“She’s not going to make it,” said another longtime friend and supporter. “What is Kirsten’s reason to stay in? She should find some gracious way that enhances her . . . as she gracefully exits and throws her conditional support to whoever does get [the nomination].”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Big hit piece on Harris from Conor Friedersdorf. I’m going to omit the lengthy details of the Daniel Larsen case and jump to the conclusions:
Harris’s office didn’t merely fight to keep a man in prison after he’d demonstrated his innocence to the satisfaction of the Innocence Project, a judge, and an appeals court. After losing, it fought to keep the newly released man from being compensated for the decade that he spent wrongfully imprisoned.
Harris failed the innocent-man test.
Snip.
In 2010, the crime lab run by the San Francisco Police Department was rocked by a scandal when one of its three technicians was caught taking evidence––cocaine––home from work, raising the prospect of unreliable analysis and testimony in many hundreds of drug cases. It was later discovered that, even prior to the scandal, an assistant district attorney had emailed Harris’ deputy at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office complaining that the technician was “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.”
But even after the technician was caught taking home cocaine, neither Harris nor anyone in her office notified defense attorneys in cases in which she had examined evidence.
“A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared,” The Washington Post reported in March. “It also shows how Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair convictions.”
In fact, her office initially blamed the San Francisco police for failing to tell defense attorneys about the matter. A judge was incredulous, telling one of the assistant district attorneys, “But it is the district attorney’s office affirmative obligation. It’s not the police department who has the affirmative obligation. It’s the district attorney. That’s who the courts look to. That’s who the community looks to, to make sure all of that information constitutionally required is provided to the defense.”
Harris claimed that her staffers didn’t tell her about the matter for several months.
The Wall Street Journal reported in June that years earlier, her aides had sent her a memo urging her to adopt a policy of disclosing police misconduct to defense attorneys to safeguard the right to a fair trial. Police unions, however, were opposed to the policy, and Harris failed to act on it until after the 2010 scandal.
Had she chosen otherwise, she would not have woken up to this San Francisco Chronicle story: “Kamala Harris’ office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday … In a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab.”
Meanwhile, Jeff Adachi, then head of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, declared at the time, “Anytime I’ve asked the district attorney for a meeting, I’ve been told the district attorney is out of town or not available. We need a district attorney who will give this the attention it deserves.”
Busing policies were abandoned because they were wildly unpopular, and there’s no reason to think they’ve magically become popular. So Harris equivocated and then backtracked.
That attacking Biden on busing would paint the attacker into a corner was predictable. It was in fact predicted. See, for example, the end of this article from March in National Review. (Democratic strategists: Subscribe today!)
Going on the offensive and then retreating on busing made Harris seem inauthentic. And the candidate had been dogged by questions of inauthenticity since the start of her campaign because of her waffling on the issue of Medicare for All, the policy at the center of the 2020 Democratic primary.
First Harris indicated at a CNN town hall that she supported abolishing private insurance, as Medicare for All proposes. Then Harris said she didn’t support abolishing private insurance: She tried to hide behind the fig leaf that Medicare for All allows “supplemental insurance,” while obscuring the fact that “supplemental coverage” would be legal for only a very small number of treatments not covered by Medicare for All, such as cosmetic surgery. And cosmetic-surgery insurance doesn’t even exist.
Harris thought she’d finally figured a way out of the Medicare for All mess in July: She introduced her own plan shortly before the Democratic debates. It tried to split the difference: She promised to transition to a single-payer plan in 10 years (as opposed to Sanders’s four-year deadline). This was meant to reassure progressives that they’ll get there eventually while also reassuring moderates that there will be at least two more presidential elections before the country goes through with anything crazy.
Harris’s provision of Medicare Advantage–type plans was also supposed to reassure moderates, but the second debate demonstrated that she still wasn’t ready to respond to the fact that her plan would eventually abolish existing private health plans for everyone, and she has no serious plan for how to pay for single-payer.
Then there were Joe Biden’s and Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s devastating attacks on Harris’s record as a prosecutor at the second Democratic debate. “Biden alluded to a crime lab scandal that involved her office and resulted in more than 1,000 drug cases being dismissed. Gabbard claimed Harris ‘blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until she was forced to do so.’ Both of these statements are accurate,” the Sacramento Bee reported after the debate.
As Harris’s backtracking on busing made clear, no one is seriously considering resurrecting the deeply unpopular policies of the 1970s. But criminal justice is very much a live issue in Democratic politics, and that’s why the attack on Harris’s record as a prosecutor has had such a greater impact than the attack on Biden’s record on busing. Biden continues to do very well among African-American voters, while Harris continues to struggle.
And stunts like this aren’t helping:
They really think that this is cool and that they're making a difference by acting like 12 year olds. https://t.co/1jNswL9Jmb
Update: Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Climate Change dropped out August 21, indicating that either he was a really bad candidate, or that Democrats are lying when they say how important climate change is to them.
He also announced he’s running for a third term as Washington governor.
The Minnesota senator has been mired in single digits in national polls and those in Iowa and New Hampshire, which vote first next year.
Two candidates with better ratings are making moves to challenge the three-term senator in Minnesota. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren drew thousands of people to a town hall in St. Paul, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be at the State Fair on Saturday. He won the 2016 presidential caucuses in the state.
Some people run for president to raise their national profile. In Rep. Seth Moulton’s case, his campaign didn’t even do that. Only 28 percent of Democrats could form an opinion of Moulton in an average of polls conducted between Aug. 1 and 20. This was lower name recognition than any of the other major presidential candidates in that time period and was a big part of the reason why Moulton never reached 2 percent in any poll — let alone one that counted toward debate qualification.
Moulton found himself stuck in a vicious cycle: Without higher polling numbers, he couldn’t qualify for the primary debates … and without being in the debates, he lacked a platform from which to improve his polling numbers. So on Friday, the Massachusetts congressman dropped out of the Democratic primary for president in a speech to the Democratic National Committee. He is the fifth candidate to drop out this summer and the third in just the past nine days. His departure leaves us with 20 major Democratic candidates for president, by FiveThirtyEight’s definition.
A Marine veteran who served four tours in Iraq, Moulton focused his campaign on national security and veterans’ issues; the most memorable moment of his campaign was probably his poignant admission that he had sought treatment for post-traumatic stress. But polls showed that foreign policy is not a top priority for voters (and hasn’t been for the past several cycles), and our research last year suggested that candidates who are veterans don’t win Democratic primaries at higher rates.
Moulton’s path was also blocked by higher-profile candidates who appealed to the same constituencies. If voters were looking for a Harvard-educated veteran around 40 years of age, they already had South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose polling surge came just before Moulton entered the race. Indeed, Moulton admitted to The New York Times that he had made a mistake with his late announcement date, which gave him just seven weeks to collect the necessary polls or donors to qualify for the first debate. And if voters were looking for someone “electable” or who didn’t hail from the progressive wing of the party, there was former Vice President Joe Biden, who has dominated polls among those whose first priority is defeating President Trump and among moderate and conservative Democrats.
Left out of this analysis is the fact he always looked vaguely constipated.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile that’s like all the other O’Rourke profiles. Prep school? Check. Punk rock? Check. Check. Skateboarding? Check. Cult of the Dead Cow? Check. All it’s missing from the checklist is “Kennedy-esque good looks” and “copious sweating.”
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He agrees with Harry Reid that Democratic Presidential candidates have gone too far left. “I think going for taking people’s private health insurance away as part of our health care plan is a stone-cold political loser for us.”
When Warren was in her mid-30s, and a law professor, she for the first time asserted that she was Native American. She didn’t do it by joining Native American groups, by bringing lawsuits to help Native Americans, or by helping Native American students. Never in her life did she do any of those things.
Instead, beginning in the mid-1980s, Warren asserted her Native American claim in the information provided to a law professor directory widely used for hiring purposes. That claim to be Native American landed Warren on a short list of “Minority Law Teachers.” Warren’s supposed Native American status was not disclosed in the directory, only that she was a minority.
It was a particularly devious maneuver, enabling Warren to seek the benefit of being a minority at a time when there was an intense push to diversify faculty, without having to justify her claim to be Native American. Warren would maintain that stealth status in the law directory when she was hired as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, and it was noticed. The Harvard Women’s Law Journal listed Warren on its short list of “Women of Color in Legal Academia.”
Warren stopped filling out the law professor directory as Native American when she gained a full-time tenured job at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. At that point, being Native American and a supposed-minority no longer was needed, Warren had reached the top rung of the law professor ladder. While Warren asserts that she never actually gained an advantage from claiming to be Native American and a minority, there is no doubt that she tried to gain an advantage. When that need for advantage was over, she dropped the designation.
he “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,” said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the implication of being against things, except the current president.”
Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her.
And of course DNC insiders prefer her to Sanders, who had the audacity to attempt derailing Queen Hillary’s coronation…
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter.
It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full ofsmall-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer.
His most foolproof laugh line—“the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math”—suggests that his candidacy is premised on distinguishing himself from the president the same way as his fellow challengers. But it’s not quite that simple. He’s attracting support from an unorthodox jumble of citizens, from a host of top technologists, but from penitent Trump voters, too. He’s one of only two Democrats (along with Sanders) who ticks 10 percent or higherwhen Trump voters are asked which of the Democrats they might go for—a factoid Yang uses as evidence that he’ll win “easy” if he’s the nominee come November of next year. Trump, of course, is the president, and Yang (let’s not get carried away) remains a very long long shot to succeed him.
It’s not that Yang is right about anything, it’s just that he’s offering more novel wrong ideas than the rest of the field. His campaign is selling weed-themed merchandise. With pot-friendly governors Hickenlooper and Inslee out of the race, maybe Yang has an opportunity to be the weed candidate (though Gabbard also seems to be playing in that space). That won’t get you the nomination, but it can carry you into the early primary season.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Wait, do I hear rumbling in the distance?
Biden continues to lead the field despite his senior moments, witches boost Williamson, and Harris has become really unpopular…among black voters. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Caveat: Between a new job and a cold, this week has been a bear, so the clown car update may seem merely large rather than extra-extra-extra large…
Survey USA (California): Biden 25, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 17, Buttigieg 6, Yang 1, Gabbard 1, Booker 1. So Harris is in fourth place in her own state…
Survey USA (North Carolina): Biden 36, Sanders 15, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 1, Yang 1, Booker 1, Castro 1.
Let’s look at how different segments of Democratic primary voters are responding to candidates this year.
Start with white college graduates, once a negligible splinter, now about 40 percent of them, according to exit polls. They’re also the Democrats’ leftmost voters on issues, from impeachment to racial reparations. A post-Detroit Quinnipiac poll with subgroup results shows Warren leading Biden 28 to 25 percent in this group, well ahead of Sanders (11 percent) and Harris, who is tied with Buttigieg (8 percent). White college grads are among the best groups for the articulate Harvard Law professor and the articulate Notre Dame professor’s son.
Black voters, solidly Democratic for a half-century, are about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s useful summary of their primary voting history shows how they’ve voted near-unanimously or heavily for one candidate — Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton since. Note that each of these since Jackson has won the party’s nomination. Big margins among one-quarter of an electorate can overcome small margins among the other three-quarters.
Black Democrats’ clear choice now is Biden (47 percent in Quinnipiac), with Sanders (16 percent) a very distant second, while the white college grads’ favorite, Warren, lags behind (8 percent). Quinnipiac has black candidates Harris and Booker receiving 1 and zero percent from blacks; they do better in other polls but struggle to hit double digits.
Their left-wing issue stances may not help. Echelon Insights polling shows 13 percent fewer nonwhite Democrats identifying as liberal than white Democrats. That suggests that most blacks may not switch to the strident liberal Booker or flexible liberal Harris, as black voters in early 2008 switched to Barack Obama after he showed he could win the Iowa caucuses.
Some Democratic constituencies seem to have an active aversion to certain candidates. Black voters seem to be repelled by Pete Buttigieg; he gets only 1 percent from them in Quinnipiac and has been getting zero percent in other polls. Black voters have been the Democratic constituency least supportive of same-sex marriage.
And very high-income voters, heavily Democratic these days, nonetheless seem to have little use for Bernie Sanders. Among high-income ($100,000-plus) Democrats polled in Quinnipiac, only 6 percent chose the socialist and admirer of 70 percent income tax rates. Similarly, in 2016, he lost the highest-income suburbs — Greenwich, Connecticut; Winnetka, Illinois; Wellesley, Massachusetts; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan — to Hillary Clinton by roughly 2-1 margins.
Lots of candidates put in an appearance at the Iowa State Fair. CNN has details in a sort of low calorie tracker substitute for a high calorie event.
“Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth predicted Friday that most 2020 presidential hopefuls won’t be dropping out of the race anytime soon, saying those who do will most likely wait until late fall.”
“Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.” Mainly an analysis of who Clinton and Sanders voters in 2016 are supporting this time around.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says “Trump reelection ‘more likely with each passing minute.” Wants to go all in on gun control, which is a great way for Democrats to win back the Midwest. Opposes eliminating private insurance.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. In Austin, he claimed he was a different kind of candidate before uttering a string of platitudes. “At 37, he is barely half the age of former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among the frontrunners. Buttigieg would be the youngest Democratic nominee since William Jennings Bryan in the first of his three runs just before and after the turn of the 20th century.” And nothing says “success” quite like a comparison to the Democrat who lost Presidential elections more times than Hillary…
Yet Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland who began his career in business, has outpaced the rest of the field in at least one respect. Of all the Democrats vying to challenge Trump, he is the only candidate to have visited each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. He has held twice as many events in the state as anyone else, spent more than a million dollars on local television advertisements, and staffed up early, opening his eighth office there before the first debates. (Recently, he hired away a deputy state director from Marianne Williamson’s campaign.) Last week, as Delaney drove across Iowa in a crimson pickup truck that once belonged to his father, completing his thirty-fourth swing through the state, he seemed, for once, to be carrying some momentum. During the twenty-four hours following his showdown with Warren, in the second debate, his campaign received a ten-fold surge in fund-raising. “I have people who are moderates who thought I crushed it,” Delaney told me on Tuesday, as he sipped an iced tea at the counter of a diner in Marshalltown, Iowa. “And people who, you know, really are pretty far to the left, who think I did terribly. No one thinks I did an average job.”
Snip.
Delaney has yet to qualify for the third round of debates, in September, which require candidates to reach two-per-cent support in four approved polls and to attract a hundred and thirty thousand unique donors. Earlier this week, a memo from the D.N.C. informed campaigns that the requirements for the fourth round of debates, in October, will remain the same, extending the window for more candidates to qualify and postponing the long-awaited winnowing of the Democratic field. Delaney told me that he views the third and fourth rounds as “somewhat interchangeable.” It’s important to be in one of them, he clarified, adding that he had a “much better chance” of qualifying in time for the latter. When I caught up with Delaney’s wife, April, after his soapbox speech at the Iowa State Fair, she criticized the voter threshold for working against “a more centrist voice.” “To go online, you actually have to have a more fringe message, because that incites,” she said. “We’ll get there. It’ll just take us a little bit longer to get there, because we’re not going to make these impossible promises.”
Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.
Harris national press chair Ian Sams tweeted, “Yo, you love Assad!”, a reference to Gabbard’s controversial visit with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017. He then tweeted a link to an insidious February 2 NBC News story, which asserted that Gabbard’s campaign was the beneficiary of Russian bots.
Harris herself meanwhile gave a sneering interview to Anderson Cooper.
“This is going to sound immodest,” she said, but as a “top-tier candidate,” she could “only take what [Gabbard] says and her opinion so seriously.”
She added Gabbard was an “apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”
The New York Times wrote Gabbard believes the United States has “wrought horror on the world,” and that “critics have called her actions un-American.” Politico denounced Gabbard’s “Star Wars bar scene-like following” and hissed that the Daily Stormer was a supporter (Gabbard has repeatedly condemned white nationalism and sworn off their support). On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin called Gabbard a “Trojan Horse,” while Ana Navarro viciously insinuated Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, was part of a foreign column.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She launched ads in Iowa and new Hampshire in an attempt to get into the third round of debates. Heh: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s son nearly casts ‘vote’ for Elizabeth Warren before mom corrects him.”
That unquestionably is most troublesome for the Harris campaign is the dramatic drop in support from black Democratic voters, down to 1% after reaching 27% in early July:
In today’s results: Biden gets 47 percent of black Democrats, with 16 percent for Sanders, 8 percent for Warren and 1 percent for Harris
Contrast that with the pre-second debate poll from July 29th:
Biden gets 53 percent of black Democrats, with 8 percent for Sanders, 7 percent for Harris and 4 percent for Warren
And also the survey from July 2nd:
Harris also essentially catches Biden among black Democratic voters, a historically strong voting bloc for Biden, with Biden at 31 percent and Harris at 27 percent.
When Quinnipiac asked Democratic voters after the first round of debates who performed the best, 47% said Harris. After her last debate, that number landed at 8%.
Harris’s support among female Democrats has also been in a freefall. She’s at 7% now in comparison to 24% a month ago.
So her support has dropped significantly among two crucial Democratic voting blocs: black people and women.
What went wrong for Harris? I bet Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s epic takedown of Harris on her record as California attorney general helped escalate the fall in her numbers. Gabbard raised incredibly essential issues to black Democratic voters about Harris’s time as AG on criminal justice reform.
Her ongoing racially-tinged attacks against Joe Biden may not sit well with black voters who remember (and are frequently reminded of) his eight years with President Obama.
Other polls taken after her second debate confirm the genuine drop in support for Harris.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad news for Hickenlooper: He’s dead in the water in the Presidential race. Worse news for Hickenlooper: He’s no sure thing in a senate race now. “As we shall not be following up on Hickenlooper’s further and presumptively fruitless activities, we urge citizens to pursue any other avenue of information they deem necessary, which from a practical perspective is, of course, none.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile from ABC News. Though typically thin, it’s the most substantial national news coverage he’s received since he announced. I bet his campaign celebrated with a pizza from Domino’s, assuming they could scrounge up a coupon…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Moulton reportedly laid off half his staff and skipped a major Iowa dinner to attend a reunion of army buddies. He also says he’s not dropping out. The unvoiced word at the end of that last sentence is “yet.”
It’s always important to remember that O’Rourke’s only claims to national fame are losing a Senate election and launching an ill-advised presidential campaign that couldn’t have disappeared from prominence more quickly had David Copperfield been managing it.
The media created Beto, then the media forgot Beto, now the media is heartlessly giving the delusional narcissist false hope.
The headline of the article is ” After El Paso Shooting, Will Voters Revisit Beto O’Rourke?”
That’s a little misleading. In terms of this primary race, the voters weren’t really visiting Beto in the first place. They were mostly passing by and saying hi on their way to Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete.
The article does correctly note that times are tough for Team Beto right now:
A new Monmouth University poll, conducted Aug. 1-4, found Mr. O’Rourke with less than 1 percent of support from likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers. He was at 6 percent in the Monmouth poll in April.
His poll numbers have also been weak in New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as nationally, and his July debate performance and his most recent campaign fund-raising report both fell short of the heightened expectations for his candidacy among some in the party earlier in the year.
Those “heightened expectations” were another thing that the media manufactured out of whole cloth. They were quickly ditched in favor of Mayor Pete, who was to be the MSM’s next hype concoction.
This is the ray of sunshine through all the murders that the Times sees for a Beto bounce-back:
But Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers hope that his impassioned response to the massacre in his hometown, with flashes of raw anger that match the mood of many Democrats, will prompt voters nationally to give him another look. His remarks calling President Trump a white supremacist, and his cussing out of the news media as he urged journalists to “ connect the dots” between the El Paso killings and Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant language and exploitation of racism, drew praise from both liberals and moderates.
Clarifying: “Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers” (all seven of them!) are pinning their hopes for Beto’s return to whatever relevance he had on him saying and doing the same exact things that every one of his primary opponents have been for the past week.
That illustrates the central problem with Beto, which I wrote about back in May when the MSM first began ignoring him in favor of Mayor Pete: under scrutiny, there is no “there” there.
He isn’t a particularly sharp thinker. What attention he’s gotten recently has come from carefully crafted publicity stunts.
What he is is a guy who spent too much time last year reading and believing the hype being spewed about him in the media.
If gun control was such a surefire winning issue for Democratic candidates, Eric Swalwell wouldn’t have dropped out.
“Bernie Sanders staffers manhandle press at Iowa State Fair.”
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Jim Geraghty: “Joe Sestak: The Most Interesting Democrat You Forgot Was Running.” (Sorry, Jim, I have to disagree with both parts of that headline.)
And while Sestak answers questions at length, with streams of consciousness that mix his personal history, tales from his Navy days, and John McCain–style invocations of country over party, he frequently wanders back to his fairly nonpartisan core message, that Americans are grappling with a crisis of unaccountability.
“I think what Americans want today, more than anything else, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, is somebody who they think is accountable to them,” Sestak tells me. “Above party, above ideology, above any special interest, above oneself. I think they need someone who has a breadth and depth of global experience in national security — and by that I mean from trade issues, economic issues, all the way over to military issues, understanding all the elements of our power, including the power from our ideals, and who has experience in that and has learned certain principles in how those are to be used. We need to restore U.S. leadership to a world order that is rules-based in order to protect our American dream here at home.”
“If you have a president who is really trusted, then you can move and advance those policies that actually make the American dream available to everyone. There are too many who have not shared in the benefits of this economy. We can be so much more productive, but how do you move them?”
In a Democratic field with seven senators, three governors, four mayors and four sitting congressman who can easily blur together, Sestak stands out for at least having done significant things in his life outside the realm of politics.
Following in the footsteps of his Slovakian immigrant father, Sestak was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated second in his class. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980 and 1984. He rose through the naval ranks, serving on the U.S.S. Richard E. Byrd, the U.S.S. Hoel, and the U.S.S. Underwood. By 1991, he commanded the guided-missile frigate the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, and by November 1994 he was the director for defense policy on the National Security Council. Three years later, he was commanding the Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 14. (You can watch a snippet of younger Sestak discussing the history of his fleet and duties on the U.S.S. George Washington in this video from 1998.)
After 9/11, Sestak became the first director of the Navy Operations Group (Deep Blue), the Navy’s strategic anti-terrorism unit, and in 2002, Sestak assumed command of the George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group — ten U.S. ships with 10,000 sailors, SEALs, Marines, and 100 aircraft. During a six-month deployment, the George Washington group launched approximately 10,000 sorties, including offensive strike missions, first against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then enforcing the no-fly zone against Iraq.
This is an outright lie, one day after Warren complained of the dangers of rhetoric.
Michael Brown was not murdered. Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in an act of self-defense. This is why the grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder or manslaughter, and it was also the conclusion of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
“Every police officer in America should be offended by Sen. Warren’s ill-informed, inflammatory tweet today,” Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association told me via email. “Holding a would-be cop killer out as some sort of victim or worse yet, a hero, does no justice to the truth or to reconciliation. Her careless words disqualify her from fitness to serve impartially as commander-in-chief.”
“Elizabeth Warren just has a gigantic campaign,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the social justice organization Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “There are counties all over rural areas where some campaigns are just doing tours, but she has staff there. And that was a strategy President Obama had in 2008 when he won Nevada.”
Another Democratic operative put it more bluntly: “Warren has built a monster.”
Among 17 Democratic strategists, activists and experts interviewed by POLITICO for this story, Warren’s campaign was mentioned most often as the most impressive of the field, followed by Harris’.
Williamson floated through the fairgrounds like some sort of celestial being, unbothered by the harsh sun and perpetually surrounded by a throng of sweaty supporters demanding selfies and hoping to soak up some of her good vibes. Speaking at The Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox, a mini stage where candidates take turns offering truncated stump speeches and fielding questions from curious Iowans, Williamson commanded a much larger crowd than either the entrepreneur Andrew Yang or former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who had both spoken before her. The Iowans in attendance may well have known about her low polling numbers—and about recent criticism she’s generated with her comments on science and medicine—but they seemed drawn to her nonetheless.
“We have an amoral economic mind-set that has corrupted our government and hijacked our value systems,” she told the audience, standing onstage in wedge heels and a marbled, blue-and-mauve blazer as a quiet drumbeat played ominously from the speakers. The “conventional political establishment” is the problem, she said, to loud applause, and it’s time for the American people to wake up. “While it is true that sometimes Americans are slow to wake up,” she added, “once we do wake up, we slam it like nobody’s business!”
Williamson’s eccentric performances in the first two presidential-primary debates are what put her on the map for many Americans: Hers was the most Googled name in the hours after the first debate, when, speaking in a quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent not unlike Katharine Hepburn’s, Williamson threatened to “harness love” to conquer President Donald Trump. In the second debate, she promised to combat the “dark, psychic force” of hatred in America, and offered a forceful argument for the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved people in America.
Although Williamson describes herself as a “pretty straight-line progressive Democrat,” she’s taken pains to set herself apart from the other liberal presidential hopefuls. She criticized Elizabeth Warren’s oft-discussed plans in the first primary debate by labeling them “superficial fixes” to the much deeper problems facing the country. “If you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,” Williamson said, citing America’s so-called sick-care system and the need for improved preventative care. “I’ve had a career not making political plans but harnessing the inspiration and the motivation and the excitement of people, masses of people,” she told the audience.
“‘Witches’ for Marianne Williamson Launch ‘Occult Task Force.'” She hired former Sanders staffer and accused serial groper Robert Becker for her campaign. “I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I believe in people rising up after they’ve fallen down…I had not read anything or heard anything that made me feel this was a man who never deserved to work again.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Since I see no sign she’s gearing up for a Presidential run, I’ve moved her out of the clown car proper. However, I wouldn’t rule out those early rumors of her becoming a Biden VP pick coming to pass…
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s post-debate update. Tom Steyer has jumped into the race, but Eric Swalwell has jumped out, keeping the number of accounts tracked at 25.
However, a big caveat: Twitter has screwed up my counts. They loped the last significant digit off accounts over 1 million followers, so 1.44 million became 1.4 million. This means that several contenders had their number of followers go down, but I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from this, as it appears to be a statistical artifact. Likewise, those whose counts have gone up by less than 50,000 may just be enjoying an artificial bump due to a rounding error. Thus this month’s Twitter Primary is only accurate for showing positional differences between candidates, and for establishing a new baseline for future counts, not for showing accurate gain and loss counts.
Conversely, Twitter seems to have added a significant digit for followers above 100,000 and below one million, so 733,000 became 733,400. This will also change gained and lost counts, though not by nearly as much.
The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Twitter does rounding (even apart from this month’s rounding changes), and counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
Due to the rounding issue, for the first time ever, we’ve see candidate follower counts going down, including frontrunner Biden, whose account went down 10,000 followers, with O’Rourke down 40,000 and Gillibrand down 30,000. Due to the rounding issue, I have to assume this is just statistical noise.
Harris and Warren have clearly kept some momentum since the debates, though the rounding makes unclear exactly how much.
By contrast, Castro’s momentum appears to have slowed.
Yang did well, but Gabbard did even better.
Bennet passes Delaney to get the World’s Tallest Midget trophy back.
With the debates this week, we can track changes against the new baseline (and hopefully Twitter won’t change their rounding again).
The next debates loom, Gabbard sues Google, Moulton shoots people in a graveyard, billionaire Steyer begs for pennies, a lot of polls, and your periodic reminder that polls are useless.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Also, consider this advanced notice that you’re not going to get nearly as lengthy a Clown Car Update next Monday, as Armadillocon and work-related duties are going to be soaking up an inordinate amount of my time late this week and early next.
Monmouth (South Carolina): Biden 39, Harris 12, Sanders 10, Warren 9, Buttigieg 5, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1. “Biden has widespread support among black voters (51%), a group that makes up more than 6-in-10 likely primary voters. His support among white voters (24%) is less than half that level. Among the top five candidates, two earn significantly higher support among white voters than black voters: Warren (21% white and 2% black) and Buttigieg (11% white and 1% black). The remaining candidates draw equal support from both groups: Harris (12% white and 12% black) and Sanders (10% white and 10% black).” Those are disasterous numbers for Harris and Booker, who were game-planning for a South Carolina boost.
With the second round of debates looming this week, a whole lot of candidates seem to be angling for a “Kill Biden” strategy. Understandable, but not sufficient, and one wonders how many lines of attack will rehash the culture wars clashes of the last half century (crime, busing, etc.) that Democrats lost the first time around.
Exactly twelve years ago, on July 29, 2007, national opinion polls declared the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination to be one Rudolph Giuliani, the bombastic former New York City mayor. In second place, seven points back, was a retired Tennessee senator and actor, Fred Thompson. Languishing in third place, another five points behind, was the eventual G.O.P. nominee, John McCain. Over on the Democratic side, on the same date, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama by nearly thirteen points. Everyone knows how that turned out.
Twenty Democratic candidates are set to debate in Detroit this week, as countless Democratic voters wonder, with knotted stomachs, whether anyone will emerge to defeat Donald Trump, in November, 2020. So what do the early polls tell us? I asked around and found an array of specialists firm in their beliefs that the polls are iffy. “These numbers are fun, but I wouldn’t put money on anything,” Lydia Saad, a senior Gallup research director, told me. “Historically, among Democrats, if you had to bet at this point, you’d do a better job betting against, than for, the front-runner.” Which can’t be good news for Joe Biden, who is ahead but who slipped after his shaky debate performance, last month.
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, didn’t mince words: “Right now, it’s just too bumpy. There are too many candidates. There’s too much back-and-forth. ‘Oh, the polling shows Joe Biden is the best candidate to win the election.’ And then, after the first debate, ‘Oh, Kamala Harris came up, and she can win.’ And all of it is just bullshit.” At this stage, he said, polls can offer indications of what might happen, but he wouldn’t take them to the bank. One problem is that so little is known about so many of the Democratic candidates. Another is that so few people are paying close attention. And then there is the fact that a Presidential campaign is a bruising, billion-dollar proving ground. No candidate sails to victory untested and unscathed.
“Inside the Democrats’ Podcast Presidential Primary, Where Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang Rule.” Biden comes in third, but evidently because he has his own podcast. Or maybe “had,” since the last one seems to be dated October 23, 2018. It seems to be just some guy (not Biden) reading political news stories. It’s super-boring.
CNN did a “power ranking” of the top 10 Democratic contenders where they ranked Harris second, because of course they did.
Washington Post‘s The Fix did one that’s even stupider, with Warren first, Harris second, and Biden sixth. Yang and Williamson aren’t on it, but Kirsten “dead in the water” Gillibrand is. It’s naked gamesmanship disguised as analysis.
Speaking of which, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes on the field. Most of it is pretty lame, but there was this: “Kristen is the candidate for everyone who would say, ‘I love Hillary Clinton but she’s just too likable.'”
Rolling Stonedoes the ranking thing as well, but it much more closely tracks polls, going Biden-Warren-Harris-Sanders-Buttigieg. Has Yang too low and Messam over Sestak down at the bottom of the list.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She told her usual voter suppression fairy tales to the NAACP, who I’m sure lapped it up. Eh. I’m going to give her two weeks to give any indication she’s running, and if not I’m going to move her to the “not running” list.
The political calculation driving Biden’s campaign — and the main reason he has been assumed by many to be the most electable Democrat — is the belief that the Scranton native can win back enough of those voters to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and deny Trump a second term. “The issues that are front and center now,” he told me, “are issues that have been in my wheelhouse for a long time,” citing what he said was his advocacy on behalf of the middle class. Some who voted for Trump, he went on, were starting to realize that Trump’s tax cuts were tailored for the wealthy and for corporations; to take note of his unceasing effort to dismantle Obamacare; to grasp that he was a false tribune of the forgotten man. “When the carnival comes through town the first time, and the guy with the shell and the pea game, and you lose — the second time they come around, you’re a little more ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, I saw what happened last time,’ ” he said. Trump voters might be unwilling to admit out loud to buyer’s remorse, he allowed. “They don’t want to turn to their buddy and say, ‘I’m taking off my Make America Great Again [hat].’ ” But Trump’s base, he argued, isn’t as solid as it appears: “Not all of them, but I think they’re persuadable, yes.”
Biden and his advisers are convinced that the general election will mostly be a referendum on Trump and his fitness for office. “This is really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology,” says Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist. He acknowledges that Hillary Clinton tried and failed to make Trump’s suitability the pivotal question of the 2016 election. The difference this time, he says, is that Trump is now president and has demonstrated his inadequacy. Biden made a similar point. “Even when he was running,” Biden told me, “I don’t think anybody thought he would be as bad as he is.”
Orange man bad! Note that he’s not trying to run on “this lousy economy.” Biden loves him some ObamaCare. Huh: “Harris’s close friendship with Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, is giving an unusually personal tone to the growing rivalry between Biden and Harris (D-Calif.), which will be on display again at Wednesday’s debate.”
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown says he doesn’t think Biden will be the nominee, and makes noises about getting in himself, because if there’s anything this field needs, it’s one more guy running. (Also see the entry on Steyer below.)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to go after Biden in the debates. Also says he’s near the 130,000 donor threshold for the next round of debates. The Chicago Tribune says he’s foolish to go after Biden for the 1994 crime bill. “Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer.” And a lot of people calling for harsher penalties were black Democratic politicians.
“My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.
His is also not the voice of free college or canceling student debt. It is the voice of a Democrat who has shepherded several tuition freezes for residents at the state universities, thereby minimizing the need for loans in the first place. He also beefed up the Montana Registered Apprenticeship Program, a public-private partnership among the state and tribal colleges and more than 500 businesses whose graduates earn $20,000 more than the state average. In Montana, that’s a year’s mortgage, about three years of a kid’s tuition at one of the aforementioned state schools, 1,700 movie tickets — that’s a life.
Does Mr. Bullock, with his modest but concrete progress in a state hostile to Democrats on issues all Democrats hold dear, sound boring compared to charismatic candidates promising revolutionary change? I don’t know. Is winning boring?
Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.
Sounds like the sort of incremental approach the loudest voices in the Democratic base assure us is passe compared to radical change. He gets a Politico profile. “He thinks Democrats are not doing enough to win over voters who backed Obama and Trump.” Also slammed Warren’s claims of PAC purity. “Everybody can be pure if you transfer over $8 or 10 million from their Senate accounts directly.” Bullock also opposes impeachment.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has a plan for homesteading vacant property. Not necessarily a bad idea in abstract, but his plan actual sounds like what it will be is the fed airdrops money, the connected scoop up desirable property cheap, and after a year you’ll find that we’ve spent $500 million and created a new federal bureaucracy to actual give 37 homeless people homes. (It doesn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will actually amount to.) “South Bend Cops Warn of ‘Mass Exodus’ as Morale Plummets Over Buttigieg’s Mishandling of Shooting.” Lil Nas X: “No ‘Old Town Road for you!”
(Found the oldest version of this meme to represent the age of the idea.) Now if he wanted to limit it to everyone receiving federal welfare payments, that I could get behind…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris’ post-debate bounce is fading, which you could have learned here, what, three weeks ago? Flip, meet flop. “Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., backtracked on her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossing, then immediately reversed course and said she was in favor of it.” If you like your insurance plan, you can suck it up while government moves you to socialized medicine, but she promises to let insurance companies run parts of it. New York Times wonders what she actually believes:
For the fights she has promised to wage, Ms. Harris prizes two weapons above all: presidential decrees and federal dollars. They are the instruments of an impatient politician — a career prosecutor sensitive to how slow the machinery of government can move, and how unforgiving voters can be.
Ms. Harris’s economic agenda involves trillions of dollars in new spending — exact estimates vary, but well over $3 trillion and perhaps more than $4 trillion — with much of it aimed at distributing cash to people in economic distress. Most of the spending takes the form of a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income taxpayers.
But it also includes hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for specific purposes: raises for public schoolteachers, tax benefits for people who rent their homes and grants for minority home buyers. On Friday, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges.
Snip.
Of nearly a dozen major plans Ms. Harris has announced, about a third have also included a kind of a threat: that if Congress did not resolve an issue with sufficient haste, she would take narrower steps with unilateral presidential authority.
Those steps, according to Ms. Harris’s campaign, would bestow new protections on undocumented immigrants, impose new limits on firearm sales, enable the manufacture of cheaper pharmaceuticals and require federal contractors to meet pay-equity standards for women. Together, these plans convey a stark skepticism that Congress can be counted upon to pass important laws — skepticism that other Democratic self-styled pragmatists, like Mr. Biden, do not share.
The decrees she has drafted are a statement, too, of Ms. Harris’s confidence in her own authority as an executor of the law.
That role, Ms. Harris said in the interview, “is my comfortable place.”
Her pitch seems to be “put me in charge so I can spend all the money and rule by decree.”
All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Mr. Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Mr. Trump.
Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral for a long shot than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.
“I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, N.H., leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.
A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Ms. Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.
“No,” Ms. Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”
Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Mr. Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.
It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.
I imagine that we’ll get lots more “failure to launch” pieces between now and Iowa. He has a plan for rural broadband and development, that may well appeal to all six of the rural Democrats still left in the party.
In May, Inslee signed into law the nation’s first public option, set to go live next fall. Under the plan, the Inslee administration will contract with a private insurer to sell coverage on the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange. The state projects that premiums in the public plan will be 5 to 10 percent cheaper that alternatives because of capped payments to doctors and hospitals. That might not translate into a major enrollment boost, and it remains to be seen whether enough providers will participate in the plan.
Inslee also signed legislation making Washington the first state to add a guaranteed long-term care benefit, addressing a growing challenge for an aging population. The law, which in concept is similar to Social Security, creates a payroll tax to offer a $100-per-day allowance for nursing home care, in-home assistance or another community-based option. It’s not enough to fully fund nursing home care, which can top $100,000 per year, but it may ease some financial pressure on families.
So he favors plans structured like ObamaCare that will no doubt fail like ObamaCare. (See also: “death spiral.”) He has a New York Times op-ed on climate change, just in case you’re out of melatonin.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The presidential campaign of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been accused of delaying staff pay in order to boost the campaign’s cash-on-hand figures at reporting time.” That piece mentions a $55,000 a day burn rate. Since she brought in only $2.9 million in Q2, that burn rate is not sustainable, and that senate transfer money will only last so long. She has a “housing plan” described as “sweeping in scope but scant on details.” File it with Hickenlooper’s rural broadband plan…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not only is there no news for him, but I can’t even get his website to come up right now…
On his second combat tour in Iraq, 2nd Lt. Seth Moulton led his platoon in one of the most grueling battles of the war, at a cemetery in Najaf.
“It was intense,” says Nick Henry, who served as a lance corporal under Moulton. “The thing we dealt with in the cemetery was a lot like Vietnam, almost. The insurgency would dig into the cemetery and they would pop out of little tunnels and holes. We would fight through them and then they would end up popping out of tunnels behind us, and we’d have to back up and re-clear, and basically it was 360 all the time.”
Moulton served four tours of combat in Iraq. He’s called it the most influential experience of his life, one he refers to often in his presidential run.
Interviews with those who served with Moulton in Iraq reveal that one quality that has sometimes gotten him in trouble in politics — his ambition — served him well in combat.
Henry says half the men in their platoon saw combat for the first time in the battle of Najaf. He says Moulton was a “very intelligent” platoon commander, sometimes “a little too intelligent,” in the sense that he sometimes tried to implement tactics that were more advanced than entry-level Marines were capable of.
Still, Henry says, everything was relatively well executed. He describes Moulton as always involved, with good command and control in a chaotic situation, someone who would lead from the front most of the time, and not overly controlling.
Henry calls Moulton one of the better platoon commanders he had in five combat deployments.
“He’s very sincere with his caring,” Henry says, and that came across most vitally when Moulton made sure his men were ready for combat. “He spent the time to come up with the plans and the training plan to make sure that we were prepared for anything that we came to, which is, in my personal belief, why our platoon was the most heavily relied on to execute missions during the battle of Najaf.”
Snip.
As measured by the Democratic National Committee, he’s not doing well. The DNC has barred him from two rounds of debates because he has yet to get the required number of financial donors or standing in the polls.
“It’s the longest of long shots,” says Gergen, who believes Moulton has alienated some on the left, ironically because last year, he campaigned successfully to get young Democratic veterans elected to Congress, an effort Gergen says contributed to the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives.
“The people who won were taking back districts that [President] Trump had won in many cases,” he says, “and so naturally, they have to be more mainstream than some of the progressives in the Democratic Party, and that makes Seth a target for some of the progressives, saying he’s too mainstream, he’s too close to the center.”
The Iraq stuff is a whole lot more interesting than the political stuff. He’s for impeachment. He filed a digital privacy bill. “The Automatic Listening and Exploitation Act, or the ALEXA Act for short, would empower the Federal Trade Commission to seek immediate penalties if a smart device is found to have recorded user conversations without the device’s wake word being triggered… Moulton said that he would like to see his legislation spur a greater tech debate within the halls of Congress.” Uh…you’ve got a real issue there, Moulton, but the purpose of legislation is to make the laws of the land, not “spur debate.”
O’Rourke’s second-quarter fundraising total, announced two weeks ago, started to cement the sense of flop from polls that had him down to 1 or 2 percent, after being in third place when he announced in March he was running. He raised $3.6 million from April through June, meaning that after raising a blowout $6.1 million in his first 24 hours in the race, he picked up just $6.9 million in the three and a half months that followed. O’Rourke and his aides know how much is riding on the second debate next week, but they’re also struggling with what to do: He became a national name partly based on a viral video of him defending Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. Re-creating that in a rapid-fire, multi-podium debate is pretty much impossible.
Plus, he has to compete directly with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whom he’ll share the stage with for the first time on Tuesday night. Both candidates are young white guys (O’Rourke is 46, Buttigieg 37), branding themselves as the bright, shiny future of the Democratic Party. Buttigieg’s explosion tracks with O’Rourke’s implosion. Any hopes O’Rourke has of rising again may depend on Buttigieg collapsing, which he shows no signs of doing; his polling has remained decent, and he raised $24.8 million for the second quarter, more than anyone else running.
“What Beto O’Rourke’s Dad Taught Him About Losing.” Well, that’s knowledge that’s going to come in handy…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a manucaturing plan that also includes the $15 an hour minimum wage hike, which we already know is a job killer. “Two longtime Biden African American supporters in S. Carolina defect to Tim Ryan.” “Fletcher Smith and Brandon Brown, who played senior roles in Biden’s last presidential campaign in 2008” are the defectees. Given that the Biden 2008 Presidential campaign didn’t even survive long enough to get to South Carolina, it’s hard to see them as must-hire material…
“Whatever you think about Sweden and what we did, you have to realize that we had a great society first,” Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, filmmaker, and Cato Institute senior fellow, said in a recent lecture titled “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”
“We were incredibly wealthy, we trusted each other socially, there was a decent life for everybody. That’s what made it possible to experiment with socialism; then it began to undermine many of those preconditions,” Norberg said during the June 20 event hosted by The Fund for American Studies and the office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“That’s the one thing that it’s important for people to get, because if they just look at Sweden and think, ‘Oh look, they’re socialist and seem to be doing quite all right,’ then they’ve sort of missed the point,” Norberg added.
Tom Steyer’s eleventh-hour presidential bid is confounding Democrats. And some party officials are ready for him to butt out.
The billionaire environmental activist is antagonizing Democratic leaders, whacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for going on August recess and criticizing House Democrats for not immediately impeaching the president.
And as Steyer vows to spend as much as $100 million of his own money in the primary to boost his long-shot candidacy, Democrats are growing frustrated that he’ll only further clog the crowded campaign — particularly if he can buy his way onto the debate stage this fall.
“It’s very difficult for me to see the path for Tom Steyer to be a credible candidate,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who has endorsed Pete Buttigieg. “So yes, I would rather that he spend his money taking back the Virginia House, the Virginia Senate and supporting people who can win.”
“I wish he wouldn’t do it. Especially at this late date,” added Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. “Things are set except for those who are going to drop out.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio observed that Steyer is basically “another white guy in the race,” albeit a wealthy one who is “a major progressive player.” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was mostly perplexed by the wealthy Californian’s entry when asked about it: “I kind of wonder why?”
Evidently Senator Brown doesn’t realize that he’s also the other white meat. But notice how he automatically lapses into the racist identity politics framing that infects the Democratic Party today. Whatever happened to judging people on the content of their character? There’s a whole lot of reasons not to vote for Tom Steyer without mentioning the color of his skin. “How Democratic debate rules are forcing a billionaire to plead for pennies.”
About one-fifth of Steyer’s TV spending is on the national airwaves, but the vast majority is concentrated in the four early caucus and primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Positive poll results specifically in those states could help Steyer qualify for the debate, so getting his face on television is of special strategic value there.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a plan to renegotiate trade deals. A small number of good transparency ideas attached to a giant boat anchor of liberal interest group ideas, including a “border carbon adjustment” tax. Her trade plans make Donald Trump sound like Adam Smith. Speaking of economics, she says we’re due for a recession, so she has that in common with Zero Hedge. But economists can’t agree, and the Fed is poised to drop rates, so who knows? Dem analyst for Warren says the race is between Warren and Harris. “Ignore that frontrunner behind the curtain!”
The Democratic Party has long considered itself the standard-bearer of scientific expertise, adopting an almost utopian vision of technological innovation since at least the Kennedy years, Vinsel said.
Practically, this means that Democrats have made technology a bigger part of their image over the years. In the 1980s, for instance, “Atari Democrats” wore fancy watches and promoted Silicon Valley boosterism as an alternative to courting labor unions, said Marc Aidinoff, a history doctoral candidate at MIT who has also worked as a junior policy advisor to Joe Biden. That trend continued under Barack Obama, said Mary Ebeling, a professor of sociology at Drexel University. Obama’s technology advisors were heavily recruited from Silicon Valley and many returned there after serving in his administration. And now, it’s not just the Democratic Party pushing tech-based solutions, Vinsel said. At this point, the ideas of technological innovation and economic growth are so linked in the American mind that neither party can step away from tech as a common good without seeming like they are anti-growth.
But Democrats’ tendency to seek solutions in technology for social problems has not always served them well. Ebeling is currently working on a project that explores how adopting electronic health records as part of the Affordable Care Act affected both patients and workers in the medical industry. The electronic records were pushed as a solution to deep-seated problems that weren’t really about technology — boosters promised they’d make healthcare cheaper and solve problems with patient access to consistent medical care. Instead, Ebeling is finding that we spent billions effectively favoring an industry that could never produce the returns it promised. “And lo and behold, by 2019, you have Kaiser Health News reporting on how much harm electronic health records have caused. Literally the death of patients because of medical errors,” she said.
Says he’ll be running his campaign the entire way. Given slow but steady rise in the polls, I’d say certainly through Super Tuesday, and longer if it looks like Democrats are headed to a brokered convention, because why the hell not? “A recent Fox News poll had Yang ahead of Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., former Colorado Gov. John Hickelnlooper, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
The second debate field is set, Bernie Bernies Bernie, Beto plunders staff from even less successful campaigns, and Andrew Yang plots his conquest of Area 51.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
CBS/YouGov (early states): Biden 25, Warren 20, Harris 16, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 4, Castro 2, Klobuchar 1, Booker 1, Yang 1, Steyer 1, Gabbard 1, Hickenlooper 1, Bullock 1. This is the summary, but dig deeper if you want individual numbers on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, California, and Texas (a little far out for “early,” but its inclusion explains why O’Rourke gives the illusion of viability here)
Quinnipiac (California): Harris 23, Biden 21, Sanders 18, Warren 16, Buttigieg 3, Yang 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Inslee 1. 519 voters polled. I think this is the first poll where Harris beats Biden in her home state.
Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Biden 20.8, Harris 17.5, Warren 16.7, Buttigieg 11.5, Sanders 9.9, Yang 4.9, Klobuchar 2.7, Williamson 1.5, Booker 1.2, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 0.7, Inslee 0.3, O’Rourke 0.0. Sample size of 351.
CNN/University of New Hampshire (New Hampshire): Biden 24, Warren 19, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 10, Harris 9, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1, Gillibrand 1, Bennet 1. Sample size of 386. One notable detail further in: Under “Candidate With Best Chance to Win General Election,” Biden has increased his lead from 32% in February to 45% now. How’s that “Woke Off” working out for you, Democrats?
Steyer just jumped into the race, and Sestak’s campaign didn’t file his FEC organizing papers until July 1st, so no Q2 numbers for them.
538 has a lot of analysis of the fundraising numbers, but not, alas, handy links straight to the actual Q2 reports for lazy efficient bloggers to use. Yang and Williamson have the highest burn rates in the field.
July 31: Biden, Harris, Booker, Castro, Yang, Inslee, Gabbard, Gillibrand, de Blasio, Bennet. If I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I’d say that CNN, deep in the tank for Harris, wants to give Harris another shot at Biden.
Not making the cut: Moulton, Gravel and Messam (all of who also missed the second debate) and late entries Steyer and Sestak. I’m guessing all those but Steyer will miss the third debate, too… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
The 2020 race is all about touting the democracy of small donors with a 130,000 donor threshold for the third Democrat debate. But certain zip codes keep coming up for the top Democrat candidates. The 100XX zip codes of Manhattan, the 90XXX zip codes of Los Angeles, the 94XXX zip codes of San Francisco, the 98XXX zip codes of Seattle, the 20XXX zip codes of D.C. and the 02XXX zip codes of Boston.
These are the core zip codes of the Democrat donor base. They are the pattern that recur in the campaign contributions lists of the top Democrats. And they explain the politics of the 2020 race.
Providing free health care for illegal aliens at taxpayer expense may not be very popular nationwide, but is commonplace in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. Gun control is a loser nationwide, but a sure thing in the big blue cities. Even proposals to take away private health plans, allow rapists and terrorists to vote from prison, and open the border pick up more support there.
The 2020 Democrats aren’t speaking to Americans as a whole. Instead they’re addressing wealthy donors from 6 major cities, and some of their satellite areas, whose money they need to be able to buy teams, ads and consultants to help them win in places like New Hampshire and Iowa.
New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles show up in the top 5 donor cities for most of the top 2020 candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg. Boston shows up in the top 10, not only for Bernie and Warren, but for Kamala and Buttigieg. Seattle appears in the top 10 for Bernie, Warren, and Buttigieg. Washington D.C. features in the top 10 for Bernie, Booker, Warren, Kamala, and Buttigieg. And the rest of America doesn’t really matter.
Not if you’re a Democrat.
The democracy of small donors is illusory not only by zip code, but by industry. Google isn’t the largest company in America, but, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, its employees show up on the top company contributor lists for Kamala, Sanders, Buttigieg, and, Warren. Despite Warren’s supposed threat to break up big dot coms and Sanders’ talk of going after big companies, Google employees were the top backers of both candidates.
What do they know that we don’t?
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, does employ a lot people, but its number of employees is a fraction of those employed by Home Depot, Kroger or Wal-Mart. What Google does have is an enormous concentration of wealth and power through its monopolistic control over search advertising. That power also gives its radical employees a disproportionate ability to shape the 2020 Democrat field.
Despite Warren’s supposed threats to break up big tech, their employees are some of her biggest backers. Besides Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yelp employees are some of her major backers.
Again, what do the millionaire employees of big tech know about Warren’s plans that we don’t?
Microsoft employees show up on the donor leaderboards for Bernie, Kamala, Warren, and, Buttigieg. Amazon employees are a major donor group for Bernie and Buttigieg. Pinterest, which recently made headlines for the dot com’s aggressive censorship of pro-life views, appears on Buttigieg’s donor board. Apple employees are some of the major donors to Bernie, Warren, and Kamala.
There’s no question that big tech cash is helping shape the 2020 Democrat field.
Mr. Biden starts from behind organizationally. He entered the race at the end of April and began with a lighter public schedule than many of his opponents, allowing other earlier-launching campaigns to lock down experienced talent and build more visible volunteer operations first.
In Iowa especially, the impatience with his efforts among some activists was palpable this month following Mr. Biden’s shaky debut in the first presidential debate.
Snip.
There is a “persistence picnic” slated for Toledo, Iowa, and a “policy potluck” in Cresco. There is a “pints-and-policy” house party scheduled in Des Moines, an evening of acrylic painting in Sioux City and a trivia night in Burlington.
And that’s just a snapshot of the Warren team’s plans for Iowa on Thursday.
“Her people are everywhere,” said Mr. Marquardt, the Madison County official, relaying a story he heard about a Warren campaign representative seeking to recruit supporters in a yoga class. He described her organizers as trying to embed themselves in communities across Iowa, rather than relying exclusively on traditional tactics like phone banking.
In New Hampshire, said Judy Reardon, a veteran Democratic strategist, “They had a robust field staff early on and the field staff has been able to establish themselves in their areas.”
The Warren campaign declined to divulge the exact number of staff members it has in Iowa and New Hampshire, except to say that there are more than 300 people, with 60 percent of those hires based in the first four states, but as of May she had around 50 staffers on the ground in Iowa.
Snip.
“Cory Booker’s campaign has been amazing in New Hampshire,” said [State Representative Kris] Schultz, who, like many voters in that state, is still considering a long list of candidates. “They have the A-team for sure.’’
The challenge for Mr. Booker: Despite all of the retail politicking efforts — including 35 events in Iowa and more than 40 appearances in New Hampshire, his campaign said on Thursday — he is routinely mired in the polls at this early stage.
Still, his team has been building for months on the ground, hoping to be well positioned to capitalize on any burst of momentum. He has about 30 staff members in New Hampshire, where his campaign has been engaging with voters since April; in Iowa, he has nearly 50 full-time employees along with more than 80 of his family members who live in the Des Moines area.
Snip.
Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Harris were slower to expand their teams in Iowa and New Hampshire than rivals like Ms. Warren and Mr. Booker.
But activists say they are seeing increased activity from both of them.
Ms. Harris is planning a five-day bus tour through Iowa for next month, where she has more than 65 staff members, her campaign said. In New Hampshire, they have 30.
“They’re in the process of building up the ground organization here with all the fund-raising she’s had since the debate,” Ms. Sullivan, the former party chair, said.
In April, Mr. Buttigieg had one employee in New Hampshire, and on May 1, he had four in Iowa. He now has 39 people on staff in New Hampshire. In Iowa, he has more than 50 full-time staff members, as well as 27 paid interns.
Snip.
The Sanders campaign does not take the typical route of prioritizing engagement with local party leaders.
But while other candidates ruffle feathers if they are perceived as ignoring in-state gatekeepers, many activists are now reluctant to question Mr. Sanders’s method after he delivered a stronger-than-expected showing in 2016.
“Four years ago, he didn’t seem to have much on the ground, much going on,” said Jan Bauer, the former Democratic chair of Story County, Iowa, and a longtime party activist. She is supporting Governor Steve Bullock of Montana, but has heard from several other campaigns.
“But come caucus night, everyone discovered there was a lot going on here that was underground.”
Mr. Sanders began his campaign holding big rallies that doubled as opportunities to sign up supporters, and his aides view events as a chance to recruit volunteers and sign them up for the campaign app.
For example, Mr. Sanders did a multi-parade swing through Iowa on the Fourth of July, with his campaign giving out stickers and seeking to engage voters along the way (not everyone was receptive; one father insisted his daughter remove her Sanders sticker).
In New Hampshire, which Mr. Sanders won by around 22 percentage points in 2016, he has a core of die-hard supporters that helps ensure an on-the-ground presence, despite slipping in the polls recently.
“Bernie obviously has the lion’s share of his activists and volunteers with him from just four years ago,” said New Hampshire’s Democratic Party Chairman, Raymond Buckley. “It makes it pretty easy to build a solid foundation from.”
His campaign did not respond to requests for information on how many employees it has in the early states, but it announced earlier this month that it had 45 staff members in New Hampshire.
CBS has a mock early delegate tracker based on polls in early states (again including Texas): Projected delegates are Biden 581, Warren 430, Sanders 249, Harris 173, O’Rourke 48 (all from Texas), and Klobuchar 13 (all from Minnesota).
I’m far from convinced that those are the five most likely to win, or that only five have a reasonable chance. I’m not sure that “usually” applies to this cycle, mainly because of the mix of candidates. Each of the leaders has significant vulnerabilities – and some of the contenders who haven’t fired in the polls yet have assets that could yet matter.
Biden? I still think he’s a weaker version of Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale won the nomination, of course, but it wasn’t easy. If Biden is somewhat weaker, he might not be able to withstand a serious rally from another candidate.
Warren? For a candidate who has been doing well lately, the lack of endorsements both in Massachusetts and elsewhere – she hasn’t added a significant new one since May 12 – may suggest a real problem. Yes, President Donald Trump won despite outright opposition from most party actors, but support from the party has been important for a long time and it may still prove critical.
Harris? She’s a solid possibility. But her post-debate bounce flattened out, leaving her fourth in the national polls. She’s also right on the edge of holding conventional qualifications for the job. Sure, Barack Obama won after four years in the Senate and Harris has more impressive pre-Senate experience, but not everyone turns out to be Barack Obama.
Sanders? He’s still a factional candidate, and factional candidates rarely win nominations. It’s been true from early in the cycle that his polling numbers, adjusted for high name recognition, aren’t very impressive, and he’s lagging in endorsements.
And then there’s Mayor Pete, who doesn’t have conventional qualifications and, despite a very impressive fundraising quarter, hasn’t really broken out in the polls or picked up impressive endorsements.
99% of endorsements are meaningless, but the rest of the piece isn’t necessarily wrong.
“Governors tank in election about Trump.” “Bullock, the Montana governor, got shut out of the first debate. Inslee, the Washington governor, hasn’t cracked 2 percent in a national poll. Colorado’s Hickenlooper has hit even harder times — his senior staffers urged him to drop out of the race last month.” Politco suggests that this is because Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and the congresscritters running get more media exposure by attacking Trump. I think Trump has less to do with it than the fact that all features variously high quantities of suckitude. If attacking Trump were the golden ticket, Swalwell would be at the top of the polls rather than dropped out…
Most likeable of the Democratic candidates? Would you believe Sanders? No, but that’s what Democrats told Gallup, at 72%. Biden came in second at 69%. As usual, de Blasio had the highest unfavorability rating, at 30%.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s at that NAACP meeting this week, along several declared presidential candidates, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi, and Shaun “Talcum X” King.
Think about all of the factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. She was a figure who had been around a long time, among the best-known names in the party establishment. As a senator, she worked closely with her home state’s financial industry, leaving some liberal grassroots concluding she was a corporatist who was far too comfortable with big business. Critics asked how someone who had spent the past few decades in the public sector could so quickly become a multimillionaire, and contended that her family foundation had engaged in shady deals with foreign governments and foreign businesses. Some people couldn’t believe she wanted to charge University of Missouri at Kansas City a whopping $275,000 to give a speech at a luncheon.
More progressive figures challenged her in the primary, and activists on the Left hit her hard for her punitive stances on crime in the 1990s, including describing young gang members as “super-predators.” She attempted to shore up her support among African Americans by emphasizing her close work with Barack Obama.
“Joe Biden says ‘radicalization’ of young Democrats a myth: ‘This is not a generation of socialists.” I think he’s right in general. As for those voting in the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s a more open question. “How Joe Biden won friends in Hollywood by helping studios get their movies into China.” Nothing says “salt of the earth” quite like palling around with Communist Chinese bigwigs to increase the profits of Hollywood studio heads. “2020 Democrats Are Starting to Turn Obama’s Legacy Against Biden.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s at the San Diego Comic Con for some damn reason. Booker said he’d meet with Louis Farrakhan, then said he wouldn’t and he was “misquoted.” He visited New Hampshire. “Noticeably absent from his campaign has been a breakout moment. The 50-year-old former Rhodes Scholar is among the score of presidential contenders polling in low-single digits both nationally and in New Hampshire.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He called for Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello to resign, though the reason cited was ‘massive protests” rather than “massive fraud.” The Hill contends that Castro is “carving a niche” for himself with a focus on immigration. Whistling past the graveyard. “In Iowa, Castro won 1 percent in a recent poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, behind nine other candidates, including former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.).” Gets a similar Washington Post puff piece from David Weigel.
The surge, if that’s the word for it, has not put Castro anywhere near the front of the pack. Polling, which can be a lagging indicator of candidate strength, has not shown much growth. A Quinnipiac poll of California, conducted after the debates, found Castro winning just 2 percent of Latino voters. He substantially lags the poll leaders in fundraising and has 12 staff members working in Iowa, where other campaigns have dozens of people on the ground. Escaping the back of the Democratic pack is one thing; how does an escapee, like Castro, elbow into the first tier? No candidate who has polled in the single digits six months before the first caucuses has gone on to be the nominee.
In Iowa, any answer starts with voters who aren’t comfortable with former vice president Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — for age reasons, mostly — and want a candidate who’d offer a night-and-day contrast with Trump. The people who showed up for Castro’s eastern Iowa swing often said they wanted a “fresh” candidate, that they had not heard much about Castro until the debates, and that they felt good hearing a candidate talk about taking in more refugees and immigrants. On Sunday night, after Castro spent an hour at a forum organized by the pro-immigration group Iowa WINS, some voters reminisced about how their state, under a Republican governor, took in thousands of refugees from the Vietnam War.
Snip.
Castro’s campaign has not, so far, stirred Latino organizations or endorsers, who want Trump gone but worry about allowing the president to run a nativist campaign on immigration. Cecilia Muñoz, who led President Barack Obama’s domestic policy council while Castro led the Department of Housing and Urban Development, told The Washington Post last week that Castro’s proposal to lower the criminal penalty for illegal border-crossing largely helps Trump.
It’s an awful lot of hemming and hawing. Castro’s entire post-debate bump was going from 1% to maybe 2% on a good day.
You stayed away for last week’s blackout to remain in Iowa for your ridiculous presidential campaign. You didn’t show up for the Puerto Rican Day Parade or veterans’ D-Day ceremonies. In May, you blew off a memorial event for victims of toxic exposure to Ground Zero — and blamed your staff. You skipped a murdered cop’s vigil in 2017 so as not to interrupt your junket to Germany.
You should learn from your City Hall predecessors. Some were great mayors, others lame. But they all knew the right public gestures to make when the chips were down, even though they might have needed to take a deep breath first.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gabbard too called for Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello to resign and joined protests there. She raised negative $20 for her House campaign. “The absence of any fundraising or spending on her House race has left political observers with the impression that Gabbard may not return to Congress at all if her White House bid falls short.”
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. AP story on Gillibrand and her fellow 1%ers (Booker, O’Rourke, Inslee, Ryan) working to revive their moribund campaigns. I’m beginning to think it’s less a campaign at this point than an excuse to indulge in alcohol abuse…
One problem with an approach like Harris’s of building a consensus path to victory is that the candidate isn’t necessarily the first choice of any one group of voters. And this can be a problem in states in which the demographics are idiosyncratic, as they are in all four early-voting states.
The electorates in Iowa and New Hampshire, for example, are probably a bit more liberal than Harris would like, helping candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren instead. And while South Carolina’s large black population could help Harris, it still looks like Joe Biden’s state to lose, provided he does well enough among African Americans while cleaning up among relatively conservative white Democrats who are also plentiful in the electorate there. Nevada? Well, I don’t know, Nevada is weird. (I love you, Nevada.) You probably want a candidate who does well among Hispanics, who has a good organization and who has the backing of organized labor. That could be Harris, but unions are mostly taking their time to make any endorsements.
It’s true that finishing first doesn’t actually matter in terms of the Democrats’ delegate math. Unlike in the Republican primary, there are no winner-take-all states; instead, delegates are divided proportionately among candidates who receive at least 15 percent of the vote in a given state or congressional district. And Harris was at 15 percent or higher in several of the early-state polls I mentioned above, even though she didn’t lead in any of them.
Winning can matter, though, in terms of momentum, which mostly takes the form of favorable media coverage. Although the post-Iowa bounce has faded in recent years — just ask Ted Cruz how much good winning Iowa did him in New Hampshire — a candidate who came from behind to win an early state or who is otherwise seen as expectations-defying could still get a pretty big boost. And if voters are still choosing among several candidates — say, Harris and Warren — they might jump on the bandwagon of whoever has performed well in these early states. No candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won a nomination while losing both Iowa and New Hampshire.
Just two weeks after a major staff exodus from John Hickenlooper’s campaign — six key aides abruptly headed for the door on the heels of a debate performance where the former Colorado governor failed to dazzle — the former governor, despite fundraising and donor-number issues, is plowing straight ahead.
Among those who left — his campaign manager, communications director, digital director, New Hampshire political director, national finance director and his deputy finance director — sources told ABC News aides sat Hickenlooper down after the Democratic National Committee announced requirements for the September debate to discuss with him other options.
But, sources told ABC News, Hickenlooper was undeterred, adding staffers who’d stay the course.
Man, how about that Democratic staffer loyalty? Of course, they’re not wrong…
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ha: “‘The View’ co-host awkwardly confuses John Hickenlooper with Jay Inslee during interview.” Honestly, I’m not entirely unsympathetic, but fake Republican Ana Navarro just isn’t too bright.
Moulton is polling at the back of the pack seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and he didn’t make it on the stage for the first primary debate last month. But from his perspective, his party is overestimating its chances at beating Trump in 2020, Moulton said Thursday in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO reporters and editors.
The Democratic front-runners are too focused on convincing Americans of Trump’s failings, Moulton said, and are not presenting a vision of the country that can win over people who supported the president in 2016.
“I think a lot of Democrats think, ‘You know, these Trump voters, what we need to do is we just need to educate them, and we’re going to get it through their heads that this guy is a bad guy,’” Moulton said. “OK, Trump voters are not idiots. We don’t need to give America a moral education; they know that he’s an asshole. They get it. They’ve just baked that in.”
“When we’re trying to win over Trump voters in the general election, we can’t go on this moral crusade because people are like, ‘Give me a break,’” he said. “What they’re really saying is, ‘I get it, I get this guy is immoral. I’m voting for him anyway because you don’t give me a better alternative.’”
There’s a real arrogance among a lot of Democrats in thinking that all these people are stupid policy-wise and stupid moral-wise,” he said in an interview conducted as part of a recurring POLITICO series with 2020 candidates.
The three-term Massachusetts congressman argued that he had a vision to take on Trump “in a way that doesn’t alienate his voters.” Moulton — who perhaps is best-known for helping lead a failed rebellion against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last year — was deeply critical of the leftward drift of the party on everything from health care to immigration.
“We have to have a pro-jobs, pro-growth kind of agenda, and not just a redistributive agenda,” he said.
Substitute “flawed” for “immoral” and there’s very little about his analysis to disagree with.
O’Rourke is probably competing for young voters more than for older ones, for white voters more than nonwhite ones, and for moderate voters more than for very liberal ones. (His voting record in Congress was fairly moderate, although the policy positions he’s staking out now are more of a mixed bag.) There are plenty of young voters, white voters and moderate voters in the Democratic electorate. But there aren’t that many who are young and white and moderate.
According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 63 percent of voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries were white, 51 percent identified themselves as moderate or conservative, and 56 percent were born in 1965 or afterward, per the Pew Research Center. Multiply those numbers together, and you’d expect:
63% * 51% * 56% = ~18%
…about 18 percent of Democrats to be all three things at once. That’s enough to form a real base when you’re competing for a party nomination, especially when Democratic rules require you to win at least 15 percent of voters in a state or congressional district to secure convention delegates.
But when you actually look at individual-level voter data, you find something different: Only 12 percent of Democratic primary voters are young and white and moderate. That’s far fewer voters to go around, especially when you’re also competing with, say, Pete Buttigieg for the same voters.
I bet O’Rourke thinks of Hispanics as part of his base, but so far there’s precious little evidence the feelings are mutual. He didn’t let a weak fundraising quarter keep him from hiring more senior staffers:
Nick Rathod, a Democratic operative who served as President Barack Obama’s liaison to state officials, has been hired as a senior national political adviser, a campaign spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO on Friday.
Adnan Mohamed, who was deputy national political director for Rep. Seth Moulton’s presidential campaign, has been named national political director. Anna Korman, who worked with O’Rourke’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, at Precision Strategies, will be O’Rourke’s national data director. And Morgan Hill, who was research director on Richard Cordray’s gubernatorial campaign in Ohio last year, will be national research director.
Lauren Hitt, who previously was communications director for former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign, has been hired as O’Rourke’s national director of rapid response.
Hitt’s departure from Hickenlooper’s campaign follows the earlier defection of Hickenlooper’s former national finance director, Dan Sorenson, who also went to O’Rourke’s campaign.
I can understand wanting to leave Hickenlooper’s campaign; jumping to O’Rourke’s doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. By the same token, the Hickenlooper campaign showed no sign of being such a well-oiled machine it deserved poaching. (Also, it’s amusing to go back through Hitt and Sorenson‘s Twitter timelines to see when they went from forwarding Hickenlooper posts to forwarding O’Rourke posts.) Finally, it seems like I’ve done more of this “senior staff hires” pieces on O’Rourke than any of the other candidates, and I wonder if his staff is top-heavy. Team O’Rourke says they have a plan for a comeback:
O’Rourke is still drawing relatively large crowds in Iowa — some 125 at Sioux City and another 100-plus in Sioux Center this weekend — and his campaign just opened 11 new field offices in the state, where he’s well on his way to visiting all 99 counties.
“Obviously we are going to need more resources for the national effort, but Iowa is a top priority for this campaign,” Norm Sterzenbach, the O’Rourke campaign Iowa director, said.
The campaign also hopes to make a major play for delegate-rich Texas, which votes early in the primary process next year. The state hasn’t been polled in over a month, but O’Rourke was in second place behind former Vice President Joe Biden in early June.
Eh. Minus Texas, “all in on Iowa” is every other longshot’s “plan,” and for most it’s like a losing-streak horse bettor counting on the last race’s trifecta to pull him out of a hole before the loan shark breaks his kneecaps.
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan wants to be the presidential candidate who can appeal to “yoga moms” and blue-collar workers — and judging by his second-quarter fund-raising, he has a smattering of support from both.
Mr. Ryan’s $890,000 haul positions him second-to-last among the 20 candidates who qualified for the first round of Democratic debates, leaving him little in the way of resources to sustain him in the race against a top tier of candidates who each raised over $10 million in the last three months.
Mr. Ryan raised more than former Maryland Rep. John Delaney ($300,000) but less than New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ($1.1 million). He also raised less than spiritual author Marianne Williamson ($1.5 million), perhaps his closest competitor in the wellness space.
Still, those who did contribute to the northeast Ohioan’s presidential campaign demonstrate the cross section of supporters making up his base.
Among his most notable donors is New Age guru Deepak Chopra, who gave Mr. Ryan’s campaign $1,000. Mr. Chopra is listed on Mr. Ryan’s campaign finance report as an author at the Chopra Center in California, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. Another person associated with Mr. Chopra’s wellness empire gave $800.
If you’re competing with Marianne Williamson for the Deepak Chopra vote, you’ve already lost.
The Vermont socialist senator made history by agreeing that his paid 2020 presidential campaign workers would be repped by a union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, with all earning $15 an hour. But now the union complains some employees are getting less.
Worse, someone leaked the whole dispute to the Washington Post.
Worse yet, Sanders’ response could be a violation of US labor law, all on its own.
The union’s gripe centers on the fact that field organizers, the lowest-level workers, often put in 60 hours a week but get paid only for 40, since they’re on a flat salary. That drops their average minimum pay to less than $13 an hour.
“Many field staffers are barely managing to survive financially, which is severely impacting our team’s productivity and morale,” the union said in a draft letter to campaign manager Faiz Shakir. “Some field organizers have already left the campaign as a result.”
Ouch. So Sanders is down to march with McDonald’s employees demanding higher pay, and happy to slam Walmart execs for paying “starvation wages” — but the folks working for him are feeling “berned.”
In 2016, no state was better for Sanders than New Hampshire. The independent senator won the first-in-the-nation primary with 60 percent of the vote. The 22-point win over Hillary Clinton — who had a decades-long relationship with New Hampshire — was the biggest victory margin in that state for a competitive Democratic primary in over a half century.
In the years since, Sanders returned to the state often. He maintained a strong volunteer team and a local steering committee that met regularly. His son even ran for Congress in the state last year.
But now, with a little more than six months to go until the 2020 New Hampshire primary, Sanders can no longer take the state for granted. He has gone from being the unquestioned front-runner to second place — and sliding.
Snip.
“His campaign supporters felt they had New Hampshire in the bag and they could run this national campaign and dare others to catch up, but here they are in the summer and they are suddenly tumbling in what should be their best early state,” said Wayne Lesperance, a political science professor at New England College in Henniker, N.H. “And if he doesn’t win here, where can he actually go after that?”
“MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah said that 2020 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders ‘makes my skin crawl‘ and that he’s not a “pro-woman candidate” on the network Sunday morning.” Caveat: She’s in the tank for Warren.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview in Merion West, which describes itself as “a journal of the hard center.” Asked to name the greatest threat to American national security, he said:
China. For four reasons. The first is because of climate change. If we shut down all Western oil companies today, that’s only ten percent of all natural gas and oil that’s being produced for fossil fuel in the entire world. So much of is by China and Russia, and China, in particular, has 1,600 coal burning facilities it is building globally in the next decade. Number one, it’s because of climate change—that is the biggest. And I tell people, by the way, just a side note—I have said climate change is a great and catastrophic threat, but we can only be 15% in reduction in greenhouse emissions, even if we zero us out. The 85% is over there, and China is the biggest polluter of them all.
And the second greatest threat is China; the second reason is through its Belt and Road initiative. Or predatory loans—it is actually enslaving nations through these loans. Djibouti had to give China a port for its Navy. Right there, a first base in Africa [for China]. Greece had to give up its political voice and block the European Union’s unanimity needed to stop a condemnation of the terrible human rights record for the Muslim Uighur citizens of China. And so Xi is a new illiberal world order where might makes right, and the Prime Minister of Malaysia said it’s a new colonial power. And in this Belt and Road initiative, it is exporting its old coal mines and factories and building them there with Chinese labor. It is a very illiberal and unjust world order. That’s why, John, our retreat from the world today, from home, thinking somehow we can become great again behind walls so dangerous to the American dream—we are hurting what we could be in the world.
The third reason is our national corporations have exported, outsourced not just jobs, but our national security to China. By having their technical supply chains, the high tech products being in China—75% of all mobile phones are constructed there, and 90% of all computers are there—you might’ve seen that the Mac Pro of Apple was just shut down a few weeks ago, and it’s being outsourced over there. What happens, as you may know, if you have an Android phone, everything you say, all the data on it is surreptitiously sent back to China. Because it’s with Chinese software. Motherboards that go into servers for Apple and Amazon, the Navy cruisers and CIA drones, were embedded with microchips being sent here. So we have our national corporations outsourcing to China. So that’s the third reason—we have a national security threat, through their ability to begin to identify, follow, and know everything for commercial and intelligence purposes.
But the greatest, the number four threat, within the cyberspace world is the 5G network. Because of the Belt and Road initiative, we must find out about the digital Silk Road. And each of these countries are now enslaved, so to speak, by the Belt and Road initiative to also have this 5G network that China is leading the world on. With Huawei and other companies. Whoever builds it, owns it—it will revolutionize economies and warfare. Because no longer do you need to hack—what China does now, with $300 billion per year—everything that will go through, a piece of equipment that they build, and we don’t build it—after we sold Lucent, only three companies in the world build it. They have eyes on everything. So if you put a virtual business meeting on there, with trade secrets, they’ll just listen in. They don’t have to hack, it just goes right through this piece of gear. Number two is they’re able to, without having to hack, through the same pipeline take down critical infrastructure during high speed tensions. So that is why, we must understand that China, it is now one world. We’re damaged by climate change, and it will come no matter what we do by ourselves here. Number two, changes to our way of life by China will happen no matter what we do alone. And third, damage to us by corporations outsourcing our national security to China will happen no matter what we do by ourselves. So we must convene the world once again. Go back to those institutions, like the World Trade Organization, the detective organizations that set the rules for technology. And convene the world to make sure that together, we ensure, like we did in the Cold War, like in making sure that extreme poverty—went from in 1945 with 80% of the world’s population to 8% today—we can confront and mitigate and eventually end the damage to us from what they’re doing. By forcing them, by everyone being united to follow the rules of the road. Of justice.
If Mr. Trump ran as the billionaire of the people, appealing to working-class Republicans and swing voters, Mr. Steyer is a very California billionaire: a denim shirt, a tan, and a hip activist wife.
And since he announced his run, his wealth has been the story, as he jockeys to be seen as a radical for change.
“Should we put a limit on what Beyoncé makes?” he asked a reporter for the Guardian.
Billionaire doesn’t appear to be a great brand among a Democratic base calling for single-payer health care. Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg decided not to run when he figured that out, and the campaign for Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, fizzled.
Onstage, Mr. Steyer, a soft-spoken man with sandy blond hair, fielded questions.
“Why? Why have you decided to run for president, Tom,” the moderator and venue owner Manny Yekutiel, 29, asked, kicking the evening off.
Mr. Steyer said he believes he is the only person willing to fight Mr. Trump.
“I am more than willing to take this fight on if no one else will,” Mr. Steyer said. “And I don’t see anyone else who sees it’s a very simple fight. It’s hard. But it’s not complicated.”
Oh yes, there’s a rare commodity among Democrats: being “willing to fight Trump.” It’s a like a NASCAR competitor saying he’s the only one that wants to drive really fast. “Tom Steyer is the poster child for liberal hypocrisy.”
Steyer’s alleged goal is to be the “outsider” in the race, ready to “break the corrupt stranglehold that corporations have on our government” and “return power to the American people.” The enemy, Steyer claims, is “corrupt corporate power,” with a bit of climate change sprinkled in. The liberal mega-donor has long fancied himself as an environmental activist, donating more than $100 million to Democratic candidates who agree with him on the issue.
Yet, even a cursory glance at Steyer’s background exposes a Democrat more corporate than community organizer. In 1986, Steyer founded Farallon Capital Management, which has grown into one of America’s largest hedge funds. As of last year, Farallon managed over $25 billion worth of assets: roughly the equivalent of Iceland’s entire economic output. Steyer’s net worth is pegged at $1.6 billion.
I guess “corporate power” is only corrupting when it’s the other guy.
Dig deeper, and the stench of hypocrisy only grows. Beginning in the 1980s, Steyer made his name (and much of his money) investing in coal, natural gas, and oil.
As they rise to the top of 2020 Democratic presidential field, Harris and Warren are increasingly in direct competition for many of the same voters and donors, according to polls and fundraising data, with each drawing support from the party’s more affluent, college-educated wing — particularly women.
The overlap between their supporters might be a surprise, especially for Warren, who is usually portrayed as being in direct competition with fellow liberal stalwart Bernie Sanders. But Warren’s strongest support so far has come from the same group of voters that is critical to Harris’ path to the nomination.
“A lot of people handicapped the race with Warren competing for voters in the Bernie wing of the party,” said Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton campaign aide. “And it turns out that a lot of Clinton voters like Warren too, and she’s competing for voters in both lanes.
“And that lane definitely puts her in competition with Harris for some of those center-left college-educated women,” Fallon added. “Both of them have higher ceilings than others with those voters.”
Recent polls have underscored just how much support Warren and Harris each receive from white, college-educated voters — and how much room to grow they still have with this group.
In polling results shared with McClatchy, Quinnipiac University found that 24 percent of white, college-educated voters backed Warren earlier this month, compared to 21 percent for Harris.
Joe Biden placed third among those voters at 18 percent, despite having the top overall standing in the poll.
Like the Democratic Party in general, Harris and Warren are fighting over a small piece of the pie that they think is the whole pie. She gets a fawning Atlantic profile:
The crowds tell at least part of the story. Despite leading almost every poll, Biden has struggled with turnout: At one stop I was at last month, in Ottumwa, Iowa, the campaign had reserved a 664-seat theater and was excited when about 250 people showed up. Meanwhile, Warren drew more than 850 people on a recent Monday afternoon in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which was prime Bernie Sanders territory in 2016. Three days later, 1,500 people packed a Milwaukee high-school gym late into a Thursday night to see Warren, cheering and laughing along with her through a town hall. She walked out to “9 to 5.” She stood in front of an oversize American flag. She finished to “Respect.”
Nowhere does it say how a woman without Obama’s charisma can forge a movement the way Obama did. Warren goes after private equity. “Her new scheme is a far-reaching broadside against an entire industry that invests half a trillion dollars each year in American businesses.” Because how dare rich people build new businesses and hire people instead of building a bigger yacht? She says the economy is doomed, doomed unless congress adopts her laundry list of policy proposals. “Most of Warren’s proposals to head off the crisis are policies she has called for recently on the campaign trail such as forgiving over $600 billion in student loan debt, enacting her “Green Manufacturing Plan”, strengthening unions, providing universal child care and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.” Translation: You’re going to lose this race unless you strap this boat anchor to your car. Peter Thiel says that Warren is the only Democrat talking economics rather than identity politics.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Williamson asked white people to offer ‘prayer of apology.'” How about “No”? Does “No” work for you? Gets an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Finally, a meeting of the minds! It talks about her being roommates with Laura Dern.
A year and a half later, Yang, 44, is still introducing himself. But many of the people who have heard of him, who took in his interview with Fear Factor-host-turned-podcasting-king Joe Rogan or browsed his website’s absurdly long and eclectic list of policy positions, have come away intrigued and, in some cases, enamored. Over a span of months, Yang has ascended from sideshow to a Top 10 candidate in several recent polls. Morning Consult’s latest survey of Democratic primary voters ranked him seventh, tied with Senator Cory Booker; the candidates who trail Yang in that poll have more than 150 years of combined experience in elected office. Yang qualified for the first two Democratic National Committee debates in June and July well before the deadline; he has more Twitter followers than half of the Democratic field; and despite a disappointing performance at the Miami debate (he spoke the least of all 20 candidates), he’s blown past the threshold of 130,000 unique donors for the third and fourth debates this fall.
Yang’s pitch goes like this: Donald Trump got elected because we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, leading to economic insecurity, a declining quality of life, and a sense of desperation felt by millions of Americans who gave voice to that desperation by voting for the political equivalent of a human wrecking ball. And what automation did to manufacturing, he argues, it will soon do to trucking, call centers, fast food, and retail. “We’re in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” he likes to say.
Yang’s flagship plan to deal with this transformation, his Big Idea, is a universal basic income. He calls it the Freedom Dividend. (He picked the name because it tested better with conservatives than UBI did.) It’s $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for every American over the age of 18. What this new, multitrillion-dollar program would mean for the existing social safety net — well, Yang hasn’t entirely worked that out yet. But he’s quick to note that the concept of a guaranteed income has been around for centuries, with many famous proponents. (Thomas Paine! MLK! Richard Nixon!) And the appeal of a simple, catchy solution to problems as complex as the rise of robots and AI is obvious. “If you’ve heard anything about me, you’ve heard this: There’s an Asian man running for president that wants to give everyone a thousand dollars a month!” he says at the fish fry. “All three of those things are dead true, South Carolina!”
I recently embedded for three weeks with Yang’s freewheeling campaign, traveling with him in New Hampshire, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina. He invited me to ride around with him and his lean (but growing) team, sit in on private meetings, and hang out with him in the green room at the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (Reader, the snack spread was incredible.) I sought out Yang for the same reason so many others have, namely, to answer the question: Who is this guy?
But my curiosity was threaded with a sense of guilt: The last time a fringe candidate came along and started to gain traction, I dismissed him as a fluke and a fraud. That candidate was Donald Trump. This time, I figured I might learn something if I looked to the margins. Is Andrew Yang right about the robot apocalypse? Is he a teller of big truths that other candidates won’t touch or just the latest in a long line of TED-talking, techno-futurists scaring people about the End of Work? What does his popularity, however fleeting, tell us about American voters?
Joe Rogan stuff and some stupid “alt-right” accusation slinging snipped.
THE OBVIOUS NEXT question was whether Yang could translate his online support, all those “Yangstas,” as they call themselves, into something tangible. If he held rallies, would anyone come? If he asked for volunteers, would anyone sign up?
A series of big-city speeches in April and May, dubbed the Humanity First tour, settled those questions. Two thousand people showed up to see him at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, followed by 3,000 in Los Angeles, and 4,000 in Seattle. For the tour’s final stop, 2,500 people turned out in the pouring rain at New York City’s Washington Square Park. These crowd sizes exceeded those of some of the senators and governors in the race. The mainstream media tuned in as well: Yang got requests to appear on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.
I saw Yang for the first time in June on a swing through New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation primary. It was the middle of the afternoon on a rainy Thursday, but 60 or 70 people filled Crackskull’s cafe in the town of Newmarket to hear Yang speak. I overheard a barista say that former Obama cabinet secretary Julián Castro drew half as many people a few weeks earlier.
On the stump, Yang oozes a kind of anti-charisma. Dressed in dark pants, a light-blue oxford shirt, no tie, and a navy blazer — call it venture-capital casual — he doesn’t try to charm or inspire or flatter. He peppers his speeches with bleak statistics and dire warnings. Like Trump, he talks about how Middle America is “disintegrating.” He refers to “my friends in Silicon Valley” a lot and to the technologies they’re devising that will put regular people out of work.
Tech visionaries who stoke fears about the robot apocalypse are nothing new. But in the context of a presidential race, Yang is the only one making this argument, and he’s found an audience for it, judging by the crowds that followed him across New Hampshire. High school kids wore blue MATH hats — short for Make America Think Harder, another one of Yang’s Trump-trolling slogans. At Crackskull’s, Yang’s supporters had memorized Yang’s lines and knew what to say in the call-and-response sections of his stump speech.
Snip. Still super vague on what happens to existing welfare programs after his guaranteed income scheme kicks in:
Yang’s book The War on Normal People — copies of which were given out for free at nearly every campaign event I attended — lays out his views in greater detail but raises as many questions as it answers. He writes that the Freedom Dividend “would replace the vast majority of existing welfare programs.” When I ask him about this, he denies that the Freedom Dividend is a Trojan horse for shredding the social safety net. But he acknowledges that programs like food stamps, temporary assistance for needy families, and housing subsidies could shrink if recipients took the $1,000-a-month instead. “There’s no reason to think that you would end up eliminating them entirely,” he tells me. “It is the case that if enrollment were to go down by 30 percent, then over time the bureaucracy hopefully would adjust accordingly.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
All four members of the Squad (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) voted against tabling. Others voting to continue impeachment proceedings were Democratic Presidential candidate Seth Moulton (so much for those moderate credentials), former candidate Eric Swalwell, and Julian Castro’s brother Joaquin.
Voting to table was every single Republican, Republican-turned-Independent Justin Amash (who many commenters had assumed was a yes vote on impeachment), Democratic Presidential candidate Tim Ryan, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even Adam Schiff.
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard didn’t vote on the motion, the only Democrat to skip voting entirely.
Having so many Democrats vote against impeachment is a big blow to Democratic Presidential candidate Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC:
On Thursday, Steyer announced that he is launching a new political action committee to turn up the heat on key Democrats by going behind their backs and into their districts with a pro-impeachment TV and advertising blitz. According to Politico, Steyer’s top targets include three of the most powerful Democrats in the House: Oversight Chairman Elijah Cumming[sic], Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, and Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal. Other potential targets include Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and even Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Kevin Mack, Steyer’s lead strategist, told Politico that the goal isn’t to put money behind primary challengers—at least not yet. But the group has virtually unlimited money to spend on staff, ads, and volunteers. “Why does Steny Hoyer get a pass, why does Jim Clyburn get a pass?” Mack said. “They’re all hiding behind the Mueller report.”
Despite that threat, Cummings, Neal, Clyburn and Hoyer all voted against impeachment. (As per House tradition, Speaker Pelosi did not cast a vote.)
The vote was a victory for Pelosi, who proved she can still hold together a Democratic majority in the face of demands from more radical members. And it might give pause to impeachment pandering from other presidential contenders. If impeachment isn’t a winning issue for a majority of House Democrats, is it really a winning issue in the Democratic Primary?
Biden still leads, Steyer is In, Warren, Sanders and Harris are all bunched up for second, Castro wants nothing to do with your germ-bearing meatbag spawn, and Williamson channels Neon Genesis Evangelion and raises Gravel’s campaign from the dead.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Remember how Biden was doomed after a few bad polls? Yeah, no so much.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 35, Sanders 14. Harris 12, Warren 5, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Delany 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1.
NBC News/Wall Street Journal: Biden 26, Warren 19, Harris 13, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2. “Biden performs best among African Americans, older Democrats and those who are moderate or conservative in their political views, while Warren runs strongest with self-described liberals and those ages 18 to 49.”
Morning Consult (national): Biden 31, Sanders 18, Harris 14, Warren 13, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2. “The following candidates received 1% or less of the vote: Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
Morning Consult (early states): Biden 31, Sanders 20, Harris 14, Warren 11, Buttigieg 5, Booker 5, O’Rourke 3. “The following candidates received 2% or less of the vote share: Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Bullock, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
“Easily?” I asked, making sure I heard them correctly. Yes, they insisted, with her nodding as he said Democrats had gone bonkers and voters would respond by giving Trump four more years.
The recent Manhattan conversation would be insignificant except that it dovetails with national trends, namely a growing belief that Dems are not coming back to this world anytime soon. The election is still a long way off, but there is no sign that the radicalism surging through the party can be put back in the bottle before the election. What we see now is likely what voters will see in 2020.
One of many defining moments among the presidential contenders and pretenders came with their unanimous support for giving illegal immigrants free health care. They raised their hands to signal yes, as if the question was a no-brainer.
Implicit in their so-called compassion is an invitation for millions and millions more to cross the border and get free care. Free, of course, except to American taxpayers.
To qualify, candidates must have at least 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls released after the first debate on June 26-27 through two weeks before the third debate on Sept. 12-13 and 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).1 And while those thresholds might not sound that difficult to meet, it’s definitely raising the ante from the first two debates, in which candidates needed to hit only 1 percent support in three qualifying polls or 65,000 unique donors (including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states).
Right now only Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren have met the criteria.
“The party, in my opinion, has moved for me, personally, too far to the left, and for that reason I don’t have a candidate in the party at this time,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump that person, he or she, is going to have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that because the message of some of the programs that the Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”
“It’s really working for the party for the primaries, but if you’re going to win a general election against President Trump, who has a lockdown at his base and everybody’s going to contest for the middle and the independents, you can’t be too far left in that process,” he added.
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show at Netroots Nation’s presidential forum, if only for the fact that she was the lone top-tier presidential candidate who showed up.” Gillibrand, Inslee and Castro also showed up. That so many other candidates felt safe in skipping it (including Booker, who attended last year) is a sign of the conference’s continuing decline in importance.
There was a LULAC convention in Milwaukee. Sanders, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke all put in appearances, as did Jill Biden. Also see the bit on the Bennet/de Blasio being there below.
The NAACP’s 110th convention starts next Wednesday in Detroit, and declared candidates speaking there will be Biden, Booker, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, and Warren…plus Stacey Abrams. Klobuchar being there but not Buttigieg is…interesting.
I suppose I have a duty to link this 538 piece the topic of women running for president, but it starts with a lot of lefty culture war assumptions before inconclusive data scrying.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Local columnist from Rome, Georgia wants her to get in.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. George Will (I know) makes the case for Bennet, such as it is, which amounts to “he’s not as crazy as the rest.” Bennet said Democrats could lose Colorado if Sanders is the nominee. Since Clinton only beat Trump by 71,000 votes out of over 2 million cast in Colorado in 2016, any Democrat could conceivably lose Colorado. He got into an immigration pander-off with di Blasio at a LULAC convention in Milwaukee.
Joe Biden unveiled a proposal Monday to expand the Affordable Care Act with an optional public health insurance program, escalating a fierce debate with his Democratic rivals who favor a more sweeping Medicare-for-all system.
Biden’s plan, which campaign officials estimate would cost $750 billion over 10 years, would also expand tax credits to pay for health premiums, and it would create a new coverage option to help people living in states that have resisted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
Funny how a plan that socializes American medicine than the plan Obama and Pelosi just barely managed to get passed when they controlled all three branches of government is now too timid for the party’s true believers. Just one day before his candidacy, Biden had his records archive at the University of Delaware sealed. How convenient. Speaking of murky university doings, just exactly what is it that the University of Pennsylvania got for the more than $900,000 paid Joe Biden? “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) This is interesting: “Presidential candidate Joe Biden refused to apologize for the nearly three million deportations carried out during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, after being confronted by protesters while campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire Friday.” Also this: “‘I will not halt deportations and detentions.’ Protestors continued to chant and demanded an apology but Biden remained intransigent.” Holy crap! Biden might win the nomination by simply not pandering to the Open Borders crowd. “The only thing making Biden look ‘electable’ is his rivals’ extremism.” Yeah, but that ain’t exactly nuthin’, hoss. Late breaking news: “Biden cancer nonprofit suspends operations indefinitely…Biden and his wife left the group’s board in April as an ethics precaution before he joined the presidential campaign. But the nonprofit had trouble maintaining momentum without their involvement.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker is unveiling new legislation that would give more federal prisoners the chance at early release, building on perviously [sic] passed criminal justice reform that some supporters say didn’t go far enough.” Typos in the very first sentence aside (“layers and layers of fact checkers”), it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but I suspect the number of prisoners it would actually affect are small. He brags about changing Newark’s image of “crime and corruption” as mayor. Don’t know about corruption, but the figures hardly show an unambiguous decline in crime between 2006 and 2013 (all numbers per 100,000). Murders: 105 in 2006, 112 in 2013. Rapes: 87 in 2006, 45 in 2013 (the biggest decline I can spot except for arson, though they’re way up to 116 in 2017); Robberies 1,288 in 2006, 2,433 in 2013, etc. Arson went from 166 in 2006 to 34 in 2013, so maybe there was a significant dent there. Or maybe the economy improved just enough that people weren’t torching their own places for the insurance money anymore. In fact, crime seems to have dropped more after he left.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg goes on hiring spree after top fundraising quarter. Buttigieg’s once tiny campaign now has more than 250 people on staff, an aide said Friday, making the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign more representative of a top fundraising candidate.” The New Republic, once the premier journal of what would come to be called neoliberalism, published a piece attacking Buttigieg for being a neoliberal, and does so in such explicit terms about his gay sex life that it might have been penned by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Speaking of tedious explorations of Buttigieg’s sex life, NYT offers up “Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet,” because evidently that’s a subject some fraction their readership deeply cares about. Speaking of tedious, here’s more on Mayor Pete and race relations, because Democrats never seem to tire of scrutinizing every single person on earth for suspected racism. (See also yesterday’s piece.) Someone tracks down at least some of where that huge fundraising haul came from:
Notably, however, it came three days after Buttigieg held a fundraiser at the home of Hamilton James — a longtime Democratic donor, a political bundler for the likes of Hillary Clinton, and also the executive vice chairman of the Blackstone Group and an architect of a $20 billion deal to use Saudi dollars to fund U.S. infrastructure projects.
Blackstone, the largest alternative investment firm in the world, has long counted Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client, according to the New York Times. The infrastructure deal was in the works before the last presidential election and long before the death of Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is widely believed to be responsible.
The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.
Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.
And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.
Snip.
De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.
He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.
I think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn’t work anymore meaning we don’t get anything done. And I’m running for president to get America working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there’s jobs in every community in this country. Those are the reasons I’m running for president. And- but to do any of those things we actually have to start coming together. We have to find common ground. We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.
Snip.
Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize. My plan which is called “Better Care” is a universal health care plan. Every single American gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. But I preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance. They can if they want to buy supplemental plans. They can. It’s a much better way to create a universal health care system.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. At the Milwaukee LULAC convention, Gabbard criticized Trump’s immigration policies on much narrower grounds: non-Americans denied citizenship after serving in the U.S. military. This is a real issue, but it’s one that affected only 227 people in 2018. Gabbard appeared on an NPR podcast. “Asked if there are any wars in American history that she thinks were justifiable, she named only World War II.” She says the two party system sucks. A defensible position, but one not calculated to help win the nomination of the party Gabbard is running to represent. She also wants to eliminate superdelegates, which under the 2020 rules won’t vote unless the nomination goes beyond the first ballot.
Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Still In? Twitter. Facebook. Evidently last week’s news that he was dropping out was premature, or else he only plans to drop out after the debates, which he’s met the donor threshold for qualifying for, very possibly thanks to rival candidate William’s appeal for money. He promised the 65,000th donor a signed rock.
“Mike Gravel and His Online Teens Want Weed in the Constitution.” I prefer to see federal marijuana prohibition ended on Tenth Amendment grounds, as passing a constitutional amendment is both the stupidest and least-likely path to legalization, but I’m surprised that more serious candidates haven’t made a play for pro-pot voters. It’s a significant single-issue constituency, albeit it not as big a one as its supporters think.
As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.
Snip.
Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing. The glib response elided a more complicated record: she opposed recreational pot when she was D.A. of San Francisco, then apparently adapted her view as the public consensus shifted. But that wasn’t the problem. After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. This was not going to be “Dreams from My Father,” the sequel.
Snip.
Around the time that Owsley met her, Harris was a young prosecutor. She was dating Willie Brown, one of the most visible and powerful politicians in the state. He was sixty—four years older than her dad. Originally from segregated East Texas, he had come to San Francisco during the era of “James Crow” and, rather than join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation, became a defense attorney, representing pimps and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in the State Assembly and, for fourteen years, served as speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah. A Democratic power broker with Republican allies, he apportioned the prime office space and knew where to find a legislator if his wife showed up looking for him. In the course of Brown’s career, he was investigated twice by the F.B.I. for corruption, but never charged with a crime. (He played a version of himself in “The Godfather: Part III,” glad-handing Michael Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy,” as he puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He has had a series of girlfriends—currently, he’s dating a Russian socialite—and maintains a large collection of friends all over the city, notably among wealthy white donors in Pacific Heights. “Willie knows no strangers,” Owsley told me.
During Harris’s short-lived romance with Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in. The association has clung to her—“an albatross,” she told SF Weekly years ago. Some of the most abhorrent memes of the Presidential campaign riff on their relationship (“Just say no to Willie Brown’s ho”), as does the third comment down on just about any Harris news story. Roseanne Barr has weighed in, scurrilously. Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.
Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats—he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.” Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.
“Willie is a bit of a finishing school for some of the people in his orbit,” the local observer told me. “Most people don’t quite know one hundred per cent how to dress for the first Pacific Heights cocktail party they get invited to. The notion that he helped polish somebody like Kamala a little more—I don’t think that is sexist. To use a Colette metaphor, he might have been the Aunt Alicia. ‘Here’s how you dress for this, and when you talk to this person remember that her husband likes to talk about this subject—and you might get a big donation.’ ” Harris grew close to Wilkes Bashford, a friend of Brown’s and one of San Francisco’s most exclusive clothiers, and she became a frequent bold name in the society columns. Even now, she is often featured in the address-restricted magazine the Nob Hill Gazette. Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.
In his memoir, published the year Obama was elected President, Brown writes that it is critical for black candidates to “cross over into the white community.” He maintains that black women face a particular challenge being seen as leaders. “When whites look at black women, they see the women as servants, maids, and cooks (just as my mother was),” he writes. “No matter how astute these women are, they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much beyond domestic-service status.” His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens.
Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé, though the connection is rarely held against him. Born into a political family from Pacific Heights, Newsom was a fixture in the social scene to which Brown introduced Harris. “I certainly remember Gavin delivering wine to our house,” Owsley said, remarking that her husband had invested in PlumpJack, Newsom’s hospitality company. When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”
Since Brown fostered both of them, Harris and Newsom have been political siblings vying for primacy. The day Harris was sworn in as D.A., in 2004, Newsom became mayor; when he became lieutenant governor, she was sworn in as state attorney general. They share donors, networks, and consultants, and have backed each other publicly on issues that range from supporting gay marriage to opposing the death penalty. (Harris also endorsed Newsom’s decision to turn undocumented minors accused of felonies over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a decision both have since disavowed.) The two have even vacationed together, Newsom acknowledged to me. I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”
Several years ago, Harris and Newsom’s sibling rivalry was nearly put before the state’s voters. As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor. “It was very important when she decided, because running against her for any office was not something I had any desire to do,” Newsom, who is a co-chair of Harris’s California campaign, said. “If she decided to run for governor, that would have been perilous in terms of my own considerations.”
There’s a lot more there on her various political campaigns and tenure as DA. Harris’ calculated straddles. “She wants to attack Biden on busing with paying the price of embracing a deeply unpopular policy of imposing busing today. She wants to say she’s on Bernie’s side on health care without acknowledging Medicare for All would abolish almost all private insurance.” A critique of her housing subsidy proposal:
Harris says her well-intentioned goal is to close the wealth gap between black and while families. She would give 4 million homebuyers HUD grants of up to $25,000 each to help them make down payments and pay closing costs to buy homes.
However, as we all know, the average cost of even a modest home far exceeds $25,000. That means that recipients of these generous government grants would need to borrow a lot more money to buy homes, even while facing big monthly mortgage payments that in many cases would be greater than they could afford.
Does this sound familiar? If you’ve followed news about the housing market for years, it should. It reminds us of the feel-good government intervention that precipitated the horrendous real estate crash of 2008 and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.
In 2016, the buzz around Hickenlooper was loud enough that Hillary Clinton vetted him to be her running mate. But three years later, Hickenlooper often finds himself talking to voters who have no idea who he is. A columnist for the New Hampshire Union-Leader recently likened the efforts of Hickenlooper — a former brewery owner — to “a fledgling IPA fighting for a tap in the neighborhood bar.”
That was evident during a recent visit to the Foundry, a beer hall and distillery in West Des Moines, where patrons eyed him with mild curiosity. “You are who?” a man said as Hickenlooper wandered near the bar. Upon learning Hickenlooper was running for president, he replied, “There are so many of you.”
In Cresco, Iowa, where Hickenlooper spoke at a local Democratic Party gathering, a woman mistook the former governor for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is also running for president. “Two Coloradans,” the woman declared, as Hickenlooper walked away. “I can’t keep them straight.”
During a recent visit to the Des Moines farmers market, the unassuming Hickenlooper walked through the buyers in almost complete anonymity. He made little effort to call attention to himself, and the shoppers and merchants appeared to have no idea a presidential candidate was in their midst.
Hickenlooper’s road became even lonelier last week. Several top aides, including campaign manager Brad Komar, left the campaign or announced they would do so soon. Hickenlooper played down the departures, but a Democrat close to the campaign said the aides had urged him to drop his presidential bid and instead run for the Senate, which Hickenlooper refused to do.
When the rodents depart the dinghy, maybe it’s time to take the hint.
Hickenlooper also rejects some of the high-profile liberal initiatives embraced by other Democratic hopefuls. He is against Medicare-for-all, arguing there are “less disruptive ways” of achieving universal health care. And while citing a “sense of urgency” on climate change, Hickenlooper opposes the Green New Deal, saying it could never win Republican support.
He’s sought a similar middle path on immigration. At a deli in Boone, Iowa, Dean Lyons, a utility company manager, asked Hickenlooper what he would do about the “mess” at the border. The former governor replied, “We need borders. And we need people to obey the law. You cannot continue to have laws that people don’t obey.”
But he also said the nation can’t ignore the humanitarian issues at the border or its need for low-skilled workers, and he listed several policy ideas, such as a 10-year renewable visa program. Afterward, Lyons praised the nuanced answer but also stressed Hickenlooper’s long odds. “I was pretty impressed with him,” Lyons said. “But he’s got a long road to get up the ladder.”
Hickenlooper has recently tried to stand out by being ever more aggressive about the party’s leftward turn, arguing that “socialism is not the answer” and that embracing it will only lead to a Democratic defeat. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president ever in American history,” he has argued.
That line elicited boos from liberal attendees at last month’s California Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a reaction that lit up social media and attracted the first significant headlines of his campaign.
But the same line attracted polite nods in Iowa, where Hickenlooper hopes his “extreme moderate” message, as he calls it, will catch fire with a Midwestern electorate that often prefers middle-of-the-road candidates.
I wouldn’t hold your breath. “Hickenlooper refuses to condemn protesters who hoisted Mexican flag at ICE facility.” It must suck to be pandering as hard as you can and still be stuck at 1%.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Piece wondering why Moulton, Ryan and the now-departed Swalwell are even running for President. “‘I think he’s got a better shot at being president than being a senator from Massachusetts,’ said [Democratic consultant Scott] Ferson, who worked for Moulton’s winning congressional race in 2014 but is not involved with his presidential run. ‘He burned a lot of bridges in Massachusetts in the Democratic Party, and for statewide office you need party support.'” Asked whether he knew Buttigieg at Harvard, Moulton said:
“No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats,” Moulton said.
He was then asked to describe what his friend group was like.
“Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time,” Moulton said.
The excitement that greeted Beto O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy is long gone. The former Texas congressman has been stuck in low single digits in most polls, and CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny reports he’s now running low on cash.
“On the eve of the fundraising deadline for all the candidates to report their money, he’s yet to report,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by a couple of top supporters familiar with his financial situation that it’s bleak. A few staffers have begun leaving El Paso, moving on to other things. … He has a lot of high-powered, high-paid staff members so there are discussions going on, I’m told, as to what the next step is. He’s committed to staying in, but it’s not the summer he envisioned.”
Just nine months ago, attorney Katie Baron was so inspired by Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in Texas that she commissioned a sprawling mural on the side of a building in east Austinfeaturing the candidate in a Superman-like pose.
After O’Rourke lost race and began mulling a presidential campaign, the artist added a sweeping “2020” in blue paint – providing what seemed to be yet one more call for O’Rourke to get into the crowded race.
Now, four months into O’Rourke’s campaign, Baron wishes he had stayed out.
After the first Democratic presidential debate last month, Baron posted an altered picture of the mural on a Facebook page dedicated to the artwork. She had replaced O’Rourke’s face with Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s and wrote: “Don’t worry, still got PLENTY of love for Beto, but Kamala earned herself a little recognition too last night!” The comments filled with messages from angry O’Rourke supporters and a few excited Harris backers.
While Baron says she will be forever grateful to O’Rourke for inspiring her and thousands of others to become politically active, she doesn’t think he’s the strongest candidate for president, nor has he shown he can nationalize the magic of his Senate campaign.
“If the primary vote was tomorrow, he wouldn’t have my vote,” said Baron, 35, who likes Harris, D-Calif., for her sharp intellect and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her methodical policy papers.
“Being part of the Beto-mania that was fueling the fire, I can see why he kind of thought he had no choice but to enter,” she said. “Honestly, I did get a little caught up. We were still riding the wave of the midterms.”
As O’Rourke slogs through a difficult primary season, he’s not only struggling to gain the support of voters who don’t know of him, but also to hold on to the support of those who know him best, Texans who powered his long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.
On the one hand, yeah, there’s the widespread impression that he missed his mark. On the other hand, I still see a lot of Beto 2020 signs and stickers around Austin…
Indeed, if you’re going to construct a path to the nomination for Sestak, it probably goes something like: If Biden stumbles, here’s another white man with gravitas who can speak credibly to middle America (and doesn’t call himself a socialist). But he has a problem that other candidates in this position (e.g., Sen. Michael Bennet or Gov. Steve Bullock) don’t — he’s made a lot of enemies in the Democratic establishment. In 2010, in defiance of party leadership, Sestak primaried Sen. Arlen Specter, who had recently switched parties from the GOP. Although Sestak impressively came from behind to topple Specter in the primary, he lost the general election by 2 points, and some Democrats blamed him for blowing a winnable race. So when he tried for a rematch in 2016, party elders recruited another Democrat, Katie McGinty, to block his path, and she handily defeated him in the primary. That was the last time Sestak ran for office — until now.
O’Connell wouldn’t say which specific constituencies within the party Sestak would try to woo, but his campaign strategy so far has been focused on retail politics — shaking hands at parades and convincing one voter at a time — in Iowa. But Sestak also plans to tap his old donor base in Pennsylvania, which raised millions for him in his previous campaigns, although O’Connell acknowledged that presidential fundraising will be a challenge because of Sestak’s late entry into the race. Without question, Sestak is starting from behind: Since 1976, only one successful nominee, Bill Clinton, kicked off a campaign later than April of the year before the election. And with only 27 percent of Democrats having an opinion of Sestak, according to a recent YouGov poll, he can scarcely afford to get a late start. However, he didn’t do so by choice: O’Connell says Sestak would have jumped in the race much sooner, but he didn’t want to run as long as his daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. (She was given the all-clear earlier in June.)
Sestak was always going to have an uphill climb. He hasn’t won an election in nine years, and long layovers between campaigns can make for weaker candidates. It’s also hard to win a nomination without at least some support from the party establishment, which he seems unlikely to get. Finally, he has yet to reach 1 percent in any poll, which is a severe handicap to his chances of making the stage for future debates (not to mention getting enough votes to win the nomination). Unfortunately for “Admiral Joe,” on-the-ground campaigning simply may not reach enough voters to make up for that.
Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.
This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”
To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”
Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”
Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I’m not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”
Tom Steyer, you beautiful madman. You’re about to turn the Democratic primary into an expensive demolition derby: “Billionaire Tom Steyer announced Tuesday that he will join the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and promised to commit at least $100 million of his personal fortune to the campaign.
Steyer will not be the 2020 Democratic nominee. But with $100 million, he can do a lot of damage to anyone he deems an obstacle, and it’s worth remembering that Michael Bloomberg just overwhelmed every opponent with a tsunami of ad money when running for mayor in New York City three times. Steyer has limited name recognition now, but a nearly unlimited television advertising budget will change that fast. He can promise anything and accuse anyone else of being a “Washington insider.”
Steyer’s probably not quite a threat to overtake Biden or Harris or Sanders or Warren. But everybody below that might as well call it quits.
Life just stinks if you’re Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet these days, doesn’t it? You’ve worked hard to try to get things done in the U.S. Senate and it means bupkus to most Democratic primary voters. You could call for Trump’s impeachment, but you can’t do anything until the House of Representatives actually passes articles of impeachment. You’re sharing the stage with no-name House members and some spiritual guru from California who’s talking about the power of love. You’re going to spend your summer eating corn dogs in small towns in Iowa singing the praises of ethanol while reporters ask why you’re not raising as much money as the mayor of South Bend, who nobody had heard of a year ago. And now some billionaire who you’d prefer to have as a benefactor rather than an enemy has decided he wants the same job you want.
Lots of lefty activists are upset that Steyer’s money is going to Steyer’s campaign rather than into their pockets. Even environmentalists, frequent recipients of his largess, aren’t pleased with him. “Steyer’s campaign could blunt momentum generated by candidates, such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who have elevated climate change as a priority in the primary elections by proposing detailed policies to curb it.” Given that Inslee has zero momentum, I don’t see how it could.
It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Warren officials say she did not violate that pledge when her campaign turned to one of California’s top Democratic donors, a wealthy Silicon Valley physician named Karla Jurvetson, to help pay for access to a crucial voter database earlier this spring.
The so-called national “voter file,” a pool of data about millions of people that presidential campaigns use as a foundation for their own private data as they identify and track support over time, is managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and costs campaigns a total of $175,000, according to the DNC’s voter file contract.
The DNC term sheet outlines two ways campaigns may pay for the voter file: by transferring funds directly to the DNC, or raising that money “to” the DNC through donors.
Jurvetson, who contributed about $7 million to Democratic causes during the 2018 election, gave a total of $100,000 to the DNC in April 2019, Federal Election Commission filings show. The donations, according to two Democratic operatives with knowledge of the agreement, helped Warren pay for the voter file.
To me the most interesting part of the story is: How does a physician have $7 million to give away in political donations? Doctors make good money, but not that good. Oh wait: “Jurvetson was married in 1990 to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early-stage investor in companies including SpaceX and Tesla.” Mystery solved! Hmmm: “Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics…In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees.” “Warren criticizes powerful businesses. She also worked for them.” In addition to Dow Chemical:
At issue are two decades when Warren enhanced her income as a law professor by consulting on various legal issues and representing clients. Some seem to fit her present-day brand: She worked on behalf of asbestos victims and represented the environmental lawyer whose story became the basis of the 1998 film “A Civil Action.”
But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.
These include her work on behalf of plane manufacturer Fairchild Aircraft after a crash killed four people, including NASCAR star Alan Kulwicki. Warren argued that Fairchild should be shielded from liability because the plane that went down was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. (She lost.)
In another case, Warren represented Southwestern Electric Power Company, a firm that relied on Warren when its bid to buy power plants from a bankrupt energy co-op was jeopardized by allegations of vote buying. (She won.)
The work supplemented her salary from Harvard, which was about $185,000 a year in the mid-1990s, employment records show. Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.
From 2008 to 2010, a period for which Warren has released tax returns, her outside work brought in an average of about $200,000 a year. That included royalties from books and enabled Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, to bring in nearly $1 million in each of those years.
In her 2007 book A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Catherine Albanese argues that religiosity has taken three major forms in American history: evangelical Christianity, the mainline denominations, and what Albanese calls “metaphysical religion.” In that third strand, the material world is believed to be “organically linked to the spiritual one,” allowing people to tap into a “stream of energy” that “renders them divine and limitless.” The followers of this tradition believe that the “trained and controlled human imagination” can be honed “to bring desired and seemingly miraculous change.”
This worldview has Old World roots, but it has taken on a variety of distinctly American forms. One of the central threads of this tradition is what William James called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” You hear its echoes whenever someone uses phrases like the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking.
Overview of the career of Phineas Quimby, who combined mesmerism and herbal teas, snipped.
(Maybe a decedent…)
If this reminds you of Christian Science, there’s a reason for that: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby’s patients, and she drew on Quimby’s ideas as she developed her own distinctive doctrines. (Just how much she drew on Quimby became a matter of considerable dispute between Eddy and Quimby’s disciples.) Enthusiasts outside Eddy’s orbit began to refer to their core concepts as New Thought, a term borrowed from the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action,” Emerson said, “that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”) Others adopted different names, such as “mind cure.” When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City founded a church based on New Thought principles in 1889, they called it Unity. (The Unity congregation that hosted Williamson’s D.C. rally was founded in 1920, though it didn’t move to its current space until much later.)
Some of these new-thinkers were recognizably Christian. Others roped in a smorgasbord of other spiritual ideas, from Theosophy to bastardized versions of various Eastern traditions. Some of them argued that modern medical theories were entirely baseless; others acknowledged that doctors often knew what they were doing but suggested that New Thought techniques could either amplify medicine’s effects or work as an alternative when other remedies failed. As the movement evolved, its interests extended beyond physical health; in particular, the notion took hold that those streams of divine energy could be used to attract personal riches.
As these ideas grew more popular, they inevitably intersected with politics. Wallace D. Wattles, author of 1910’s The Science of Getting Rich, was to the left of Marianne Williamson: He was a member (and mayoral and congressional candidate) of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Horowitz’s book lists several social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who mixed their politics with mind-cure concepts. That shouldn’t be surprising. From the left-libertarian mystic Stephen Pearl Andrews to the spiritualist suffragette Victoria Woodhull, it was common in that period for populists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and other radicals to draw on Albanese’s tradition of metaphysical religion. Why wouldn’t some of them be interested in New Thought too?
But New Thought also planted the seeds of the health-and-wealth school of Christianity, whose political sympathies often trended in a different direction. Consider the career of Norman Vincent Peale, born to a Midwestern Methodist minister in 1898. Peale followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a mainline Protestant congregation in New York, but he also read New Thought literature and soon started mixing it with his denomination’s doctrines. He was particularly taken with the writings of Napoleon Hill, a serial entrepreneur who left a trail of shady business practices and dubious biographical claims. Hill’s articles and books—most famously, his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich—repackaged New Thought techniques as business advice, often putting Hill’s ideas into the mouths of the successful executives he allegedly interviewed. (In an entertaining article published in Gizmodo in 2016, Matt Novak makes a compelling case that few if any of these conversations actually happened. Hill’s habit of inventing interviews reached its peak in the posthumously published Outwitting the Devil, in which he claimed to have had a Q&A session with Satan.) Hill eventually drifted into a Long Island sect called the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which attracted a degree of infamy when it declared its plans to unlock the path to physical immortality through a mixture of New Thought practices and vegetarianism.
All its missing is the Fox sisters and John Murray Spear. Skipping ahead to Williamson:
In Williamson’s case, that background begins in Houston, where she was born to a Jewish family in 1952. (She still considers herself a Jew, even as she regularly invokes Jesus and Buddha. Entertainment Weekly once called her Christ’s “most eminently eccentric Jewish exponent.”) She drifted in her 20s: dropping out of college, working briefly as a cabaret singer, imbibing a lot of alcohol and other drugs. Her life turned around after she discovered A Course in Miracles, a lengthy text that the historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal has called “a synthesis of psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.” The book was “scribed” by the psychologist Helen Schucman from 1965 to 1972. (I say “scribed” rather than “written” because Schucman insisted that it had been dictated by Jesus.) Course says that everyone is a child of God, that our separate egos are an illusion, that the physical world itself is an illusion, and that one day we will wake into a state of eternal love.
Williamson embraced the book, calling it “my personal teacher, my path out of hell.” By 1983 she was giving talks about it at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.
The Philosophical Research Society is a venerable New Age institution, having been founded in 1934 by a Theosophist named Manly P. Hall. Hall wrote frequently about secret societies and esoteric symbols, and he was a devotee of the idea that a benevolent conspiracy has been guiding America toward a higher destiny. Williamson remembers Hall fondly, though she wouldn’t describe him as an influence on her. “By the time I got to the Philosophical Research Society, my reading Manly Hall was more affirmation of the things I already believed in,” she tells me after the D.C. rally, in a little room adjacent to the senior minister’s office. “I was already on that basic course of knowing that there’s much more to life than what meets the physical eye.”
That said, there is one rather Hallian passage in Williamson’s first political book, 1997’s The Healing of America. The Great Seal of the United States—that eye-in-the-pyramid logo on the back of the dollar bill—”illustrates our Founders’ sense of America’s destiny,” Williamson writes. “The seal shows the Great Pyramid at Giza, with its missing capstone returned and illuminated. The Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the consciousness of higher mind, is displayed within the capstone. Beneath the picture are written the words ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’—new order of the ages. This Masonic symbolism reveals democracy’s function as a vehicle for the realization of humanity’s highest potential.”
And now we’re back in Robert Anton Wilson territory. And speaking of hip pop culture references, Williamson is now memeing famed Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Given that show’s Kabbalistic underpinnings, that ties right back into the whole spiritualist enchilada above…
According to his campaign, some 300 malls will fold over the next 4 years, a number in line with an estimate by Credit Suisse that one-quarter of all malls will close by 2022. Many dozens or hundreds more will struggle as anchor stores collapse and retail outlets wither. Yang’s American Mall Act would devote $6 billion to finding new purposes for these dying retail complexes.
So, in other words, make them yet another sinkhole to toss taxpayer money into to prop up failing business models. Pass. “Andrew Yang on Automation: “You Can’t Turn Truck Drivers into Coders.'” He’s largely right there, but Universal Basic Income isn’t a solution, unless the question is “How do we prop up pot sellers, liquor stores and video game makers.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Biden is down, Harris is up, Gravel is out, Swallwell is soon to followout, Tom Steyer is getting in, and Williamson sends out a fundraising request…for Gravel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
This week’s polls are really interesting, and divergent. Some show Biden with a huge slump and Harris with a huge bump, while others only show a tiny bit of movement each way:
ABC News/Washington Post: Biden 30, Sanders 19, Harris 13, Warren 12, Buttigieg 4, Castro 3, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Booker 1, Hickenlooper 1, Inslee 1, Williamson 1, Gabbard 1. (Those are from the registered voters only screen, read from a list of candidates (question 6), which is what RealClearPolitics is tracking; the numbers are different if voters name their own candidate (question 5).)
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty good about the election after last week’s two-day Democratic clusterfark, and the president has got to be feeling pretty good too, since he just won it. Oh, we have 17 more months of media pimping of whichever commie candidate is currently the least embarrassing, but the debates made it very clear that Trump is going to be POTUS until Ric Grenell is on the victorious GOP ticket in 2024.
In the Dems’ defense, they do have an uphill battle. The economy is on fire, we’ve dodged all the new wars our garbage elite has proposed, Mueller (who went unmentioned) delivered only humiliation, and all 723 Democrats running are geebos. But say what you will, they are a diverse bunch in every way except thought – among the weirdos, losers and mutations onstage were a fake Indian, a furry, a guy so dumb he quotes Che in Miami, a raving weather cultist, America’s shrill first wife, a distinctly non-fabulous gay guy, T-Bone’s homie, whatever the hell Andrew Yang is, and Stevie Nicks.
But it was the thought part where they came together in a festival of insane acclamation. They agreed on everything, and it was all politically suicidal. Yeah, Americans are thrilled about the idea of subsidizing Marxist puppetry students and getting kicked off their health insurance so that they can put their lives in the hands of the people who brought you the DMV.
Exactly who, outside of Manhattan and Scat Francisco, think Americans are dying to stop even our feeble enforcement of the border, make illegal immigration not illegal, never send illegals home once they get here and – think about this – take our tax money to give these foreigners who shouldn’t even be here in the first place better free health care than our vets get? That should go well in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I eagerly await Salena Zito’s interview with a bunch of construction workers at a diner near Pittsburg who tell her, “It really bugs me, Lou and Joe here that those people coming into the country illegally aren’t getting free heath care on our dime. We all want to work an extra shift so we can give it to ‘em. We need a president who finally puts foreigners first! Also, we all agree we ought to give up our deer rifles because people in Cory Booker’s neighborhood can’t stop shooting each other.”
Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents.
Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream.
A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on the record going too far left. That way, he was still able to tack to the center against John McCain in the general election.
As a general election candidate, Obama rejected the idea of gay marriage. He blasted illegal immigration. He railed against deficit spending. And he went so far as to label then-President George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for taking out “a credit card from the bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt.”
The result was that Obama was elected. After taking office, in cynical fashion he endorsed gay marriage, ran up far more red ink than did Bush, offered blanket amnesties, and relaxed immigration enforcement.
Yet the current crop of would-be Democratic nominees has forgotten the old script entirely. Nearly all of them are currently running so hard to the left that the successful nominee will never be able to appear moderate.
Bernie Sanders leads the charge for abolishing all student debt. Kamala Harris wants reparations for slavery. Joe Biden talks of jailing health insurance executives if they falsely advertise.
The entire field seems to agree that it should not be a criminal offense to enter the U.S. illegally. The consensus appears to be that no illegal entrant will be deported unless he or she has committed a serious crime.
Not a single Democratic candidate has expressed reservations about abortions, and a number of them have fought proposed restrictions on partial-birth abortions.
Elizabeth Warren has said guns are a national health emergency and would not rule out the possibility of federal gun confiscation.
Early in the campaign, no major Democratic candidate has questioned the Green New Deal and its radical proposals. No one has much objected to dismantling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or scrapping the Electoral College. An unworkable wealth tax and a top marginal income tax rate of 70 percent or higher are also okay.
Yet none of these positions currently wins 51 percent of public support, according to polls.
What are the Democratic frontrunners thinking?
The Democrats’ illegal alien schemes are completely unworkable, says Obama’s own DHS chief:
Democratic presidential candidates have “unworkable” and “unwise” immigration policies, according to Obama administration Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson.
“That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” Johnson told the Washington Post on Tuesday, referring to a push to decriminalize illegal immigration. “That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”
Johnson’s comments follow sharp criticism of the 2020 Democratic contenders, who all raised their hands during the second night of debates when asked if illegal immigrants should receive taxpayer-funded health insurance (let’s not forget that Obamacare penalized American citizens who weren’t covered).
“Did the Russians pay the 2020 Democratic candidates to throw the 2020 election to President Donald Trump? Watching all four hours of the first Democratic debates, it became increasingly difficult to reach any other conclusion.”
The candidates unanimously agreed on “Medicare for All” and that it should cover illegal aliens — or as the moderator and candidates generally called them, the “undocumented.” Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., even said that Medicare for All requires the elimination of private health insurance. Sanders correctly asserted that a majority of Americans support Medicare for All. What he did not say, however, is that support steeply drops once people are informed that their taxes will go up to pay for it or when they learn that they may experience longer waiting periods before receiving health care. But give Sanders credit. Asked whether he intends to increase taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care plan, Sanders, after talking about the elimination of premiums, co-pays and deductibles, said that, yes, the middle class would pay more taxes.
Snip.
The biggest loser at the Democrat debates, however, was the American taxpayer. In addition to “universal health care,” Sanders touted his plan to hit up taxpayers for “free college” and student debt forgiveness. The candidates agreed that illegal entry into the U.S. ought not be a crime but rather a civil violation. This would simply encourage more illegal entry. How much would this cost the taxpayers just for the education of their children in public schools?
And a big issue was AWOL in the debate. Not brought up by any moderator, even though it enjoys the support of the most blacks, was the issue of reparations. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Harris all support reparations. Yet the only who brought it up, and then in passing, was fringe candidate Marianne Williamson. Why would the debate’s moderators omit a topic being widely discussed during the Democratic primary campaign? The answer is that the issue of reparations is a political loser. Polls and surveys suggest that the majority of blacks support it, but that’s about it. It appears that moderators did not want the candidates endorsing an issue so unpopular. The candidates, of course, could have volunteered their support for reparations. But with the exception of Williamson, they elected not to.
After Obama served two terms as president; after Oprah became one of the richest people Earth has ever known; after America became history’s most diverse nation where the descendants of black slaves, as a group, are more successful than any that ever existed, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are talking about race as if we’re still living in the ‘60s. And they do it not to solve real moral and socioeconomic problems in poor black communities – but to get political power.
It’s infuriating.
Cory and Kamala are mixing anecdotal scraps from America’s bad old days with “microaggressions” from today’s classroom racism, to cobble together a political scarecrow that tricks people into believing that racial oppression still exists. It doesn’t.
Greg Gutfeld thinks that Biden looks tired and Harris will be the nominee. Eh, I think he’s falling prey to recency bias here. Biden has plenty of time to recover, and Harris to stumble, between now and Iowa.
Ten candidates appeared at the NEA convention in Houston, including Biden, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke. I’d love to tell you who else, but the Texas Tribune couldn’t be bothered to actually name the rest.
Currently, the only locks for the fall debates are former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is likely to qualify, but after an underwhelming debate performance last week, even he is not guaranteed to make the polling threshold. Only polls taken between June 28 and Aug. 28 will count.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Sheriff David Clarke notes that Abrams is no longer a rising star:
Abrams continues to traverse the country in a state of delusion, telling audiences that she won her race for Georgia governor but that it was stolen from her through racist Republican gerrymandering. She lost by 55,000 votes, not even enough to trigger an automatic recount. Georgia has 156 counties. Abrams won—are you ready for this—20 counties. The only reason the race was as close as it was is because she won Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia and where 54% of blacks live. The reality is that she lost because her base of support didn’t go outside of Atlanta. It wasn’t diverse enough, ironically. She tried to get elected to the highest office in the state of Georgia by basically winning in one county. Maybe she should have considered building her bio by running for mayor of Atlanta first and governing from there. Her ambition wouldn’t allow that. She was trying to be the first—as in first black and female governor of Georgia. She could not fulfill being the first black mayor of Atlanta. Maynard Jackson beat her to it having become Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1974. Democrats are still trying to become the first in some office whether regarding skin color, gender, or sexual preference.
Now Democrats want to force Stacey Abrams down the throats of the rest of America after the voters of Georgia rejected her. They mention her as a potential presidential or VP candidate. She has a thin resume just like a replay of Obama circa 2008. I hope that conservatives push back this time with the gumption they did not have in 2008 when they decided to flaunt their racial sensitivity because of the fear of being called racists.
Let me get the drumbeat in rejecting Stacey Abrams for national office started. Too many in the GOP will be afraid to do so. She is a flawed candidate with no real political experience outside of activism. She is a career race-baiter having started a voter registration campaign called the New Georgia Project, which was investigated for voter fraud, and that was unable and unwilling to say what the organization did with the $3.6 million they raised to register voters. It failed.
In September, 2008, Hunter launched a boutique consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named for the largest of the Finger Lakes, in New York State, where his mother had grown up. In pitch meetings with prospective clients, Hunter said that he could help small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries. In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry’s stepson and an heir to the food-company fortune, and Devon Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who started his finance career at Citibank in Asia and who had been friends with Heinz at Yale. (Heinz and Archer already had a private-equity fund called Rosemont Capital.) Heinz believed that Hunter would share his aversion to entering into business deals that could attract public scrutiny, but over time Hunter and Archer seized opportunities that did not include Heinz, who was less inclined to take risks.
In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital—and, potentially, capital from other countries—in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.
In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li had what both parties described as a social meeting. Hunter told me that he didn’t understand why anyone would have been concerned about this. “How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” he said.
Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”
For another venture, Archer travelled to Kiev to pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, Rosemont Realty. There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers. Zlochevsky had served as ecology minister under the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. After public protests in 2013 and early 2014, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to remove Yanukovych and called for his arrest. Under the new Ukrainian government, authorities in Kiev, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, launched an investigation into whether Zlochevsky had used his cabinet position to grant exploration licenses that benefitted Burisma. (The status of the inquiry is unclear, but no proof of criminal activity has been publicly disclosed. Zlochevsky could not be reached for comment, and Burisma did not respond to queries.) In a related investigation, which was ultimately closed owing to a lack of evidence, British authorities temporarily froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky.
In early 2014, Zlochevsky sought to assemble a high-profile international board to oversee Burisma, telling prospective members that he wanted the company to adopt Western standards of transparency. Among the board members he recruited was a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had a reputation as a dedicated reformer. In early 2014, at Zlochevsky’s suggestion, Kwaśniewski met with Archer in Warsaw and encouraged him to join Burisma’s board, arguing that the company was critical to Ukraine’s independence from Russia. Archer agreed.
When Archer told Hunter that the board needed advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance, Hunter recommended the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was “of counsel.” The firm brought in the investigative agency Nardello & Co. to assess Burisma’s history of corruption. Hunter joined Archer on the Burisma board in April, 2014. Three months later, in a draft report to Boies Schiller, Nardello said that it was “unable to identify any information to date regarding any current government investigation into Zlochevsky or Burisma,” but cited unnamed sources saying that Zlochevsky could be “vulnerable to investigation for financial crimes” and for “perceived abuse of power.”
Vice-President Biden was playing a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine, and took the lead in calling on Kiev to fight rampant corruption. On May 13, 2014, after Hunter’s role on the Burisma board was reported in the news, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson, said that the State Department was not concerned about perceived conflicts of interest, because Hunter was a “private citizen.”
Funny how the Clinton and Biden kin are always “private citizens,” but any low-level Trump staffer bumping into a Russian was cause for ruining his life. One amazing thing about that New Yorker piece is how it was obviously written by someone sympathetic to the Bidens, but which nonetheless paints a devastating portrait of a Vice President’s son deeply entangled in foreign interests. And I haven’t even talked about the cocaine and alcohol abuse. Joe Biden wants to bring back the ObamaCare individual mandate. Remember how super popular that turned out to be for Democrats in the 2010 election? Speaking of reruns, Biden says he’s open to renominating Merrick Garland. Something tells me that the activist base has discovered that Garland is, in fact, an old white man sometime since 2016…
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Among Bullock’s Q2 donors: Jane Fonda. “2020 Democratic candidate Bullock open to Keystone XL pipeline.” And there’s your first sign that Bullock is thinking of dropping out of the Presidential race and filing for a senate run against Steve Daines in 2020 (he’s term-limited as governor).
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let the black pandering begin! “Pete Buttigieg Uses Essence Festival to Start His Rehab With Black Voters.” Also: “Democrat Buttigieg announces minority-focused small business investment plan.” With as much money as he’s raised, and with Harris and Booker in the race, I’m not sure making a play for minority voters is the best use of his time and money. He should be attacking Biden and making a play for what’s left of the Democratic Party’s white working class voters. I guess this support for striking workers qualifies, but given they’re striking on Martha’s Vineyard, I suspect the “working class solidarity” vibe is somewhat muted. Then again, he says Democrats need to veer further left to win in 2020, so maybe his “moderate’ reputation is overblown.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. For all this talk of Castro having a “breakout debate,” what it seems to boil down to is he went from 1% to 3% in the polls…at best. He says he’s feeling better, but can’t quote climb out of the corpse wagon on his own power. Like a good little social justice warrior, Castro is falling in line and declaring the Betsy Ross flag as racist. And speaking of being a good social justice warrior, he says the reason he can’t speak Spanish is “internalized oppression.” Said he had a “better” fundraising quarter, but hasn’t released his Q2 numbers yet.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently “Look, I have a mixed race son!” isn’t quite the Ace-in-the-hole de Blasio thinks it is. “It’s beyond telling that he’s already relying on the same gimmick — rather than his record in office — to get him out of the 1 percent doldrums in the 2020 campaign.”
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was on Face the Nation. “We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.” Also: “”Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize.” Yeah, not seeing the debate change among the candidates polling higher than him, which is most of them.
I’d asked to attend the workout of the senator from New York and aspiring president after seeing her do chest presses on Instagram, thinking it would work as a facile metaphor for the strength she’d need to break out in a 24-person Democratic field. I’d hoped the sight of 52-year-old Gillibrand’s now-famous biceps might reveal some larger, heretofore obscured appeal. Some reserve of magnetism, also hiding under a navy blazer. A glimpse into the reasons she’s not gaining ground as a candidate.
The majority of Democratic hopefuls have yet to experience a moment like the surge of interest in Mayor Pete or Beto or Elizabeth Warren, let alone the preexisting support afforded the two candidates approaching their 80th birthdays. But Gillibrand’s lack of anointing seems conspicuous. After all, on paper, she’s set herself up to succeed: Gillibrand has never lost an election in her 13-year career in politics. She’s an advocate for women and families at a time when the law has been lapped by societal sentiment. She’s progressive enough to have supported Medicare-for-all since 2006, but she had enough bipartisan reach to get Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vote for her (as yet unpassed) Military Justice Improvement Act, which would protect those sexually assaulted while serving. She also co-sponsored the 9/11 first responders bill.
Yet Gillibrand is currently polling between 0 and 1 percent in national surveys, nestled in the bleak data crevice between Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. “Kirsten Gillibrand Is Struggling,” announced the New York Times in May. “Will Abortion Rights Be Her Rallying Cry?” Two weeks later, a Politico headline read: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s Failure to Launch.”
Yes, we’ve reached the point in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre where the piece namechecks previous entries in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre…
Williamson’s campaign on Sunday sent out an email asking people to donate to her opponent Gravel — who served as a U.S. Senator from Alaska from 1969 to 1981 — because he’s “only 10,000 donations short of qualifying for the July debates.”
“Thanks to you, I’m on the debate stage. And that’s why today I’m using this platform, granted to me by you, to ask for your help,” Williamson wrote in the email.
“You may not have heard of him,” she continued, referring to Gravel, “because he hasn’t yet qualified for any debates. But his voice is important.”
In 2008, Obama complained about “the orgy of spending” under President George W. Bush. He pledged that all his spending plans would be more than offset with expenditure reductions.
“What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut,” he said.
Harris, in contrast, has a legislative agenda that would more than double the size of the federal government. She’s endorsed Medicare for All ($32 trillion over 10 years), the Green New Deal (another $50 trillion to $90 trillion or so), $6,000 in “tax credits” for each working family ($2.8 trillion), and a $78 billion renter-subsidy program. That’s just for starters.
Obama advocated, half-heartedly to be sure, cutting what before Trump was a sky high corporate income tax rate, recognizing that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage. Harris wants to crank it back up.
On immigration, Obama promised in his campaign to improve border security. “We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace,” he said.
Harris plans to use executive orders to grant amnesty to millions of illegals.
When Obama was pitching Obamacare in 2009, he made it clear that under no circumstances would it provide benefits to illegals.
“There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” Obama told a joint session of Congress. That prompted Rep. Joe Wilson’s famous “You lie!” response.
Harris, like every other Democrat running, has promised that, if elected, she will provide free health care to those who must now be referred to as “undocumented immigrants.”
On the other hand, a lot of Harris’ positions are hard to pin down:
Who is the real Kamala Harris?
Ten days ago, the senator from California dominated the Democratic presidential debate when she excoriated Joe Biden for his opposition to mandatory busing to achieve school desegregation. Her poll ratings shot up; his sagged.
Then came the details. When reporters asked Harris if she supports federally mandated busing in 2019, she seemed to say no. Busing should be voluntary, a “tool that is in the toolbox” if school boards want to use it, she said last week.
“Absolutely right,” Biden replied; that’s his position too.
A consensus? Not so fast.
“We do not agree,” Harris insisted the next day. The real problem, she said, is that Biden has never admitted he was wrong to oppose busing in the 1970s.
Lesson One: Harris’s debate gambit wasn’t really about busing — not busing in 2019, anyway. It was mostly about knocking Biden down a peg by reminding voters of the baggage he carries from nearly half a century in politics, and elevating her profile in the process.
Lesson Two: Harris’ positions can be maddeningly elusive. She has staked out stances on some issues that sound bold, only to qualify them later. Her stances often seem designed to straddle the divisions in her party — to make her sound progressive enough for leftist voters but moderate enough for those in the center.
The frank assessment of his challenges come after a number of top staffers on Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign left the team, after Hickenlooper failed to gain traction in early polls and has struggled to raise money in the first few months of his campaign. But he told the Perry voters that, despite pushback from his staff, he plans to stay in the race and sees Iowa as his opportunity to break out.
“Despite pushback from the staff.” Evidently even the people receiving paychecks think he should drop out.
As Gov. Jay Inslee pursues his long-shot run for president, political dominoes are lining up for Washington’s 2020 elections.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, state Sen. Christine Rolfes and state Rep. Drew Hansen are among those waiting to see which way their domino will fall: Run for re-election or a new office?
Inslee still has a gubernatorial re-election campaign committee on file with the state Public Disclosure Committee. It has raised some $1.4 million and spent $1.2 million since he was re-elected in 2016. But it has only collected about $2,400 and spent less than $1,800 since he formally announced his presidential bid early this year.
Washington doesn’t term-limit its state officials, and Inslee hasn’t ruled out seeking a third term if he steps away from the presidential race, although that may be getting less likely with each passing week.
Only one governor, Republican Dan Evans, served three terms. Since then, all three of Inslee’s two-term predecessors – Booth Gardner, Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire – discussed running again but ruled it out, usually announcing they were retiring during the summer before the election year.
None of them pursued a different office while keeping open the option of seeking re-election.
Under Washington law, a person can’t appear on the same ballot for two offices, so at some point Inslee will have to choose. Because governor stands at the top of the state election ladder, not knowing whether Inslee is in or out has created a bottleneck for the upward movement of others, especially Democrats, on the rungs below.
My heart bleeds…
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She and Inslee unveiled education plans. Sounds like Democratic boilerplate, right down to opposing school choice and charter schools. She appeared in a photo-op with a misbuttoned shirt. Man, I can only imagine all the objects hurled at the staffer who let her go out like that… (Hat tip: Reader BrandoN Byers.)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Messam news is so thin on the ground, I’m having to resort to extreme measures: actually linking to a profile on Vox. “Like San Antonio, Miramar’s chief executive is technically a city manager appointed by its city council. This means Messam does not have the same power over policy or decision making that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — another primary candidate — has, for example.” The two policy proposals they highlight are eliminating student debt and gun control, which means there’s zero to distinguish him from better-known candidates, which is literally every single candidate in the race.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers.” Given that his opponents are already going full on eliminating everyone’s student debt for everything, one wonders what he hopes to accomplish with this modest pander. “Beto O’Rourke says he’s not aware of his fundraising numbers.” The two possibilities are that he’s telling the truth, because he runs a disorganized campaign and isn’t on top of details, or he’s lying, because his fundraising numbers suck like a Dyson. We’re finally starting to get the first prebituaries on his campaign:
Today, even as he’s assembled a stable of experienced operatives and released a spate of policy proposals, the former Texas congressman is polling at 2 percent nationally in the latest Morning Consult survey. One Iowa poll released this week put him at 1 percent in the state. A fundraising machine in his Senate campaign last year, O’Rourke has dodged questions about his latest performance in the money race.
Yet O’Rourke returned to Iowa this week in seemingly high spirits, campaigning alongside his wife and young children as they toured the state in an RV. The candidate has been expanding his organization at his Texas headquarters and in early primary states. And his advisers and supporters insisted they aren’t worried: The race is nothing if not fluid, they said, and O’Rourke has the political talent to catch fire.
He’s merely resting! Beautiful plumage on the Texas Beto…
While much of the attention in post-debate polling has focused on the drop of former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders’ polling looks far worse. Sanders’ Iowa and national polls are quite weak for someone with near universal name recognition.
Sanders was at just 14% in CNN’s latest national poll. That’s down from 18% in our last poll. As important, Sanders is now running behind California Sen. Kamala Harris (17%) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15%). These are candidates who have lower name recognition than he does.
It’s not just the CNN poll, either. Sanders doesn’t look much better in Quinnipiac’s latest poll, which puts him at 13%. A poll released Wednesday morning by ABC News and The Washington Post did have somewhat better news for him, putting him at 19%, second behind Biden, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Still, an average of the three polls out this week puts him at 15%.
History has not been kind to primary runner-ups of previous primaries polling this low of a position. I went back and looked at where 13 previous runner-ups since 1972 have been polling at this point in the primary. All six who went on to win the nomination were polling above Sanders’ 15%.
Vast swathes of the Democratic Media Complex never forgave Sanders for interrupting Hillary’s coronation and relish the chance to start writing his political obituary. “Bernie Sanders didn’t give a definitive answer on sex work vs. sex trafficking.” Truly we live in stupid times. Profile of Sanders surrogate campaigner and Cleveland politico Nina Turner.
Addition: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Getting In? So says The Atlantic:
Billionaire investor Tom Steyer, who in the last decade has been both the top Democratic donor in the country and the prime engine for pushing for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, appears ready to become Democratic candidate number 26. Last week in San Francisco, Steyer told staffers at two progressive organizations he funds, Need to Impeach and NextGen America, that he is launching a 2020 campaign, and that he plans to make the formal announcement this Tuesday.
Steyer certainly has the money to self-fund, but does he have the personality or know-how to win the nomination? My guess is no, but we’ll find out. I actually like him wasting money on his own candidacy than showering money on other candidates in down-ballot races who might actually know what to do with it.
Does his focus on impeachment drag the field leftward? Well, it’s not like there was a lot of Democratic Presidential candidates firmly opposed to impeachment. The biggest winner may be Trump, who seems to thrive on confrontation. (Upgrade over Out of the Running.)
Update: California Representative Eric Swalwell: Dropping Out. Twitter. Facebook. Word is that Swalwell is dropping out of the Presidential race to run for reelection to congress instead. 1 PM Pacific Time conference, so it will be after I post this. Update: He’s Out.(Downgrade from In.)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Sacremento Bee interview. Here’s a Chicago Tribune piece that says she’s pandering the black women in the right way. Color me skeptical that she’ll make any inroads there with Harris and Booker in the race. Speaking of unlikely: “Elizabeth Warren, Economic Nationalist. She’s no social conservative. But on economics, it isn’t so difficult to imagine her on a Republican debate stage.” Despite vaguely pro-American rehetoric, there’s nothing enticing about her concrete policy proposals, including a new Department of Economic Development and subsidies for American manufacturers. Hard pass on both.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got an interview on The View. He also got an interview with The Concord Monitor, where he talked about the automation menace. “This has been ongoing for a number of years and it’s only now going to accelerate. So if someone were to come and say, ‘Hey, we should stop the automation,’ it is essentially impossible to do so.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:
Post-debate analysis, Biden is down a little, Harris is up a little, Buttigieg banks big Benjamins, Yang rises, and Williamson beams love into the cosmos. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update! And it’s absolutely packed to the gills this time.
Debate Roundup
Lots of reactions to the first two debates:
The headline out of tonight’s debate is going to be Kamala Harris starting off the second hour by turning to Joe Biden and just kicking the snot out of him on the previously long-forgotten issue of forced busing in Delaware. No older white male wants to get into a fight about racism with a younger African-American woman in a Democratic presidential primary. Biden tried to defend himself by first contrasting his work as a defense attorney with Harris’ record as a prosecutor, then moved on to a not terribly convincing, “I did not oppose busing in America; I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education,” and then he cut himself off. Septuagenarians who have been in the Senate longer than I’ve been alive should probably avoid the term “my time is up.” Biden would have been better off defending his stance on the merits, declaring that busing kids across town to new schools away from their homes was angering parents and exacerbating racial tensions instead of healing them.
One night won’t sink the Joe Biden campaign, but boy, did he look like he had a glass jaw, and he also seems to have aged a decade since he left the vice presidency. When asked what his first priority as president would be, Biden answered that it would be defeating Donald Trump.
Snip.
It’s a shame Andrew Yang couldn’t be there tonight. . . . Oh, he was on stage? I must have blinked too many times. The man with a million ideas literally got three minutes over two hours to pitch his ideas. This is an egregious mismanagement of the debate by MSNBC, and the Yang Gang has every right to be livid over this.
I wonder if non-Republicans felt about Donald Trump in 2016 the way I, and it seems quite a few other conservatives, feel about Marianne Williamson. Marianne, you beautiful lunatic. Every time you spoke, I didn’t know whether you were going to do a rain dance, cast a hex, or hold a seance. On those rare moments you got a chance to talk, I leaned forward because I had no idea what kind of absolute insanity was going to come out of your mouth. It was as riveting as a hostage situation. She contends American have chronic illnesses because of “chemical policies,” she wonders where the rest of the field has been for decades (er, in public office), and her first call will be to the prime minister of New Zealand, and she wants to harness the power of love for political purposes. In many ways, she is exactly the candidate that today’s Democratic party deserves.
The debates were the first chance voters got to look at the latest crop of Democratic presidential contenders, and they didn’t like what they saw.
Voters see most of the Democratic presidential candidates as more liberal than they are and rate their agenda as outside the mainstream.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 25% of Likely U.S. Voters consider most of the announced candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to be about the same as they are in political terms. Fifty-four percent (54%) say most of these candidates are more liberal than they are, while only 13% think they are more conservative.
Wait, health care for illegal aliens, eliminating private insurance and taxpayer subsidized abortions for trannies aren’t popular with the American public? Who knew?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.
None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting “3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.
What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?
This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.
I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.
I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.
When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?
The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?
I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide. I think the courts’ expansion of the meaning of asylum would strike most Americans as excessively broad. I think many Americans will have watched these debates on immigration and concluded that the Democrats want more immigration, not less, that they support an effective amnesty of 12 million undocumented aliens as part of loosening border enforcement and weakening criteria for citizenship. And the viewers will have realized that their simple beliefs that borders should be enforced and that immigration needs to slow down a bit are viewed by Democrats as unthinkable bigotry.
Advantage Trump.
What Sullivan can’t say is that activists in the Democratic Party, including almost all of the 2020 Presidential candidates, do want more illegal aliens crossing the border, as they view every single one of them as a likely Democratic voter, either illegally or though amnesty.
The first question of last night’s debate, asked by Savannah Guthrie to Elizabeth Warren, was a good one: “You have many plans — free college, free child care, government health care, cancellation of student debt, new taxes, new regulations, the breakup of major corporations. But this comes at a time when 71 percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60 percent of Democrats. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?”
Warren answered that the public is wrong to feel that satisfaction with the economy, that the economy is only “doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” Apparently, those 71 percent of Americans have all been hypnotized or something.
A more honest answer would be that the Democratic party is interested in a drastic overhaul of the economy because of two factors relating to the outcome of the 2016 election.
First, the departure of Barack Obama from office means it is safer for Democrats to openly discuss how his presidency disappointed them. Think back to how much wild optimism surrounded Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2007-2008. Think of Oprah declaring that he was “the one.” Think of the massive crowds chanting, “O-ba-ma!” Think of the downright messianic coverage of Obama. Many Democrats genuinely believed that Obama’s election would usher in a golden age.
Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”
Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.
Obama’s inability to deliver what Democrats truly wanted — and Democrats’ unwillingness to reexamine whether their expectations are realistic — leaves them wanting bigger, bolder changes. If the stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank didn’t do it, then the only thing that will is having the federal government cover the costs of every major expenditure in Americans’ lives — health care, college education, child care, etcetera.
He also says that Republicans’ inability to even pretend to care about deficits has emboldened Democrats to ask for everything as though they had infinite money.
Positive and negative impressions of the candidates following the debates. Biden’s negatives went up and his positives went down…but his positives are still higher than Harris (though now ever-so-slightly behind Sanders).
Politico says that, following he debates, the primary is now wide open, because that’s the sort of headline political reporters always want to right after the first debate. I suspect pundits are overstating the case to how badly Biden has been bloodied or Sanders surpassed by the hard-left female candidate they favor.
Video roundup from The Five:
Senator John Kennedy (the living Republican from Louisiana, not the dead Democrat from Massachusetts), said the Democratic debates were a clear win for Castro. Fidel, that is. “I know many of the candidates running, but I felt like I was listening to folks who were Castro without the beard, or Cuba without the sun.”
Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 19, Harris 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Ryan 1. That’s good news for Harris and Yang, bad news for Biden (down 5, but still the frontrunner), O’Rourke and Castro.
Gravis (Maine primary): Biden 27, Warren 17, Sanders 15, Uncertain 11, Buttigieg 8, Yang 5, Ryan 4, Booker 3, Williamson 3, “Bennett” 2, Harris 2, O’Rourke 1, Swalwell 1, Gillibrand 1. Seems Maine likes Massachusetts liberals more than Vermont socialists. Of course, Maine used to be part of Massachusetts before becoming a state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when [long, tedious historical digression excised].
(From here on down pre-debate polls)
Economist/YouGov: Biden 24, Warren 18, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Yang 1. That’s the highest I’ve seen Gabbard.
Emerson: Biden 34, Sanders 27, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, Gillibrand 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Gravel 1. That’s as high as I’ve ever seen Sanders, but it’s pre-debate and a small sample size (457).
Fundraising
Lots of candidates claimed they got a bump off their debate performances, and we finally have our first Q2 number:
Buttigieg says he raised nearly $25 million in Q2. That is a huge, impressive haul for someone that’s not even in the top three, much less a frontrunner. That’s just under where Sanders was in a two-man race in Q2 2015. This suggests that a lot of big money donors are disastisfied with both Biden and his primary hard-left opponents. Buttigieg is in until Iowa and probably beyond.
Harris says she raised $2 million following the debates.
“Castro sees strongest fundraising day post-Democratic debate.” “Over Wednesday and Thursday, the campaign raised 3,266 percent more money than it had the previous two days, according to the statement.” Absent a baseline, this jump if sort of meaningless. Maybe he pulled in all of $20 the previous two days…
“Inslee’s campaign said in a press release it enjoyed a record number of donations in a 24-hour period following his appearance in the debate Wednesday night, though it did not specify how much it had actually raised.” Sensing a pattern here.
“Dem debates spark fundraising gusher for breakout stars. The Democratic digital fundraising platform ActBlue raised $6.9 million on Thursday alone — the party’s biggest day in more than two months.” Are there individual candidate numbers? There are not.
Finally some numbers here, though a lot of it is rumors, guesswork and speculation.
Warren has built up one of the biggest campaign operations of any candidate, rapidly hiring experienced staffers in early primary and caucus states. In the first three months of 2019 alone, she spent nearly $1.9 million of the $6 million she raised to hire and retain more than 160 people.
Since then, that number has swelled upward of 200 and she’ll need to show that she’s raising the money to keep her operation going. Still, her campaign finances have been bolstered in part by a $10.4 million transfer from her Senate campaign committee, and her growing political support bodes well for her second-quarter haul.
Snip.
So far, all signs point to a massive second-quarter haul for Biden. He’s devoted a substantial portion of his time to attending high-dollar fundraisers in traditional donor hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington.
He hinted earlier this month that he had raised nearly $20 million up to that point, and some prominent donors expect him to report as much as $25 million this quarter.
Two weeks ago that might have looked impressive, but now the frontrunner merely tieing Mayor Pete is not going to get it done.
Pundits, etc.
“This One New Poll of Democrats Explains Why Donald Trump Will Be Reelected. Just 25 percent of Democratic voters want a candidate promising a “bold, new agenda,” which is exactly what party and media elites will cram down their throats.”
One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a “bold, new agenda” or one “who will provide steady, reliable leadership.” Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of “bold, new agenda” that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is “more moderate” while just 41 percent want one that is “more liberal.”
Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All would cost $37 trillion in new spending over a decade and his free-college plan would cost the federal government about $47 billion a year. He plans to spend much, much more, as does Elizabeth Warren, who is running on promises to spend $3.3 trillion over a decade in new giveaways that will be paid for by an unworkable, probably unconstitutional “wealth tax” that will at best raise $2.75 trillion.
“How the Democrats Could Blow the Election Over Health Care.” Notable for being from lefty Daily Beast, not notable in that it’s a “Members Only” story, so I guess I’ll never know how “these positions stand to lose the Democrats votes. Lots of votes.” Though I think I have an idea…
All those big Democratic plans? Fugitaboutit. “The Democrats have no plan for ‘Cocaine Mitch.'”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s evidently highly in demand as a speaker and consultant. But: “Does the Stacey Abrams method — a charismatic figure painstakingly courting disadvantaged and often-ignored voters — really work for anyone besides Stacey Abrams?”
In the end, Abrams came within fewer than 60,000 votes of becoming the first black woman to lead Georgia, or any other state for that matter, in a much better showing than the usual 200,000-vote loss for Democrats in Georgia. Republicans say a loss is still a loss; they call her complaints of voter suppression sour grapes, and the notion that she represents some brilliant new Democratic future a fantasy.
To me, it was clearly Biden. I didn’t like Harris’s attack on Biden when I was experiencing it emotionally, watching TV late at night, and I don’t like it now, as I examine the transcript this morning. She yelled at him, and she would have won if he had broken down and just yelled at her or if he’d gotten confused and said something wrong. But he made sense, and though I could see on TV that he was aggravated by the attack, on the page, he’s completely lucid. He gets his points in and the points are sound. That’s all I need him to do. I am not won over by Harris’s “That little girl was me” pathos or her prosecutorial aggression. But maybe a lot of people think she won the night. It didn’t work on me. I woke up this morning with an okay, it’s Biden feeling.
The Georgian-style home — from the front a brick version of the White House — once belonged to Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state. Nestled on a wooded lot in McLean, the nearly 12,000-square-foot residence has five bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, marble fireplaces, a gym and a sauna.
“Surrounded by Washington elite and sitting high above the Potomac River, there is an undeniable grandeur in the design of this home,” said the British-accented agent in a video released when it went on the market in 2015. “This property makes an imposing statement with parking for over 20 cars and creates a perfect setting for the most lavish of events.
“This may have already been the residence to a very important person,” he continued. “But I suspect it will be home to many more.”
It is currently home to Joe Biden. He and his wife, Jill, rented it after leaving the vice presidential quarters at the Naval Observatory in 2017. The house had been purchased for $4.25 million in June 2016 by Mark Ein, a wealthy venture capitalist who lives next door.
Biden points out on the presidential campaign trail that he was often the poorest member of the U.S. Senate and, for at least a decade, has referred to himself as “Middle Class Joe.” But since leaving office he has enjoyed an explosion of wealth, making millions of dollars largely from book deals and speaking fees for as much as $200,000 per speech, public documents show.
Snip.
Since leaving the vice presidency, Biden has rented the McLean home and purchased a $2.7 million, 4,800-square-foot vacation house near the water in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to go along with his primary residence, the nearly 7,000-square-foot lakeside home he built more than two decades ago in Wilmington, Del.
Let he who has never owned two 4,000 square foot homes and rented a third cast the first stone. Also:
Biden released his tax returns in the past but has not done so since 2016, his last year as vice president. He has vowed to release the current ones as part of this campaign. A financial disclosure required of presidential candidates would have provided the first window into the financial boost he has received since leaving the vice presidency. The deadline for that document was set for last month, but Biden filed for an extension until July 9.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who also notes that Biden’s speech riders obligate hosts to serve him the exact same Italian meal every time: “angel hair pomodoro, a caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.”) This is an interesting look state of the Democratic Party that Biden participated in the 1970s. “By the 1970s, opposition to ‘busing’ was strongest in Democratic strongholds, cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Baltimore — as well as Biden’s own Delaware.” Lindsey Graham: “Underestimate Joe Biden at your own peril.” Also says about Harris: “She is very talented, she’s very smart, and she’ll be a force to be reckoned with.” He’s not necessarily wrong with either assessment…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker wants Biden to confess his racial sins. It’s an interesting approach for someone polling at 2%, which is even less than Biden was polling at going into the 2008 Iowa caucuses. A guy down in that range is usually thinking about possibly being a VP pick than taking down the frontrunner. Similarly unusual is his white knighting for Harris. Usually you’re attacking the candidate in your “lane.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Q2 fundraising numbers are late-breaking news, so no reactions yet. South Bends’ police union isn’t happy with him, so he has one more thing in common with Bill de Blasio. Hugh Hewett thinks Buttigieg and Harris were the winners of their debate. “Both displayed an almost effortless eloquence and command of rhetorical devices. They did not need gimmicks and appeared completely unrehearsed. They connected.” Though I take his “Biden is doomed” take with several grains of salt. Rich Lowry had a lot less rosy assessment of Buttigieg’s chances:
The elite media fell in love with Buttigieg, not just because he’s genuinely talented, but because he’s the type of candidate — young, earnest, credentialed, progressive but with a self-image as an ideologically moderate pragmatist — it always falls in love with.
It is attracted to the idea of an intellectual as a presidential candidate. This doesn’t literally mean someone with deep intellectual interests or genuine accomplishments — think the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — but an impressive academic résumé, a copy of The New Yorker on the nightstand and true verbal acuity.
In this sense, Pete Buttigieg is the new Barack Obama, except with limits that will likely keep him from reaching the next level in the 2020 nomination contest and even if he did, would make him perhaps the weakest plausible prospective Democratic general-election candidate.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro is barnstroming through Texas bragging about his debate performance: “‘A few months ago they were writing me up as the other Texan,’ the former San Antonio mayor told supporters at a rally in Austin on Friday night. ‘But that’s no more. I am the Texan in this race.'” Honestly, neither his nor O’Rourke ‘s chances look particularly bright right now. Castro also did the same white knighting of Harris that Booker did. Maybe they all got the same memo…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Nothing says “political SUPERgenius” quite like quoting Che Guevara in Miami. He also came out for “Medicare for all” paying for “gender reassignment surgery.” I’m sure “Taxdollars for Trannies” will play super-well in helping Democrats win back states in the Midwest. But this piece suggests his entire purpose in running is to push the Democratic Party to the left. They hardly needed any help.
His plan would be a catastrophic insurance package that would cover only major, high-cost medical expenses. Everyone under the age of 65 would be enrolled, with individuals given the ability to opt-out and use a tax credit to purchase their own insurance. Those enrolled in the program would be free to purchase supplemental insurance, either individually or through their employers. His proposal calls for the new insurance system to absorb both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Since his plan doesn’t socialize medicine nearly enough for Democratic activists, expect him to continue getting ignored.
When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.
(For “interesting” I’d probably substitute a phrase like “nakedly political” or “lacking moral principle.”) “‘I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,’ David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me.” Oh, that makes it all better! “Of course you have to lie to those gun-toting upstate rubes from JesusLand! She’s really one of us.” Gillibrand is all in on abortion (just in case you were unclear on that), including wanting to repeal the partial-birth abortion ban, but her own campaign is so moribund I doubt it makes it to the third trimester…
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mike Gravel is the anti Joe Biden, by which I guess they mean he’ll never be a Presidential frontrunner. He spends a good deal of the interview yammering on about a “Legislature of the People,” which is some sort of direct democracy scheme that would require a constitutional amendment. It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with a proposal even less likely to be enacted than “Medicare for all” or the “Green New Deal”…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Of all the many, many, many potential issues Harris could attack Biden over, possibly the most inexplicable is forced busing.
1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color.
2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing of schools (which I have no doubt is now supported to one degree or another by all the Democratic presidential candidates, including both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) is unconstitutional and bad policy.
It wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was widely hated by the school districts it was inflicted on. Forced busing tore communities apart, engendered white flight, threatened the integrity of public school systems, and shifted suburban voters sharply towards the Republican Party. Biden was right when he called forced busing inherently racist.
The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he said in the same interview. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Despite Harris’ claims, huge numbers of parents opposed forced busing for reasons other than racism:
The implication is that all those “working-class Democrats” in Delaware who demanded that Biden take a firm stand against busing were racists, and so were all the other parents across the country who objected to a policy that forced their kids, because of their skin color, to take long bus rides to unfamiliar neighborhoods in the name of racial equality. Yet according to a 1978 RAND Corporation study of the demographic shifts spurred by mandatory busing, “racism does not explain white flight.” The study cited survey data indicating that most whites who opposed busing simply preferred schools in their neighborhood, mentioning “issues such as distance, loss of choice, lost time, and lost friends.” And “when asked about the benefits and harms of desegregation, a large majority of white parents believed it would improve neither minority education nor race relations, while it would increase discipline problems and racial tensions.” In other words, “most white parents believe they are being forced to give up something they value—the neighborhood school—in return for a policy that benefits no one and may even being harmful.”
Most black parents took a different view, but that does not mean the white parents’ concerns were illegitimate or covers for racism. The RAND report noted that “the vast majority of whites accept desegregated schools when brought about by voluntary methods but reject them when their children are mandatorily bused or reassigned to schools outside their neighborhoods.” The study also cited data indicating that “whites with low racial prejudice scores were nearly as opposed to busing as persons with high prejudice.”
As fundamentally dishonest as Harris’ busing attack may have been, her social justice warrior tactic may end up working because it might achieve a primary goal to help her nab the nomination: make Biden unacceptable to black voters, no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts on the Democratic Party (and the nation) in the process. Even Harris’ former paramour Willie Brown thinks she can’t beat Trump:
The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.
California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.
Trump must have enjoyed every moment and every answer, because he now knows he’s looking at a bunch of potential rivals who are still not ready for prime time.
Listening to Hickenlooper, it seemed to me that there was something else that bothered him about the socialist idea that he was not quite putting into words. He seemed drawn to projects in which people could take action on their own behalf, that existed at the human scale: the bottom-up economic plan, designed around what nurses and small-business owners wanted for their town. A brewpub that could revive a neighborhood; an ambitious light-rail project that helped connect Denver to its suburbs, which he had accomplished through diligent personal lobbying of suburban politicians; an apprenticeship program built through coöperation with Colorado’s business leaders, so that teen-agers who were not headed directly for college would graduate with “skills and a sense of direction.” What seemed to spook him about socialism was an implied passivity. “That rut of thinking that government’s going to solve all our problems,” he said. “I think, as long as we’re demonizing business, as long as we’re saying we have all the answers—the rest of you just wait while we provide you all the answers—I think we’re going to have problems.”
Hickenlooper’s entire campaign summarized in one incident:
Security person outside debate site just now : “are you here to pick up press credentials?” John Hickenlooper: “…I’m a candidate”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Amy Klobuchar made a mark in the first Democratic debate, but was it enough?” A skidmark, perhaps. She went into the debate with zero momentum and went out the same way. Weirdly, her campaign’s popularity seemed to peak at the same time everyone was writing articles about how she abused her aides. “Amy Klobuchar owned Jay Inslee on abortion rights at the Democratic debate.” That’s like Kramer dominating his karate class.
Shortly after gaining office back in 2015, Messam spoke out in support of local legislation that would have seen small amounts of cannabis decriminalized in the county his jurisdiction resides in.
“We have to ensure our city doesn’t become a place where lives are destroyed due to recreational possession of marijuana while providing real rehabilitation options that offer offenders resources to avoid a life of drug addiction and bad choices,” Messam said in a Facebook post.
I think Hickenlooper and Inslee both missed the boat by not becoming notable pro-pot candidates. As governors of legal pot states, they could have made the case for legalization and generated buzz for their campaigns that has been sorely lacking. (“Heh heh heh. He said ‘buzz!'” “Shut up, Beavis!”)
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another guy with a lot of “he missed the debates” articles. He visited a gay pride parade in New Hampshire. Given his lack of attention and funding, he could do a lot worse than an “All in on New Hampshire” strategy. At least he could drive to all the events…
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look behind the O’Rourke-castro tiff and Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. With the two now polling more evenly, the Texas porimary is now wide open. Vanity Fair wonders if Castro dealt him a fatal blow. Probably not, because his campaign was already stumbling lisstlessly down a trash-strewn alley. Believe it or not, O’Rourke actually came up with a novel idea: A small “war tax” on households where no one has ever done military service. Shades of Robert A. Heinlein! But I don’t see that idea gaining a lot of traction among Democrats. He and Castro had dueling Austin rallies.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders thinks he won both debates. Of course he does. WSJ thinks Sanders “won” the debate by pushing Democrats to the left. “President Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).” He came out against forced busing. Maybe the super secret social justice warrior plan to take over America is to push the Democrats so far to the left on race issues that Bernie Sanders looks like a voice of moderation by comparison. He and Warren’s student debt plans make no sense.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with The National Interest. His take on a possible war with Iran is presumably well-informed by his navy experience:
With an intricate knowledge that rivals any of the other contenders, Joe Sestak described in detail the difficulties the United States would have if it used a military strike against Iran. “[I]t would take us weeks if not months to destroy it [their nuclear facilities] if we go full bore to do so. Because part of it…is buried under three hundred feet of rock, hard rock.”
A war with Iran would imperil our strategic naval positioning in the area and force us out of the gulf. “We cannot survive in the Persian Gulf with our aircraft carriers. I know, I’ve operated there. There are about two places that we operate because the depth of water to do fight operations is the best right there. Our sonar doesn’t work there in the Persian Gulf and we cannot find their nineteen midget submarines at all. So, we will withdrawal our carrier groups out of the Strait of Hormuz before we even begin to think about striking and have to do it from a greater distance.” While the United States is flying air sorties and launching Tomahawk missiles on Iranian positions, they have the strength to return fire in kind. “[T]hey can rain hundreds of long-range missiles on Israel and our regional bases there.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a smallishWashington Post profile, as befits his campaign’s stature. Gets a Polifact profile, which lists one endorsement (Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego), and that he’s known as “the Snapchat king of Congress.” Well, Anthony Weiner isn’t there anymore…
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a People profile: “Williamson was raised Jewish in Houston and still practices today. Her teachings and writing draw from multiple religious practices, sometimes referencing Jesus and Buddha, and the book that inspired her spirituality, A Course in Miracles, is heavily influenced by Christianity.” “Marianne Williamson is the Kanye West of the Democratic Party, a hard to reconcile mix of truth, depth and kookiness that can baffle and lead to as much harm as good.”
A couple of weeks ago, I drank human blood and ate human flesh. It was an expression of my belief in a higher power. No one mocked me for living out my faith the way Christians do, and yet many others have been mocking Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson since Thursday night’s debate.
I wasn’t stuck near the summit of Mt. Everest and forced to become a cannibal in a desperate attempt to survive. It was a voluntary act to acknowledge that I was “born again” and freed from my sins. I was in my Christian church in South Carolina during a normal Sunday service taking what we call communion, an exercise in which we drink a juice and eat a wafer that we are told to imagine are the literal blood and body of Jesus Christ.
Snip.
If you understood the faith, you’d understand the power and beauty of those beliefs, we argue. And yet, when it comes to Williamson’s new age spirituality, we don’t hesitate to think her strange — even if we haven’t taken the time to understand her. Those of faith should remember that we live in glass houses, that it’s as easy for others to deem us whackos as it is for us to condemn others to that kind of mockery.
The debates produced lots of awesome tweets about Williamson:
It’s like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for the healing crystal set. “Republicans Donate To Marianne Williamson To Keep Her In Democratic Debates.” BattleSwarm commentor T Migratorious made an interesting point: “The other thing that set her apart from the rest of the candidates was her lack of anger. I sense that a lot of Democrats and many more swing voters are tired of the Dems constant rage and are willing to give someone who is calmer and kinder a second look.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a New York Post piece by Mary Kay Linge that notes Yang gained over 100,000 Twitter followers after the debate, and even quotes Your Humble Blogger. Yang claims his mic was not on so he couldn’t jump in to other candidates answers. A better question is why anyone but the designated speaker’s mic was on during these exchanges. How about you let one person speak at a time and provide a level playing field rather than playing favorites? Calls for “human-centered capitalism“:
In his book The War on Normal People, Yang defines human-centered capitalism as an update to or the next stage of classical capitalism. Contemporary American culture, Yang argues, imagines capitalism as a natural fit for the human condition, especially when compared to the centralized mechanisms of socialism. In turn, our culture tends to view the two as binary, almost Manichaean, opposites.
But these cultural arguments often miss some important points, including: Capitalism is not natural, and Western societies have experimented with many economic systems; there has never been a pure, laissez-faire capitalist system; and our form of corporate capitalism is but one of many.
So how do we know if laissez-faire capitalist works if we’ve never tried it? “Andrew Yang’s Proposals Aren’t As Popular In Silicon Valley As You Might Think.” (Actually, I’ve long thought he was regarded as a fringe candidate there as well.) “It’s expected that [Universal Basic Income] would cost more than $3 trillion annually. For perspective’s sake, the proposed federal budget for 2020 is $4.746 trillion.” And the idea that we’ll just “consolidate” a lot of existing programs down into UBI ignores the sad fact that welfare programs are historically harder to kill than Thanos. But Yang did offer this:
I’ve noticed that conservatives often follow liberals on Twitter – but the reverse does not seem to be true.
