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 I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update. Today’s falls on the 24th, while last month’s fell on the 27th, so feel free to adjust accordingly for the three day difference.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 64,699,182 followers, up 1,133,230 since the last roundup, so once again Trump has gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26,750,341, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
Andrew Yang gained the most of all the contenders, up almost 150,000 followers, passing Amy Klobuchar for ninth place. At that pace he’ll break the million follower mark next month.
Cory Booker gaining less than 15,000 followers since last month, despite starting with over 4 million, is a strong indication his campaign is dead in the water.
Marianne Williamson’s mere 4,000+ gain is even more pathetic. Clearly her magic ride is over.
Most pathetic of all is Tom Steyer, who has reportedly been throwing fistfuls of money into social media advertising…and gained 276 followers. That’s less than last-place Wayne Messam gained. Steyer could have gained more by posting cute puppy memes.
As predicted, Elizabeth Warren zoomed past Kamala Harris into third place, but her momentum has slowed, as she gained roughly half the followers in September she gained in August.
In fact all candidates seemed to slow the rate at which they acquired new followers. Maybe younger people stopped paying as much attention to politics after returning to school after summer vacation.
De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Monmouth (New Jersey): Biden 26, Warren 20, Sanders 18, Booker 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Gabbard 2, de Blasio 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. Booker’s best showing, but it’s for his home state, and if he got that percentage in the actual primary, it would be below the 15% threshold he needs to pick up delegates.
Iowa State University: Warren 24, Biden 16, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 13, Harris 5, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. High as I’ve seen Buttigieg anywhere, much less Iowa. Sample size of 572.
Florida Atlantic University (Florida): Biden 24, Warren 24, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 5, Harris 4, Messam 3, Yang 2, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 1, Ryan 1, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, de Blasio 1, Booker 1. Messam’s 3% in his home state is not only his highest anywhere, it may be the first time he’s actually registered as a choice.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 25, Warren 23, Buttigieg 12, Sanders 9, Klobuchar 8, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Booker 2, yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1. Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1, Messam <1. Sample size of 500. Highest I've seen Klobuchar since she announced. Of all the longer-shot candidates, I'd give her the best chance of an "all in on Iowa" strategy getting results.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said it would have 110 staff members in the state by the end of this month. Senator Kamala Harris has promised to visit every week in October. Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday kicked off a John McCain-like, everything-on-the-record bus tour and is advertising on local television and radio. Senator Amy Klobuchar is 49 counties into her tour of all 99 in the state. And on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders will begin a “Bernie Beats Trump’’ tour of eastern Iowa to highlight what he says is his strength as a general election candidate.
As a new poll suggested a significant shift in the primary race’s top tier — with Senator Elizabeth Warren overtaking Mr. Biden for first place — candidates at the annual Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines on Saturday tried to cut through the furor surrounding President Trump, Ukraine and Mr. Biden to deliver their message to voters still sifting through their preferences from one of the largest fields in history.
The candidates’ renewed sense of urgency has set the stage for a four-month sprint to a night of caucuses that remains the single biggest prize in American politics.
“We know that Iowa is where we can turn heads,’’ Mr. Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., said aboard his campaign bus on Sunday. “Even the other early states will be looking at what Iowa did.”
The increasing focus on Iowa, where voters must attend an hourslong midwinter evening gathering to participate in choosing their party’s nominee, has come at the expense of New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary election comes eight days later.
None of the Democratic presidential candidates are betting their entire campaigns on a strong performance in New Hampshire, meaning it may be the first time since 1984 that there is not a candidate focused solely on the Granite State in a contested presidential race.
Naturally, this turn of events has supposedly given New Hampshire Democrats a case of the sads:
Overall, an analysis by The Hill shows that this cycle’s presidential candidates are actually visiting New Hampshire more frequently than 2016’s field of candidates.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who is from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, held 34 campaign stops between January and July of 2019, according to the NBC Boston candidate tracker.
Former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) held 79 campaign events in the same time frame, the most of any 2016 or 2020 candidate.
Former presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also held more campaign stops than any 2016 presidential candidate, with 53 campaign stops before the end of July. She dropped out of the race at the end of August.
Fat lot of good it did her.
“Even though there are dozens and dozens of candidate visits, they’re not as visible as they used to be,” said Andrew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.
In an interview with The Hill, Cline, who follows New Hampshire politics closely, said the sense the state is being overlooked by candidates is widely shared.
“It definitely feels like there isn’t much going on in New Hampshire week to week,” he said.
New Hampshire people can sound a bit miffed about the whole thing.
“Yes, it’s annoying,” Cline said about the feeling of an overshadowed first-in-the-nation primary.
The sentiment has been felt in the state throughout the summer.
For example, the famed Amherst, N.H., Fourth of July parade usually serves as a hotbed for presidential hopefuls, but none of the top-tier candidates showed up this year.
Most of the top-tier no-shows had supporters marching in their absence but were met with lukewarm enthusiasm compared to the low-polling candidates, such as Delaney and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who marched in the hot sun and shook hands with dozens of locals.
After most called for reducing meat consumption, and some for banning cheeseburgers, Democrats descended on Iowa to grill 10,000 steaks.
Are Harris, Buttigieg and Booker playing for second place? If so Harris is failing at that. Booker may well be running for veep. I get the impression that Buttigieg is the insider big money backup choice if Biden’s brain goes completely kablooey.
Lots of candidates aren’t even winning their home states. “The fact that so many Democratic candidates aren’t winning in their home states is not a good sign. These are the voters who know you best and should be the most behind you.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. All that Hunter Biden/Ukraine dirt is finally getting dragged into the open. “Joe Biden, now the Democratic presidential frontrunner for 2020, faced scrutiny for months over accusations that he pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who at that time was leading a corruption investigation into a natural gas company that had ties to Biden’s son.” Let’s go to the tape:
Here is Joe Biden bragging about using extortion to have a Ukrainian state prosecutor fired for investigating the shady business dealings of Biden’s son.
Those so-called experts on TV keep saying that Biden is old. Well, you’re not as young as you used to be, either, but you’re not ready to be shuffled off into the retirement home or the grave just yet. When they say Biden’s past his prime and no good anymore, those smug young punks are saying you’re past your prime and no good anymore. You hope to live long enough to see those guys deal with a bad back and arthritis and diabetes.
Then there are the kids are complaining about what Biden said and did in the ’70s. C’mon now, it was the ’70s. Everybody was listening to disco and wearing bell bottoms and taking drugs and growing their sideburns longer than your middle finger. Nobody’s the same now as they were in the ’70s. That nice-looking kid mayor who’s running was, what, in preschool then? You want to judge him based on what he was doing back then?
He gets dissed by Ilhan Omar, which will probably only help him with his base of mostly non-insane Democrats.
The next 10 days will be critical for Sen. Cory Booker, who warned his presidential run may come to an end if he isn’t able to raise nearly $2 million by the end of the month. “We have reached a critical moment, and time is running out,” campaign manager Addisu Demissie warned in a memo to staff and supporters. “It’s now or never: The next 10 days will determine whether Cory Booker can stay in this race and compete to win the nomination.”
Booker confirmed that was the case in a series of tweets, acknowledging it was unusual “for a campaign like ours to be this transparent” but he insisted that “there can be no courage without vulnerability.” Booker specified that his campaign doesn’t “see a legitimate long-term path forward” unless the campaign can raise $1.7 million by the end of September. The New Jersey senator insisted that “this isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt” but rather “a real, unvarnished look under the hood of our campaign.”
Possibly true, possibly just another version of the direct mail “Dear DONOR, we need $X amount of money for CANDIDATE campaign in Y days or we can’t go on! Could you give $Z to keep us going?” solicitation that everyone who’s ever donated to a political campaign gets. Were Booker and Harris in on the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax? The Senator from Innsmouth.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why Steve Bullock Refuses to Drop Out. Members of the Clinton diaspora are pleading with the Montana governor to stay in the race, even if the rest of the country doesn’t know who he is.” Because if there’s anyone who has their pulse on the finger of America it’s Clinton cronies.
The Democratic Party, and America as a whole, have changed so much over the past 30 years that comparing candidates from different eras can seem moot. But there’s a distinctly Bill Clinton–esque sensibility to many Democratic Party veterans urging Bullock to stick with his presidential campaign, despite his failing to make the September debate stage and remaining, at best, in the margin of error of most polls. They see another popular, moderate governor of a small, conservative-leaning state who started his campaign late and is being written off, and they don’t just feel nostalgic—they feel a little déjà vu. They insist they are not being delusional.
Paul Begala, the former Clinton strategist and current CNN pundit, earlier this week went on Twitter to encourage people to donate to Bullock’s campaign. Minyon Moore, one of the top political aides in the Clinton White House and now one of the most respected African American female operatives in the party, told me she didn’t know Bullock before they recently had dinner, but she was impressed by both his understanding of public policy and his campaign’s outreach, and encouraged him to stay with it. “They’ve been doing a lot of quiet meetings,” Moore said. “Unfortunately, time is not waiting for anybody, but I think he has an important voice that probably hasn’t been heard as much as it should be heard.” Mickey Kantor, the former Clinton Commerce secretary, told me this week that Bullock is “a terrific talent,” with “a résumé we would have prayed for in a Democratic candidate for president.”
Just 10 candidates met the polling and donor thresholds to participate in last week’s Democratic debate in Houston. And de Blasio was not among them, nor did it seem possible for him to qualify for the next debate, in Ohio in October. As of July, only 6,700 people had donated to his campaign (debaters need 130,000), and he has only hit 2 percent support in a handful of polls all year long (none of which are counted by the Democratic National Committee for debate qualification). In short, it’s no mystery why de Blasio called it quits.
De Blasio was always an extreme long shot. He entered the race quite late, on May 16 — after more than 20 other major candidates had declared and the field was already drawing headlines for being historically saturated. In fact, only one successful presidential nominee since 1976 (Bill Clinton) kicked off his campaign later than de Blasio did. And although de Blasio was arguably one of the most progressive candidates in the field — having brought universal pre-K and other liberal reforms to the five boroughs — he was crowded out of the primary’s left lane by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who combined for 56 percent support among “very liberal” voters in the most recent Quinnipiac poll (de Blasio had less than 1 percent).
But probably de Blasio’s biggest problem was simply that Democratic voters did not like him,2 which is quite an unusual place to be among voters of one’s own party. In an average of national polls of 2020 candidates’ favorability from May, de Blasio was the only candidate at the time whom more voters viewed unfavorably than favorably (his net favorability rating — favorable rating minus unfavorable rating — was -1). That’s especially bad because de Blasio wasn’t some little-known candidate; 46 percent of Democrats were able to form an opinion of him. All other candidates who were at least as well-known had net favorability ratings of +21 or better!
That’s one way to put it. “Almost universally loathed” is another.
NY Post de Blasio presidential campaign obituary – “it died doing what it loved best – being as far away from nyc as possible” 😂 pic.twitter.com/il0X9vs4aW
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His daughter is getting married. Congrats! So now Delaney has at least one good thing that happened in his life this year…
Kamala Harris is putting her stumbling campaign on the line with a new Iowa-or-bust strategy: She’s shifting away from the closed-door fundraisers that dominated her summer calendar to focus on retail politicking in the crucial kickoff state.
Harris huddled with top campaign officials Tuesday in Baltimore to discuss the next steps as a series of polls show her plummeting into the mid-single digits. She’s not expected to significantly alter her message. Instead, Harris is planning to make weekly visits to the state and nearly double the size of her 65-person ground operation, sources familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It’s designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.
Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought.
An Iowa poll out Wednesday, conducted by her own pollster for another client, showed Harris well out of range of the frontrunners, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, and behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
By confiding (a little too loudly) to Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii that she’s “fucking moving to Iowa,” Harris inadvertently disclosed that her strategy now depends on getting a good result there. Another option would be to suggest to the nation that it’s not an optimal state for her, and thereby lower expectations. She could tell everyone that she’s putting her chips on New Hampshire. In truth, though, neither state is ideal for her.
Iowa and New Hampshire are among the least racially diverse states in the nation. At least in Iowa, Harris does not have to contend with two of the three frontrunners (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) representing bordering states.
Harris’s decision looks logical even if it’s a bit forced. The third contest is the Nevada caucuses, but they have historically not had influence in the perceptions game. Harris’s best early state is likely South Carolina, where there is a huge African-American population that has tremendous influence in the Democratic primary. But Joe Biden is dominating in the polls there and that’s unlikely to change (or benefit Harris if it does) if she does poorly in the first three contests.
She needs a win before South Carolina, or at least a much-better-than-expected result that gives people a reason to see her as a real option. Iowa is probably her best bet for accomplishing that.
According to an Iowa poll by Harris’ chief pollster, David Binder, released by Focus on Rural America, Klobuchar has jumped ahead of Harris in the Hawkeye State, in fifth place behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders after the third presidential debate in Houston.
Since the end of 2018, Klobuchar and Harris have jumped back and forth with one another in this particular poll. Harris had 10% support in September, while Klobuchar did not chart. By December, Klobuchar had 10% support and Harris dropped to 7%.
Harris jumped ahead of Klobuchar again in March by 3 points and following the California Democrat’s strong debate performance in Miami, after excoriating former Vice President Joe Biden, she received 18% support from Iowans in the poll, leap frogging into third place.
Klobuchar, on the other hand, spiraled downward at the time to the low single digits before rebounding to her current 8%.
Harris is an unlikable phony. Klobuchar, on the other hand, is just genuinely unlikable.
We’re swiftly marching into 2020, and as of right now, the Democrat party is in crisis with its 2020 candidates doing everything they can to appease the radical trend that has taken it over as Democrat leadership attempts to keep the party as centered as it possibly can.
It’s a war that is going to keep the left busy as the right continues to sail right through the election period with little to no difficulty. The great thing about O’Rourke’s comments is that, as Coons suggested, it will haunt Democrats going forward, specifically into 2020. O’Rourke essentially gave Democrats another problem to deal with, and so long as he’s is in the race, he’ll continue to make more problems for Democrats to deal with when it comes to gun control.
What’s more, it’s putting Democrat leadership in the position to tell demonstrable lies, and lies that will get other Democrats who do support that measure of gun control to turn on Democrat leadership.
So long as O’Rourke is around, the Democrats will continue to be forced to fight one another, and continue to give Republicans more momentum. It’s a house divided that will fall in 2020.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say O’Rourke is a Republican plant.
Warren has begun to eclipse Sanders’s once-dominant standing among the Democratic Party’s most liberal voters and surpass him in some polls in the first two states in the nominating process: Iowa and New Hampshire.
They both support what would be a massive economic restructuring with ideas such as Medicare-for-all, but Sanders, 78, has carved out his brand as a democratic socialist while Warren, 70, has described herself as a capitalist who has operated more as part of the Democratic mainstream. While Sanders drew notice in 2016 for his avid fans and big crowds, it is Warren this time who is gaining traction that way.
These challenges have been compounded by volatility inside Sanders’s operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign quietly fired its Iowa political director in the late summer and has yet to name a replacement — a key vacancy as the race enters a crucial phase, with less than five months to go before the February caucuses.
Sanders’s difficulties in Iowa have come into sharper focus over the weekend. The most respected pollster in the state released a survey late Saturday showing Warren surging to 22 percent, two points ahead of former vice president Joe Biden, with Sanders at 11 percent. That places him third in the state where he fought Hillary Clinton to a near draw in 2016, launching an electrifying national movement.
Other Democratic presidentialcandidates have visited mosques on the campaign trail this year or spoken to Muslim groups. But Sanders has done it first and done it bigger, building on relationships with Muslim communities that took off during his previous presidential campaign, said Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University who studies the role of Muslims in politics.
“Historically, engaging with Muslims when you’re seeking federal office has been seen as politically dangerous,” Chouhoud said. “Bernie Sanders seems to be doing something different.”
Since February, Sanders has named a Muslim to be his campaign manager, tapped a prominent Muslim Palestinian American activist as a surrogate and visited a Los Angeles mosque to commemorate the victims of a New Zealand terrorist massacre at two Islamic houses of worship.
Last month, he headlined the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston, where he got a standing ovation for his promise to overturn President Trump’s travel ban blocking most visitors from five predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It was the first time a presidential candidate addressed the largest and most prominent Muslim gathering in the country, and more than 7,000 people packed in to hear him.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, the only other presidential candidate to speak at the event, followed Sanders, but many in the crowd left after hearing the senator.
Sanders’ campaign representatives said they hope Muslims will help him repeat his 2016 Michigan primary win and capture other states. The campaign credited outreach to Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim communities — including Arabic campaign ads — as a factor in his win there.
Muslims and Islamic organizations, meanwhile, have sought out Sanders, inviting him to talk to their communities, praising his policy positions and offering endorsements. Many have taken to social media to show their support, using the hashtags #Muslims4Bernie and #InshallahBernie.
Over the summer, Latif, the Bay Area supporter, launched the website “Iftars with Bernie.” The name refers to the meals at sundown that end the daily fast during Ramadan, when extended families and friends take turns eating and praying together in each others’ homes. The website encourages Muslims to share literature about the senator at the dinners.
“Muslims appreciate how he is giving them opportunities to be part of his movement,” said Cynthia Ubaldo, a physical therapist in Columbus, Ohio, who hosted a similar event for Eid, a holiday at the end of Ramadan. She passed out homemade “Muslims for Bernie 2020” pins decorated with stars and crescent moons to her 30 guests.
Snip.
Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, is flying to Islamic conferences and mosques around the country to speak on Sanders’ behalf as a campaign surrogate. The co-founder of the Women’s March was among the leaders who left the group recently after infighting and accusations of anti-Semitism, which she has denied.
Sarsour says Sanders has attracted followers because of his response to Trump’s statements on Muslims and the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Part of the challenge for Steyer, at this stage, is that his ideology does not especially distinguish him from many of his competitors. Were he a moderate, his late entry in the race might seem clearer—to rope the Party back toward centrist pragmatism. Instead, Steyer has cast himself as an outsider capable of realizing even the most progressive campaign promises. “My basic thesis is that we have a broken government,” he told me, adding that the top three candidates in the polls have served in Congress or the Senate for about seventy years. “We have to stop the corporations’ stranglehold on this government. So, if that is the issue, the question is who’s going to be credible in terms of making that happen.”
In his early visits to Iowa, though, his bid has felt somewhat abstract. When, at the diner, he roved from table to table, asking Iowans to name their top policy concerns, the impression was of a cheery executive crowdsourcing his own priorities. During another stump speech on his swing, Steyer outlined the five priorities central to his political identity—voting-rights protections, a clean environment, a complete education, a living wage, and good health—and pointed out that none of the candidates at the previous night’s debate had brought up the climate crisis. He later told me that the first debates, which he found uninspiring, had contributed to his decision to run. “I felt they weren’t really getting down to the nub of what’s going on in the United States,” he said, of the other candidates. “I am categorically, qualitatively different, and, in my opinion, what I am saying is much more realistic and much more significant than anything they’re saying. As far as I’m concerned, I have a very simple task—not an easy task, but simple—to try and see if I have something important to say to the American people.”
On Friday, a few dozen people, mostly seniors, convened in Maquoketa for a town hall hosted by Bob Osterhaus, a pharmacist who served in the Iowa state legislature until 2004. Osterhaus has seen a number of politicians pass through his home, including Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd, and John Dean, who told Osterhaus’s wife that her cinnamon rolls were the best he’d ever had. “It’s always interesting when a rich man decides to get in and try to act like a commoner,” Osterhaus said of Steyer before the event.
In her first Senate race in Massachusetts, in 2012, Warren won by just 7.4 percent, while Barack Obama was carrying the top of the ticket by more than 23 percent. (Warren might have been facing the unique obstacle of being seen as a carpetbagger, but it’s worth noting that Obama was running against a former Massachusetts governor.) Six years later, Warren won reelection against a barely known opponent in a Democratic wave election. She won by a more commanding 24.1 percent, but still fell short of the 27.2 percent margin Hillary Clinton had amassed in that state in the much-less-favorable 2016 election year.
Election results are indicative, but not dispositive. No two races are alike, and it’s possible Warren’s traits translate better to a presidential election than to the Senate (or to a campaign against Donald Trump in 2020 than to the Republicans she faced in 2012 and 2018). A somewhat more subjective measure of her political appeal is the degree to which Warren’s platform tracks with popular opinion.
When she began positioning her candidacy last year, Warren seemed to consciously aim for the broad mainstream of her own party. While she formally had endorsed the Bernie Sanders health-care plan, she was promising more limited measures, which seemed to insulate her from its unpopular aspects like higher middle-class taxes and forcing everybody off employer-based insurance. She was also distancing herself from Sanders by labeling herself “capitalist to my bones,” and even pitching her most radical proposal, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” as good for business in the long run in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
And Warren seemed also to understand the political appeal of policies that imposed their costs on corporations — both through taxes and through regulation — than on the public through general taxation. Her focus on corruption and corporate governance was substantively ambitious, but also presented a narrow target for attack — most voters are happy to stick costs on corporate America if they don’t worry about paying for new programs themselves. A year ago, I thought Warren had found the perfect sweet spot.
It didn’t work out that way. Despite an exhaustive Boston Globe report that her self-identification as Native American had never benefited her career, early media coverage fixated on the issue, and she drew scorn from left and right alike. To Democratic voters, she looked like another victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.
Months of dismal polling forced Warren to attract more attention from progressive activists and compete with Sanders for the energized left. She has thrust herself back into the conversation by releasing a blizzard of policy proposals, including a full-on embrace of Berniecare. Many of them poll quite well, though the totality of the programs — free college and debt forgiveness ($1.25 trillion over a decade), green energy investment ($2 trillion), universal child care ($700 billion), new housing subsidies ($500 billion), and Medicare for All (roughly $30 trillion) — would be impossible to fund entirely from the rich. Circa 2018, Warren had a strong case to make that she could avoid higher taxes on the middle class, but 2019 Warren couldn’t credibly make a promise like that without giving up most of her plans.
On top of all that, Warren has joined most of the field in embracing broadly unpopular stances that play well with progressive activists, like decriminalizing immigration enforcement, abolishing the death penalty, and providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Trump’s campaign clearly grasps that his only chance of success is to present the opposition as unacceptably radical, and the Democratic primary is giving him plenty of ammunition to make this case. (Trump has also stopped, for the moment, injecting his “Pocahontas” slur into the political news cycle, but that will return if she clinches the nomination.)
Ann Althouse has spotted the most embarrassing example of WaPo Warren sycophancy yet: “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?” Sweet bleeding Jesus, do you have any idea how cringingly pathetic that makes you look? “Martin Luther King helped lift black Americans up to freedom. Could Wheaties do the same?” Matt drudge thinks it’s Warren’s nomination to lose. She and Biden joined UAW picket lines.
The more voters learned more about her, the less they seemed to like her. According to an analysis by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich, Williamson’s name recognition is up, but her net favorability ratings are down. She now actually has negative net favorability, a dubious honor she shares only with mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Joe Sestak. And her failure to resonate with an audience that might have been receptive to her message — “spiritual but not religious” Americans — also reflects the difficulty of reaching a group that’s defined largely by what it’s not.
According to the Pew Research Center, about one-third of Democrats identify as “spiritual but not religious” — an amorphous identity that has a lot in common with Williamson’s nondenominational spiritual practice. She identifies as Jewish and still attends High Holiday services, but she also practices transcendental meditation. She rose to prominence as a commentator and teacher of “A Course In Miracles,” a mystical book published in 1976 whose author claimed to be dictating revelations from Jesus.
“She’s really the definition of spiritual but not religious,” said Laura Olson, a political science professor at Clemson University, about Williamson. “In that sense, she represents — and you’d think might be able to reach — a very sizeable group of Americans.”
Depending on how you measure it, between one-fifth and one-third of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a group whose numbers have grown in recent years, as more and more people draw away from institutional religion. And like Williamson, most of the “spiritual but not religious” maintain some kind of link to an organized faith tradition. In fact, according to Pew, they’re about as likely to identify as Protestant as they are to say they’re religiously unaffiliated. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority are not churchgoers, nor do they necessarily have a strong sense of communal identity or group cohesion. And here we run into the hurdle that makes outreach to the less-religious and the non-religious perennially tricky for Democrats: It’s hard to marshal a group that doesn’t think of itself as a group.
Williamson’s followers seem to be people who want meaning in their lives, and who reject the materialist vision of finite human life as a briefly flickering candle in a howling void of meaningless existential nothingness, but also don’t want to believe in something as unfashionable as Christianity. She wants mandatory national service to combat climate changes. Way to draw in that youth vote! Evidently she “didn’t challenge” a 9/11 truther in a 2012 interview. Meh, that’s a pretty limp gotcha.
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 Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
Biden threatens a black man with a chain, Beto wants to take your guns, and Democrats don’t want to govern America, they want to punish it. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 27, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Harris 7, Yang 5, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2. Large gap between this poll and YouGov for Warren; suspect the small sample (454) and methodology differences may be at play. But 5 points for Yang is his best showing, and means he gets to play Ted Cruz in basketball (see below).
Reuters/IPSOS: Biden 22, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 4, Harris 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1. No cross-tabs or sample size.
Quinnipac (Texas): Biden 28, Warren 18, Sanders 12, O’Rourke 12, Harris 5, Castro 3, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 2, Delaney 1, Yang 1. Sample size of 456 Democratic-leaning voters out of 1,410 registered voters.
“Democrats onstage in Houston aspire not so much to govern America as to punish it.”
Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke called racism not only “endemic” to America but “foundational.” He explained, “We can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage and as a slave built the greatness, and the success, and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to participate in or enjoy.”
The villains in the Democratic Party story of America do not remain hundreds of years beyond our reach. Cops, gun owners, factory farmers, employees of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street speculators, the oil industry, Republicans, and so many others who, together, constitute the majority of the nation: our Houston Dems do not look to them as fellow countrymen but as impediments, evil impediments in some cases, to realizing their ideological vision. And if that message did not come across in English, several candidates speaking Spanish not comprehended by most viewers nevertheless did not get lost in translation.
That ideological vision includes a doubly unconstitutional confiscation of weapons through executive fiat endorsed by Sen. Kamala Harris and O’Rourke (“Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”), abolition of private health insurance in a bill sponsored by Sens. Sanders and Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden’s insistence that “nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime,” reparations for slavery supported by O’Rourke, a wealth tax proposed by Warren, Sen. Cory Booker’s call to “create an office in the White House to deal with the problem of white supremacy and hate crimes,” Harris demanding that government “de-incarcerate women and children” (even ones who murder?), Andrew Yang wanting to “give every American 100 democracy dollars that you only give to candidates and causes you like,” and the entire stage endorsing open borders, if in muted terms during this debate, and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Here is a science-fiction scenario: Imagine a strange new virus that incapacitates everybody below the age of 75. The virus wipes out the entire political leadership, except one old man, who has survived on account of his age, but may also be too old to handle the awesome task before him.
Now suppose — and I am not certain this is the case, but just suppose — that this is happening to the Democratic presidential campaign. The virus is Twitter, and the old man is (duh) Joe Biden.
In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, an exotic political theory promoted by the party’s most left-wing flank suddenly gained wide circulation. The appeal of Bernie Sanders proved Democrats were ready to embrace socialism, or at least something close to it; and Donald Trump’s election proved a nominee with extreme positions could still win. These two conclusions, in combination, suggested the party would move as far left as activists preferred at no political cost.
Neither of these conclusions was actually correct. The Bernie Sanders vote encompassed voters who opposed Hillary Clinton for a wide array of reasons — including that she was too liberal — and were overall slightly to the right of Clinton voters. And political-science findings that general election voters tend to punish more ideologically extreme candidates remain very much intact. (Trump benefited greatly by distancing himself rhetorically from his party’s unpopular small-government positions, and voters saw him as more moderate than previous Republican nominees, even though he predictably reverted to partisan form once in office.)
And yet, this analysis seemed to race unchallenged through the Democratic Party from about 2016 — it seemed to influence Clinton, who declined the traditional lurch toward the center after vanquishing Sanders — through this year. Through sheer force of repetition, it achieved the status of a kind of self-evident truth.
2. Joe Biden did look old — especially when I switched from the downstairs TV to the newer upstairs TV. The sharper image of him is a little disturbing — I can see that his hair is a strange illusion — but the sharpness of his mind is what matters. He seemed ready to fight, and his idea was he identified with Barack Obama and he offers to make the country into where it would go if we still had Barack Obama. Make America Barack-Obama-Style Again. MABOSA!
3. Bernie was awful. His voice had acquired a new raspiness that made his angry, yelling style outright ugly. I couldn’t believe I needed to listen to him. I cried out in outrage and pain. The stabbing hand gestures — ugh! This is the Democrats second-most-popular candidate? I loved Bernie when he challenged Hillary 4 years ago. The anger was a fascinating mix of comedy and righteousness. But the act is old, and the socialism — did Joe call him a “socialist” more than once? — is scary. We can’t be having a raving crank throwing radical change in our face.
4. Elizabeth Warren was there on the other side of Biden. She and Bernie were double-teaming Joe, and that worked… for Joe. He linked Warren to Bernie: She’s for Bernie/I’m for Barack. I remember Warren reacting to every question with “Listen…” Like we’re the slow students in her class and we haven’t been paying attention and she’s getting tired of us. We should already know what she’s been saying on whatever the question happens to be. She was sunny and bright with enthusiasm when she talked about her early career as a school teacher and how when she was a child she lined up her “dollies” for a lesson. She was, she said, “tough but fair.” I love whatever love there is for tough but fair teachers. Maybe more of that, but we’re not in her class, and our responsibilities are to people and things in our own lives, not in keeping track of whatever her various policies and positions are. Warren seems to have the most potential, but she got yoked to Bernie, and the impression from a distance is: 2 radicals who want to make America unrecognizably different. MAUD!
Dozens of reporters and photographers descended on the Hawkeye Downs speedway, all waiting for one man to appear at a local Labor Day picnic.
That man was not Michael Bennet.
“We’re having a great Labor Day in Iowa,” said Mr. Bennet, the Colorado senator and still a presidential candidate, showing up suddenly to address the scrum that gathered 20 minutes earlier for the arrival of Joseph R. Biden Jr. “And here comes the vice president! So let me get out of his way.”
Life isn’t easy these days for bottom-tier Democratic presidential candidates. Not many people know who they are. Fewer come to their events. No reporters cover them regularly.
The indignities don’t stop there. On Saturday, an Iowa Democrat approached a Wall Street Journal reporter and asked if he was Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana. “I don’t even have cowboy boots on,” the reporter, John McCormick, wrote on Twitter about the encounter. Mr. Bullock’s campaign didn’t have yard signs for a house party on Sunday, so it borrowed signs used by Andy McGuire in Iowa’s 2018 primary for governor and taped “Bullock” placards on them. (Ms. McGuire, who placed fourth in the primary, has endorsed Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota for president.)
The real problem with obscurity, though, is not securing enough donors, or high enough poll numbers, to make the debates. And it becomes something of a vicious cycle: Democratic voters and activists tend to see debate qualification as a litmus test of viability, but candidates can’t increase their viability unless they make the debate in the first place.
There were a lot of good politicians on the debate stage in Houston. But the night rang hollow as they clung to the old conventions — the overcoached performances, the canned lines, the pandering, the well-worn childhood anecdotes meant to project “relatability.”
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Tactics superseded passion and vision. Everyone seemed one tick off. Unlike with Barack Obama in 2008, none made you feel like you wanted to pump your fist in the air and march into the future behind them.
“Being a good politician doesn’t matter anymore,” lamented one freaked-out congressional Democrat afterward. “It’s like being a great used car salesman. We need a Holden Caulfield to call out all the phonies.”
It’s a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron about a moron: Trump’s faux-thenticity somehow makes the Democratic candidates seem more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak.
Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough presidential tone, and unconventional political tactics. Trump is a renegade. Biden remains what he always was—a deep state fixture. And his brand is mainstream Democrat left-liberal orthodoxy, which supposedly does not include weird and wild La La Land pronouncements.
Snip.
Biden’s fantasies, however, are quite different: 1) total memory losses and brain freezes—in which he has forgotten in what state he is, when he was vice president, or for whom he once served in that office; 2) mythography in which Joe Biden becomes an epic hero of every fiction he relates, as he stitches together half-true and quarter-true memories into mythical proportions, and 3) his race and gender hang-ups, in which he says something the Left would normally categorize as racist (e.g., “clean” and “articulate” blacks) or he breathes onto, touches, grabs, and hugs too long and too closely unsuspecting girls and women in the no margin-of-error #MeToo era, and 4) promises that he never intends to keep, such as embracing the suicidal Green New Deal.
As far as the diagnosis of the Biden gaffe machine, the only debate is whether Biden at 76 is addled and suffering early signs of dementia—that is, hardly the sharp and energetic septuagenarian that Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Elizabeth Warren seem to be. Or, in fact, is he just now back in the spotlight and thus resuming his forty years of characteristic embarrassments, some of which blew up his prior two presidential bids.
Is Biden in fact not any more unhinged than he was at 40—the difference now being only that what was seen as eccentric and obnoxious then is now recalibrated as demented due to his advanced age?
After all, we remember a much younger Biden’s lies about his college résumé, his plagiarism in law school, his decades of creepy hugs and breathing into the ears and curls of prepubescent girls, his intellectual theft of British Labourite Neil Kinnock’s stump speech and padding it with family distortions, his trademark appropriation of the ideas and buzzwords of others, his racialist commentary (e.g., Barack Obama is our first “clean” and “articulate” major black presidential candidate, Delaware donut shops are all stuffed with Indian immigrants, Mitt Romney would put blacks “back in chains”) and on and on.
Whether one thinks that Biden is just continuing where he left off in 2008, or that his capacities have slipped considerably since that failed bid matters not. The key is the current prognosis: can the present Biden possibly survive the rigors of 14 more months of campaigning, some 10 or more primary debates, countless fundraisers and one-on-one televised interviews, nearly 50 state primaries, the convention melodramas, and likely three more debates with Donald Trump without every 24 hours sounding either crazy or incomprehensible or offering medical warning signals, in a fashion that confirms he is living in an alternate universe?
Biden’s positioning on racial issues has been problematic.
This issue exposed itself again Thursday during the presidential debate in Houston. Moderator Linsey Davis put a question to Biden:
“Mr. Vice President, I want to come to you and talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.’
You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”
Biden could have taken responsibility for his comments and addressed the question directly, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave a rambling, nonsensical answer that included a reference to a record player. But, the response ended in yet another racial offense in which he seemed to suggest that black people lack the natural capacity to be good parents:
We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
His language belies a particular mind-set, one of a liberal of a particular vintage. On the issue of race, it is paternalistic and it pities, it sees deficiency in much the same way that the conservative does, but it responds as savior rather than with savagery. Better the former than the latter, surely, but the sensibility underlying the two positions is shockingly similar. It underscores that liberalism does not perfectly align with racial egalitarianism, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary.
The only surprising thing about the “not woke enough on race” attack is that we’re seeing it after Kamala Harris crashed and burned. So who does branding Biden as a racist benefit now? Liawatha? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post wants him to drop out. Fat chance. Grandpa Simpson is with the field until the bitter end.
Of all the Presidential hopefuls who have promised to oust Donald Trump in 2020, Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has perhaps the most compelling electoral record. In 2016, he was the only Democratic governor to be reëlected in a red state, winning by four points among Montanans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Trump. His bid is centered on a pledge to reform campaign finance, and, at stops in Iowa, he routinely touts his history of working with a Rebublican-led legislature in his home state to curb dark-money contributions. And yet, Bullock, the last governor left in the race, failed to secure the necessary number of individual donors to qualify for Thursday’s Democratic debate. Like a number of his fellow-candidates, he has criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria, which, for at least a night, winnowed the Democratic field to ten. Last month, the billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars of his own money on advertisements, announced that he had received enough individual donations to qualify for the next round of Democratic debates, in October. A number of candidates expressed dismay, but the most vocal was Bullock, who appeared on television to criticize the lingering influence of money in politics. He conceded that the D.N.C.’s rule was well intentioned, but, he added, “what it really has done is allow a billionaire to buy a spot on the debate stage.”
On Thursday night, as his fellow-candidates stood behind their lecterns in Houston, Texas, Bullock sat at the corner of a glossy wooden bar at the Continental Lounge, a gastropub in Des Moines. The governor was in good spirits, hunched over a glass of Coke, with his right sleeve rolled up and his cowboy boots planted on the base of his stool. “I’d rather be on the debate stage,” he told me. “But I don’t think being on the debate stage is going to define what the first week of February looks like.” Earlier that day, in Clive, Bullock had attended a meet-and-greet hosted by the wife of Iowa’s former governor, Tom Vilsack. By his side at the Continental sat Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa and an old friend, who endorsed Bullock in May. (Miller, Bullock also noted, was one of the first state officials outside of Illinois to back Barack Obama in 2007.) They both ordered bacon cheeseburger flatbreads, which arrived, garnished with pickles, on marbled slabs of wood. Bullock, who had also ordered a refill of soda, looked surprised when the bartender arrived bearing tumblers of Bulleit bourbon.
“This is brought to you by the Gillibrand team,” the bartender said, gesturing to his left. A few former staffers of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, who withdrew her candidacy last week, waved.
“I guess we have to drink, then,” Bullock said, raising his glass.
She’s out of the race, and we’re still hearing about Gillibrand and booze…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ouch: “Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro lost one of his congressional endorsements Sunday, with Texas Rep. Vicente González switching to support former Vice President Joe Biden.” What does it tell you about the doomed nature of Castro’s campaign that even fellow Hispanic Texas democrats are abandoning it? On Fox, both Lisa Boothe and Juan Williams think Castro was Julian Castro the biggest debate loser for going after Biden.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ann Althouse notes that New York Timesfinally mentions the fact that she was Willie Brown’s mistress: “”He appointed her to two well-compensated state posts. He gave her a BMW. He introduced her to people worth knowing…. Ms. Harris’s allies have bristled at any suggestion that Mr. Brown powered her ascent, dismissing the charge as sexist and making clear that she was plenty capable of impressing on her own.” Let ye who has never gifted a BMW to a political protege cast the first stone. Don’t distract me with details: “Kamala Harris Does Not Understand Why the Constitution Should Get in the Way of Her Gun Control Agenda.” Big money donors aren’t opening their pocketbooks to her campaign. That’s what happens when you become a falling star…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While it’s still early in the presidential race, one thing is clear: Wayne Messam is no Pete Buttigieg.” It’s largely a rehash of last week’s Buzzfeed piece, but that’s the only Messam news this week…
At the Democratic-primary debate in Houston last night, Beto O’Rourke formally killed off one of the gun-control movement’s favorite taunts: The famous “Nobody is coming for your guns, wingnut.” Asked bluntly whether he was proposing confiscation, O’Rourke abandoned the disingenuous euphemisms that have hitherto marked his descent into extremism, and confirmed as plainly as can be that he was. “Hell yes,” he said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”
O’Rourke’s plan has been endorsed in full by Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, and is now insinuating its way into the manifestos of gun-control groups nationwide. Presumably, this was O’Rourke’s intention. But he — and his party — would do well to remember that there is a vast gap between the one-upmanship and playacting that is de rigueur during primary season, and the harsh reality on the ground. Prohibition has never been well received in America, and guns have proven no exception to that rule. In New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, attempts at the confiscation of “high capacity” magazines and the registration of “assault weapons” have both fallen embarrassingly flat — to the point that the police have simply refused to aid enforcement or to prosecute the dissenters. Does Beto, who must know this, expect the result to be different in Texas, Wyoming, or Florida? Earlier this week, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives was unable to marshal enough votes to pass a ban on the sale of “assault weapons” — let alone to mount a confiscation drive. Sorry, Robert Francis. That dog ain’t gonna hunt.
And nor should it, for O’Rourke’s policy is spectacularly unconstitutional. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America by a considerable margin, and is therefore clearly protected by the “in common use” standard that was laid out in D.C. v. Heller. Put as baldly as possible, confiscation is not a program that the federal government is permitted to adopt.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has replaced the New Hampshire state director of his presidential campaign after growing indignation from his fiercest supporters that their concerns about losing the first-in-the-nation primary states were being ignored.
More than 50 members from Sanders’ state steering committee applauded on Sunday afternoon when they heard that Joe Caiazzo had been reassigned to Massachusetts, according to those in the room. The news was delivered by the new state director, Shannon Jackson, who ran Sanders’ Senate reelection in 2018.
“The people who helped Bernie win here last time knew and felt intimately that something was very different and not for the best,” said a steering committee member who was at the meeting. “We know our state, we know our counties and we see what other campaigns on the ground are doing. We weren’t happy with what we were seeing.”
Maybe Bernie could ask Trump’s advice on the best way to fire underperforming underlings. “Senator Bernie Sanders’s announced last week that Palestinian-American activist and Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour would be joining his presidential campaign as an official surrogate.” Just how big is the radical antisemitic faction in the Democratic Party these days? This is a move that could really blow up a synagogue in his face. Flashback: “Bernie Sanders Was Asked to Leave Hippie Commune for Shirking.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the October debate. Which was mentioned last week, but if not for that, the only Steyer news appears to be from Salon, and there are things even I won’t do…
On the highest floor of the tallest building in Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren was busy collecting big checks from some of the city’s politically connected insiders. It was April 2018 and Ms. Warren, up for re-election, was at a breakfast fund-raiser hosted for her by John M. Connors Jr., one of the old-guard power brokers of Massachusetts.
Soon after, Ms. Warren was in Manhattan doing the same. There would be trips to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia — all with fund-raisers on the agenda. She collected campaign funds at the private home of at least one California megadonor, and was hosted by another in Florida. She held finance events until two weeks before her all-but-assured re-election last November.
Then, early this year, Ms. Warren made a bold bet that would delight the left: She announced she was quitting this big-money circuit in the 2020 presidential primary, vowing not to attend private fund-raisers or dial up rich donors anymore. Admirers and activists praised her stand — but few noted the fact that she had built a financial cushion by pocketing big checks the years before.
The open secret of Ms. Warren’s campaign is that her big-money fund-raising through 2018 helped lay the foundation for her anti-big-money run for the presidency. Last winter and spring, she transferred $10.4 million in leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against.
As Ms. Warren has risen in the polls on her populist and anti-corruption message, some donors and, privately, opponents are chafing at her campaign’s purity claims of being “100 percent grass-roots funded.” Several donors now hosting events for her rivals organized fund-raisers for her last year.
“Can you spell hypocrite?” said former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who contributed $4,000 to Ms. Warren in 2018 and is now supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Rendell said he had recruited donors to attend an intimate fund-raising dinner for Ms. Warren last year at Barclay Prime, a Philadelphia steakhouse where the famed cheesesteak goes for $120. (The dish includes Wagyu rib-eye, foie gras, truffled cheese whiz and a half-bottle of champagne.) He said he received a “glowing thank-you letter” from Ms. Warren afterward.
But when Mr. Rendell co-hosted Mr. Biden’s first fund-raiser this spring, Ms. Warren’s campaign sent brickbats, deriding the affair as “a swanky private fund-raiser for wealthy donors,” the likes of which she now shuns.
“She didn’t have any trouble taking our money the year before,” Mr. Rendell said. “All of a sudden, we were bad guys and power brokers and influence-peddlers. In 2018, we were wonderful.”
“While Warren won reelection easily in 2018, Biden’s backers point to her performance among independent and blue-collar voters as evidence she’ll fail to appeal to similar voters in the Rust Belt — just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.” She wants to go after banks and big tech just as both are doing gangbusters. “Who would want to weaken America’s strong global leadership in technology? It would undoubtedly lead to mass layoffs and definitely destroy future investment and wreck the economy.”
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 Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
Gillibrand is Out, CNN is going to subject America to 7 hours of climate change blather because they hate America (and ratings), Biden suffers imaginary flashbacks, and the next debates loom. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
USA Today/Suffolk University: Biden 32, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Castro 1, Ryan 1. “The contenders who did not receive the support of a single one of the 424 likely Democratic voters surveyed included Montana Governor Steve Bullock, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Miramar (Florida) Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.”
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2. Sample size: 465, 190 males, 275 females. That’s a pretty small samples and a pretty strong sex skew.
Monmouth: Sanders 20, Warren 20, Biden 19, Harris 8, Booker 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 2. This is the poll that launched a thousand “Biden is toast!” pieces last week, only for every other poll to come out and go “Yeah, not so much.”
Ten Democrats qualified for the next round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Yang. 538 staffers debate the debate. “Isn’t Biden presented with the most downside risk now that the focus gets tightened to 10 candidates? Instead of having to worry about mainly one top-tier challenge (Harris or Bernie or whomever), he now risks getting outshone by any or all of them.”
Believe it or not, the criteria to make the October debates is actually easier.
Here’s the catch: To qualify for the fourth round of debates in October, the candidates must meet the same requirements as those for September. In other words, candidates can raise money or improve in polling with a much longer deadline; for this reason, at least a few candidates will stick around until October.
Of the candidates who failed to qualify, only Gabbard, Steyer, and Williamson came close, so it’s unlikely any of them will call it quits over the next month. (Steyer fell short only one point from qualifying for September’s debates.)
After failing to qualify, both Delaney and Ryan have reiterated their commitment to their campaigns. “We’re moving forward,” Ryan said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “This is not going to stop us at all … we’re picking up endorsements left and right.” And in a story published yesterday over at the Atlantic, Benett has already stated his commitment to stay in the race until the 2020 Iowa caucuses in February.
All of this leaves us with Bullock and de Blasio, our predictions for the next candidates to drop out of the race.
“Cory Booker meditates. Kamala Harris does SoulCycle. Beto O’Rourke eats dirt.” Pretty much posting it just for the headline.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s staying in the race despite not making the debate. “Bennet says he plans to do well in the 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.” In other news, I plan to date lots of hot supermodels this fall…
Biden is probably mentally and physically fine — or within the parameters of fine for a man who turns 77 in November and who never had the greatest verbal discipline at the height of his career.
When Biden tells a story where he gets just about all of the details wrong, when he mixes up New Hampshire and Vermont, or calls former British prime minister Theresa May “Margaret Thatcher,” or when he says, “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president” or when he mangles the address of his campaign web site at the end of a debate, it’s probably just a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s behaving like a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s.
I believe that if Biden were genuinely mentally or physically unwell and incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, his family and friends would sit him down and make him withdraw from the race. No one would want their loved one to go out into the national spotlight and stumble and be embarrassed. Watching a loved one succumb to age and gradually lose their mental acuity and memory from Alzheimer’s is an extremely painful process.
(In a strange way, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” is kind of a cute and charming unofficial slogan. With the news being what it is these days, Mr. Vice President, we’ve all felt the need to reassure others and ourselves of that fact.)
But even assuming that these are just normal septuagenarian memory lapses, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch Biden appear to forget Barack Obama’s name, saying during a recent appearance, “he’s saying it was president . . . (pause) My boss’s, it’s his fault.” If part of the reason to vote for Biden is his superior experience and knowledge in foreign policy, it’s a little unnerving to hear Biden say, “I don’t know the new prime minister of England. He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Really? Does the former veep need glasses?
The problem for Biden and his campaign is that nothing gets easier from here. Running for president consists almost entirely of long days of extemporaneous speaking in front of cameras and getting asked difficult questions from both reporters and voters. It is physically and mentally grueling marathon even to the healthiest and youngest candidates. Sure, the Biden campaign can rely on ads where Biden barely speaks and try to get him to stick to a prepared script as much as possible. But we know this man. Biden likes to talk. He likes to tell stories. He will tell stories where he doesn’t really remember the details, fills in the blanks with how he wanted it to have happened, and insist, “this is the God’s honest truth.”
Kevin Williamson doesn’t think Biden is senile, he thinks he’s just a liar:
In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”
But his word as a Biden isn’t worth squat, as the Post showed, reporting that “Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” Which is a nice way of saying: Biden lied about an act of military heroism in order to aggrandize his own role in the story.
Like Hillary Rodham Clinton under fictitious sniper fire, Biden highlighted his own supposed courage in the face of physical danger: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids.”
If Biden here is lying with malice aforethought, then he ought to be considered morally disqualified for the office. If he is senescent, then he obviously is unable to perform the duties associated with the presidency, and asking him to do so would be indecent, dangerous, and unpatriotic.
The evidence points more toward moral disability than mental disability, inasmuch as Biden has a long career of lying about precisely this sort of thing.
The most dramatic instance of that is Biden’s continued insistence on lying about the circumstances surrounding the horrifying deaths of his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. It is not the case, as Biden has said on many occasions, that they were killed by a drunk driver, an irresponsible trucker who “drank his lunch,” as Biden put it. That is a pure fabrication, and a slander on the man who was behind the wheel of that truck and who was haunted by the episode until the end of his days. Imagine yourself in the position of that man’s family, whose natural sympathy for Biden’s loss must be complicated by outrage at his persistent lying about the relevant events.
Why would Biden lie about the death of his wife and daughter? Why would he lie about the already-heroic efforts of American soldiers? In both cases, to make the story more dramatic, to give himself a bigger and more impressive narrative arc. That he would subordinate other people — real people, living and dead — to his own political ambition in such a callous and demeaning way counsels strongly against entrusting him with any more political power than that which he already has wielded.
Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.
The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.
So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Cory Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hey, remember all the way back to a few months ago to when Mayor Pete was The Next Big Thing? Then it turned out that Mayor Pete wasn’t so good at the mayoring part:
Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.
Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.
It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.
“When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.
Mr. Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.
But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters.
So what’s a guy that’s suddenly not-so-hot but still have lots of campaign money to spend do? Obviously beef up his campaign staff. Especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is in better shape than the also rans, or, for that matter, Harris, who wasn’t able to translate her brief turn in the sun into a fundraising haul the way the Buttigieg campaign did. If Biden does flame out, Buttigieg is still best positioned to pick up the mantle of “Well, he’s not as crazy as the rest,” and a lot of DNC money seems to be hedging that way.
The audience laughs and cheers and there is time for one more question, and it is the big one: How are you going to beat Trump?
Just as Castro begins to answer, an airplane, landing at nearby Manchester airport, flies low over the party. No one can hear anything over the plane’s growling engines. But Castro keeps talking, smiling, jabbing the air in front of him, uttering words only he understands or can hear.
This should be Julián Castro’s moment. At a time when issues of immigration and family separation, race and the border are front and center in the national consciousness, the story of a third-generation Mexican-American would seem tailor-made to resonate emotionally with voters.
Snip.
And yet, as he spoke to Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Castro’s campaign seemed to be on the cusp of ending. Despite being pegged as the future of the Democratic Party almost as soon as he arrived on the scene as San Antonio mayor in 2009, and as the “Latino Obama” after he delivered a memorable keynote to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, here he was, stuck in the third tier of a sprawling field, polling around the 1 percent mark. And most crucially, he had not yet qualified for the third Democratic debate in September, which required polling at 2 percent to make it on the stage.
Snip.
And yet Elizabeth Warren is the “policy candidate.” And Pete Buttigieg, seven years younger than Castro, is the Millennial Mayor candidate. Joe Biden is the one with better ties to the Obama administration. And even though Castro proposes taxing inheritances of $2 million or more, raising the capital gains tax rate, providing a $3,000 per child tax credit, paid family and medical leave and a $15 nationwide minimum wage, Bernie Sanders is the candidate known for fighting income inequality. And somehow, despite being able to trace his lineage to the American colonies of the 18th century, Beto O’Rourke, a son of El Paso and fluent in Spanish, has become the candidate of immigration and the new Texas.
Snip.
Although Castro had been considering a statewide run in Texas for years, probably for governor, before O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Ted Cruz it was widely thought that the state wasn’t ready to elect a Democrat yet. After losing the veepstakes, he had planned to remain in Washington, angle for a job in the Hillary Clinton administration, possibly as secretary of Education or Transportation or in the Office of Management and Budget, or at some politically influential think tank.
Instead he moved back to San Antonio in 2017 and signaled his interest in running for president almost immediately. He started a PAC, Opportunity First, which raised a half-million dollars and supported “young, progressive leaders” around the country. He wrote a pre-campaign memoir, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream, which details his rise from the barrios of West San Antonio through Stanford, Harvard Law, San Antonio’s political scene and to the Obama administration, with his twin, Joaquin, younger by one minute, with him all the way.
But other than the book and the PAC, Castro really wasn’t a major figure in the “Invisible Primary” period after the 2016 election. He wasn’t a regular on “Pod Save America,” there weren’t glossy magazine profiles or stories of him stumping for down-ballot candidates in the early primary states. It is hard to go from Housing secretary to presidential front-runner, and much harder when you are last seen in the public eye as being not picked for your party’s presidential ticket. It is telling that few of the most sought-after political operatives in Democratic circles rushed to join Castro’s campaign even though he had signaled he was in the race for a long time. Instead of veterans of the Obama and Clinton or Sanders campaigns, the Castro team is filled with many longtime loyalists from San Antonio and his Housing secretary days.
The most likely and most obvious political path for Castro would be to consolidate the Latino vote, a population which comprises an increasingly growing share of the population but one that, frustratingly for Democratic strategists, doesn’t vote in nearly the numbers that it could. Latinos are the now the largest minority group in the country and account for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the Democratic Party electorate. 2020 polling on Latinos is scant, but the polling that does exist shows that immigration isn’t the big concern among Latinos that many analysts assume it to be. Jobs and health care rank above immigration, and polling shows that Latinos tend to favor the candidates who are preferred by the rest of the Democratic electorate like Warren, Sanders and Biden. A recent open-ended Pew survey put Castro below even Buttigieg in a poll of Latino Democrats.
Castro mouths the words, but he doesn’t hear the music.
Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.
There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by mutant sharks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.
And what does de Blasio think when he surveys this immense realm of inequality?
“Hey, why not blow up the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”
The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chiara de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.
Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large salary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.
The city has a lot of underperforming high schools, these schools are filled with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.
That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solution that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, which is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.
As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.
These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambition-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.
I know this story is only barely relevant to the 2020 Democrat Presidential Race. Much like de Blasio’s campaign…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not dropping out. More than any other candidate, Gabbard seems to be screwed by the DNC debate rules. “Rep. Gabbard has exceeded 2% support in 26 national and early state polls, but only two of them are on the DNC’s ‘certified’ list. Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC ‘certified’ polls.” 538 on the same topic, noting Gabbard and Steyer might be in under different criteria.
Go back to Gillibrand’s biography. If you had a daughter who was accepted to Dartmouth and studied two semesters abroad in Beijing and Taiwan, you would probably be pretty proud. If she got into UCLA law school, and then was accepted for internships in her senator’s office and at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, you would be proud of that, too. If, after law school, she got hired by one of Manhattan’s oldest and most distinguished law firms, and went on to get selected for coveted law clerk positions, you would probably be bragging to the neighbors.
By a lot of standards, Gillibrand did what a bright and ambitious woman is supposed to do. In fact, by the standards of America’s self-labeled meritocratic elite, Gillibrand’s path to success is exactly what a young person is supposed to pursue. This comparison hasn’t been made much, but in this way she’s like Pete Buttigieg — the bright young son of professors at Notre Dame who is accepted to Harvard, moves on to Oxford, and immediately gets hired by McKinsey consulting. They’re both Type-A personalities with grades to match, carrying around golden resumes and heads full of answers that wow teachers, professors, and potential employers. Quite a few parents look at standout young people like this and wish their kids could be more like that.
America’s self-labeled meritocracy (please avert your eyes from all the nepotism, bourgeoisie readers, it’s gauche to bring it up) unsubtly turns all aspects of life into a competition. You want to get the best grades, get into the best school, study under the best professors, get the best internships, get the best jobs, get the highest salary, move into the best house, drive the best car, have the biggest portfolio . . . This isn’t new; America has long had a competitive sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s easy to understand why many Americans would grow to find this rarely openly expressed but almost omnipresent mindset unappealing. People sigh about “the rat race.” Seemingly high-achieving workers hit burnout. People dream of winning the lottery and moving to some sparsely populated island somewhere and “leaving it all behind.” People crave a sense of being valued for who they are, not just for their big salary, prestigious job, or fancy car. A seemingly endless stream of nonfiction and fiction works explore “the cost of the American dream.”
When you have a competition, there are usually going to be a few winners and a lot of people who “lose.” We conservatives have grumbled about “class envy” for a long time, but maybe some resentment is natural. People who have thrived in America’s “meritocracy” include Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Eric Schneiderman, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes. We’ve seen plenty of millionaires and self-proclaimed billionaires who turned out to be terrible human beings. We’ve seen plenty of celebrities demonstrate every repugnant behavior under the sun, to the point of self-destruction. Lots of people who are in the middle or bottom have reason to doubt the notion that the best really do rise to the top in America.
When Kirsten Gillibrand — super accomplished, $500,000-per-year lawyer — turned her attention and ambitions to the political world, the best opportunity to run for office was a purple district in the middle of New York state. The top-tier Manhattan lawyer might not seem like the perfect fit, but she adapted, her opponent got caught in a scandal, and she won.
There’s a particular circle of elite New York Democratic party and media voices who found Gillibrand to be exactly what they wanted; she had risen to the top, and other people at the top found her to be as close to perfect as they could imagine. Their swoon spurred those ridiculous-in-retrospect overestimations of her appeal as a presidential candidate: Politico (“Her moment has arrived”), GQ (“the most fearsome contender”), The New Yorker (“the new face of moral reform”), and Vogue (“she’s got newfound street cred among lefties and progressives”).
The swoon started soon after her appointment to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. I love making fun of Vogue’s 2017 profile of Gillibrand, but the gushing in the 2010 profile — entitled, “In Hillary’s Footsteps” — is pretty over-the-top, too:
“Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces.”
For some reason, Iowa and New Hampshire farmers did not find her as appealing.
Gillibrand kept getting compared to the character of Tracey Flick from Election, and perhaps that is indeed sexist. But let’s reexamine that character and that movie. On paper, the villain of the story is Matthew Broderick’s high school social studies teacher, who grows so infuriated and antagonistic to Reese Witherspoon’s Flick that he’s willing to try to cheat to ensure she doesn’t win the election for student body election. Technically, Flick is the victim in the story. But we, the audience, relate to Broderick. Flick is a fascinating but thoroughly unlikeable character, and she’s supposed to be one. At one point she declares, “I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all of his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money — he’s gotta be at least a little jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.” Tracey Flick doesn’t have much beyond her all-consuming ambition and determination, and probably the single most important characteristic is that we never see her actually caring about anyone besides herself, and perhaps the desire to make her mother proud. Why was Election a hit that is remembered and still referred to, two decades later? Because a lot of people knew high school class presidents who reminded them of Tracey Flick.
I have two minor quibbles with this analysis, both related to the same facet of Gillibrand. One, Gillibrand’s rise strikes me as less meritocracy at work than credentialism (a point Geraghty implies without actually stating). In truth, nothing I’ve seen from Gillibrand suggests that she’s actually bright. It seems like liberal female New York political writers bestowed that unearned distinction on Gillibrand because she came across as one of them, someone with the right pedigree who held all the right fashionably liberal opinions. Gillibrand’s one-woman show of The Wokeist Sorority Girl is finally over. Good riddance:
From the beginning, her upstart campaign was characterized by an enormous amount of virtue-mongering, insisting not only that her progressive bona fides made her superior to you, but that only she could help you comprehend exactly how backwards you are. In the last debate, for instance, she promised to traverse the suburbs explaining “institutional racism” and white privilege to white women.
It was an interesting tactic from a candidate attempting to distinguish herself as a female candidate running for women, and it’s easy to see why the effort failed to gain much traction. The major policy centerpiece of her campaign was called “Fighting for women and families” and focused exclusively on issues like unlimited abortion rights, universal paid family leave, public education, and sexual harassment. Perhaps the most news attention she got all campaign came when she compared being pro-life to being racist. Light on substance, she needed a forum to peddle her platitudes, and without the debate stage, she had little hope of convincing Democrats to listen to her at all.
The news that she had terminated her campaign came just a few days after a former Gillibrand staffer told the New York Post, “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.”
On paper, though, Gillibrand’s campaign didn’t seem especially quixotic. She was on the national stage for more than a decade before throwing her hat in the ring, and established herself as a strong advocate for women’s rights issues such as paid family leave and sexual assault in the military. She was also explicitly pitching her candidacy toward groups like white college-educated suburban women, whose political enthusiasm had just helped sweep a record-breaking number of women into office in the 2018 midterms.
So Gillibrand’s biggest problem may have simply been that there wasn’t a clear base for her in the Democratic electorate — at least not one for which there wasn’t also fierce competition in the rest of the primary field. After all, she was running against a number of other women who are also strong on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Without another signature issue to help her stand out, she often got lost in the melee of the primary.
Snip.
In some ways, Gillibrand’s campaign may have also shown just how tricky outreach to women voters can be, even in a year where issues such as abortion and the #MeToo movement are prominent. Women make up about 60 percent of the Democratic base, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that they gravitate automatically toward female candidates because of their shared identity, or even because of shared priorities. In that Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, only 5 percent of Democratic women voters said that gender equality was a top voting priority. And Warren and Harris appear to be polling only very slightly better with women than men; that gap is actually bigger for Biden.
Harris’ tumble in the Democratic primary race has worried donors and supporters after her launch attracted huge crowds amid high expectations. A rising charismatic and accomplished star, they did think she couldn’t go wrong. They also figured she could ride her early summer ascent to a face-off with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. After all, her decision to jolt her campaign by attacking Biden at the first candidate debate had initially proven successful — Harris had left him wobbly-kneed and doubted. New endorsements came in from the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a surge in donations, and media accounts of voters and insiders talking about her unique ability to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump, as the former California attorney general likes to say.
But last week a CNN national poll that had her at 17% support — in second place — in June now showed her in fourth place with only 5%. In the new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll out Wednesday, Harris is at 6% but now in fifth place, behind Pete Buttigieg.
I’m going to go with “no.” Harris’ stumbles revealed that, like Gillibrand, her “charisma” was more media creation that real, and that she’s actually unpopular with black voters, a huge problem if the media positions you as ‘the black candidate.” “Five times prosecutor Kamala Harris got the wrong guy.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s no Messam news this week. His Twitter timeline is discussing preperations for Hurricane Dorian, so he’s evidently doing the job he actually has now, and will presumably continue having once he stops pretending he’s running for President. Maybe Mayor Pete could take notes…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Missed the debate, still running, but he’s also fundraising for his congressional campaign. Hardly burning his boats. Says there’s no shot of him dropping out of the Presidential race. So I’m guessing he’s out in about five weeks or so…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the latest case of Bernie spending taxpayer money he doesn’t have, he promises to cancel all medical debts. At this rate, Democrats will be promising to cancel all debts on everything, credit cards and mortgages included, so why pay any bills any more ever? The Magic Power of Socialism™ will take care of it all! A California restaurant owner says that Brnie is a rude asshole. “It was all very nice, except for rude and cranky Bernie…He didn’t want to shake hands, he didn’t want a picture. No campaign face…He wasn’t nice to any of the staff.” Campaigned in Porland, Maine.
Tom Steyer’s campaign was confident he would make it into the September debate. With the help of a nearly $5 million online advertising blitz, the billionaire presidential candidate had scooped up the necessary 130,000 unique donors in just over a month, meeting the Democratic National Committee’s donor threshold to qualify.
But he also had to meet the polling requirement. As the party’s deadline approached, Steyer had notched the necessary 2% in three qualifying polls, meaning he needed just one more to make it into the debate. The campaign hoped for another in an early primary state, where Steyer had spent more than $8 million on TV ads in six weeks, according to Advertising Analytics — more than any candidate, including President Donald Trump.
That poll never materialized.
The campaign vented that there hadn’t been a qualifying poll in Nevada, where Steyer spent $1.7 million and finished fifth in one survey that wasn’t approved by the DNC. But several political strategists offered another possible reason Steyer’s strategy came up short: No amount of paid media can match the influence of actual coverage, referred to in media parlance as “earned media.”
“Advertising you pay for can increase your name recognition, but unless people are hearing about you from third parties like earned media that are reinforcing a real narrative, then it’s not really going to go anywhere,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
And if there’s anyone who knows about tremendous campaign failures, its Robby Mook. Steyer’s only been in the race for two months and we already have our first failure-to-launch piece:
Even before liberal billionaire Tom Steyer was shut out of the next Democratic debate, there were tell-tale signs his rocket-fueled six-week presidential bid was failing to launch.
At last weekend’s Democratic National Committee summer confab in San Francisco, Steyer’s home turf, his campaign had a fancy booth complete with a snazzy “Tom2020” photo backdrop, but only a handful of supporters were happily snapping pics and there were no sign-waving foot soldiers to compete with Kamala Harris’ k-hive entourage.
Still, just before his remarks to the gathering, there was a slight buzz in the ballroom from Democrats eager to hear from the familiar activist in person.
To put it bluntly, Steyer underwhelmed. The wooden speech fell especially flat when he lectured his DNC hosts to stop accepting corporate cash.
“We can’t be chasing corporate money. … We should only be chasing people’s votes,” he said. “As president, I would insist that the DNC not take one single penny from any corporation.”
Overall, the party faithful assembled there offered tepid applause even after Steyer reminded them that his NextGen group organized and paid for the “largest youth mobilization in American history” in 2018, helping to flip 33 GOP House seats to the Democratic column.
Strangely, with the notable exception of slamming Donald Trump as the “biggest swamp rat of them all,” Steyer didn’t focus much on the president despite the months he spent demanding Democrats in Congress move to impeach him.
Steyer’s speech left some DNC delegates scratching their heads, though no one wanted to go public berating a billionaire who has invested so many dollars in liberal causes. Steyer was the single largest individual donor to Democratic-aligned groups in 2016 and his voter registration drives in California and Arizona helped fuel the 2018 blue wave.
The spending largesse aside, many Democrats privately say Steyer, an Exeter/Yale/Stanford graduate and a former Goldman Sachs associate who made his fortune running a $26 billion hedge fund, is simply the wrong person to pitch the party’s anti-corporate message to voters.
Elizabeth Warren came to last week’s Native American presidential forum in Sioux City, Iowa, with, as you might expect, a plan. And she executed it perfectly.
First, the Massachusetts senator expressed sorrow for the “harm I caused,” referencing her attempt to prove she had Native American ancestry through a DNA test. Then she pivoted to her literal plan, her sweeping and detailed set of ideas to expand tribal nation sovereignty and invest in social programs benefiting Native American communities. The long list of proposals was repeatedly praised by the forum’s attendees, several of whom excitedly predicted that they were speaking to the next president of the United States.
While Warren’s campaign staff might have breathed easier coming out of the forum, her Republican antagonists have made it clear they have no intention of forgetting the episode. Shortly before Warren’s appearance at the forum, the Republican National Committee released an opposition research memo titled, “1/1024th Native American, 100% Liar,” which quoted its deputy chief of staff Mike Reed as saying, Warren “lied about being [Native American] to gain minority status at a time when Ivy League law schools were desperate to add diversity to their ranks.” A few days earlier, President Donald Trump, after lamenting that “Pocahontas is rising” in the polls, assured his supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he still has the ability to derail her: “I did the Pocahontas thing. I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it.”
Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.
They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.
But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.
That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.
It used to be that the Boston Globe practically had a monopoly on slobbering, unctuous flattery of the erstwhile Native American, the first woman of color at Harvard, emeritus.
It wasn’t enough for the Boring Broadsheet to pretend that the New England Historical and Genealogical Society hadn’t busted her melanin-impaired grift, or to peddle fake statistics about her scam DNA test. No, the bow-tied bumkissers also penned hagiographies of her dead dog (Otis), her new dog (Bailey) and her campaign headquarters in Charlestown (complete with a cameo appearance by Bailey).
But the Globe is one busy Democrat fanzine these days, what with having to break out the pom-poms for, among others, Ed Markey (he may be a doddering old fool, but he’s our doddering old fool), JoJoJo Kennedy (look, a Kennedy! And he has red hair!), and of course Seth Moulton (America’s loss is Essex County’s gain, or something).
So when it comes to open and gross cheerleading for Lieawatha, there’s an open lane, and boy, are the Democrat operatives with press passes rushing to fill the void.
The thesis is that Fauxcahontas is, well, thoughtful and substantive, plus you always have to mention, as the New Republic gushed, “her passion, her intellect and her lack of artifice.”
Here’s how Lieawatha’s thoughtful, substantive policies work: Bernie Sanders goes in front of some whining group of self-proclaimed victims demanding handouts, and promises them, say, $10 trillion.
So the fake Indian follows and says, I’ll raise you, Bernie – how’s $20 trillion in handouts sound?
Scott Adams thinks Warren has gotten much better as a candidate but Biden is done (political portion starts about 34 minutes in):
Talking about how to beat Warren, China Fentanyl, G7, Homes for low income people, #Hoax5, and coffee. https://t.co/56TiTm0ni1
He also thinks Warren is vulnerable on making the healthcare of everyone who already has it worse. Also thinks Harris is the worst candidate of all time. “Even worse than Beto, and he’s terrible.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a thread on the many ways MSNBC and CNN have blatantly kept Andrew Yang out of newsgraphics describing all the candidates, even those polling lower than him. It’s pretty egregious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) “Yang climate plan heavily relies on entrepreneurship, nuclear.” If you’re going to do something incredibly stupid like the Paris Climate Accords or the Green New Deal, then Yang’s approach is indeed the one that does the least collateral damage, and a pro-nucelar voice is a breath of fresh air among Democrats.
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:
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 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:
