The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned Saturday evening.
Nothing is more important to the Register and its polling partners than the integrity of the Iowa Poll. Today, a respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered, which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.
While this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution, the partners made the difficult decision not to move forward with releasing the poll. The poll was the last one scheduled by the polling partners before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses, which are Monday.
J. Ann Selzer, whose company conducts the Iowa Poll, said, “There were concerns about what could be an isolated incident. Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll. The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.”
The New York Times reported that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained the former mayor’s name was left off the list of candidates in one interview, leading the media partners to throw the poll out entirely.
Again, who cancels a poll because one partisan complained something was off? More:
Underscoring the attention paid to the poll, CNN had planned an hourlong TV program around its release. Instead, at 9 p.m. Eastern, the network’s political director, David Chalian, went on the air to explain why the poll wasn’t being issued.
Something stinks here. My guess is they saw something in the poll they didn’t want the public to see, mostly likely that Bernie Sanders was clobbering the other candidates, and CNN told them to pull the plug.
Some tweets (usual rumor caveats apply):
So you're telling me that a single individual who was polled was responsible for cancelling the Des Moines Register poll? This reeks of censorship. #ReleaseThePollhttps://t.co/YGd9qK381r
The truth about the Des Moines Register poll. Bernie Sanders is up, and up YUGGEEE. We had the biggest rally of any presidential candidate today. We knocked on 500,000 doors in IOWA. Our surge isn’t even at its peak, we are going to take Iowa by a LARGE margin. #IowaForBernie
Andrew Yang: “We were all waiting in the back for a new Des Moines Register poll that was supposed to come out a few minutes ago, and then they said they’re not releasing it – so all these rumors are flying, and one of the rumors we’ve gotten is that we did really really well.”
lol. CNN can't find room on its front page for the biggest story in politics: the killing of their Iowa poll with the DM Register. pic.twitter.com/Jrt4QkzYQ6
I’m waiting for a video where he brags “So I said to the Dem Moines Register, I says there’s no way you’re releasing that poll…and sonuvabitch – what do know….”
Reminder: That same poll missed a late Ted Cruz surge four years ago. Given the way the DNC and media put it’s thumb on the scales for Hillary, and how consistently the media has destroyed what little credibility it still had left pushing every anti-Trump narrative that flowed down the sewer pipe, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen. Our default assumption now is that you’re lying for partisan advantage. Especially with CNN. You’re worthless garbage and we hope AT&T fires everyone and shuts down your entire network in embarrassment.
Right now this poll is 92% not believing the Register‘s explanation:
Do you believe the Des Moines Register when they say they are not releasing their poll bc of a problem with the questioning?
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.
Five months ago 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.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Cory Booker, Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 71,730,827 followers, up an astounding 3,691,379 since the last roundup, so not only has Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined, the impeachment farce seems to have tripled the number of followers he usually gains. To put it another way, Trump gained more followers in a month than Warren has total followers. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,975,624 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Bernie is having a great month. In addition to now topping polls, he gained as many Twitter followers as his next three Democratic rival gainers (Biden, Yang and Warren) combined.
Biden’s follower gain rate picked up only slightly, but he moved into second because Cory Booker dropped out.
I expected Warren’s follower gains to tail off with the rest of her campaign, but it actually picked up a tick.
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.
Bloomberg and Steyer’s upticks are also picking up slightly.
Given her previous rate of follower addition, for Klobuchar, endorsements from both the New York Timesand the Des Moines Register have gained her…maybe 12,000 followers.
Patrick, Bennet and Delaney are all dead in the water, and Gabbard is barely moving.
Weird statistical anomaly: Last month Bennet was up 799 followers. This month, he’s up 1,799 followers.
Everything’s coming up Bernie (including a Joe Rogan endorsement), Biden tranny panders, Buttigieg does a Jeb!, Bloomberg ops get sick bennies, Yang rises, and WaPo worries about screaming ghosts. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Also: The Iowa caucuses are next week. Our long national nightmare is finally coming to a middle!
Polls
Suffolk/USA Today (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. No link to crosstabs/sample size/etc.
Emerson: Biden 30, Sanders 27, Warren 13, Yang 8, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0. Yang in fourth here!
WBUR (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Buttigieg 17, Biden 14, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Stehyer 2, Bloomberg 1, Patrick 1, Delaney 0. Samples size of 426. Sanders has doubled his support in a month.
CNN: Sanders 27, Biden 24, Warren 14, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 4, Yang 4, Steyer 2. I think this is the first CNN poll that has Sanders over Biden.
Boston Globe/Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 16.4, Biden 14.8, Buttigieg 12.2, Warren 9.8, Yang 5.6, Gabbard 5.4, Klobuchar 4.6, Steyer 2.6, Patrick .6, Delaney 0.0.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 24, Warren 18, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 14, Klobuchar 11, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 1 Bennet 1, Bloomberg 1, Delaney 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 500 and heavily biased questions, which you would expect from a hard left interest group.
Emerson (New Jersey): Biden 28, Sanders 25, Warren 15, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6, Yang 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Delaney 2, Bennet 0, Steyer 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 388.
Up until this point, we’ve been pretty hesitant to read too much into any one of the post-debate polls — largely because for each poll that showed Sen. Bernie Sanders on the upswing, there was another poll that showed him on the downturn. But now with four more national polls and six early-state surveys (three from Iowa and three from New Hampshire) since we last checked in, we’ve got a much clearer picture of where things stand. And one thing that’s immediately obvious is that Sanders really has gained in the polls.
Sanders’s chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates has increased by 4 percentage points since Friday, up from 22 percent to 26 percent in our forecast. But notably, his gain hasn’t come at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden. In fact, Biden’s odds are unchanged — he still has a 42 percent shot at winning a majority of pledged delegates, which was also the case on Friday. Sen Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, slipped 5 points since Friday, and is now roughly tied with Buttigieg in our overall delegate forecast. (Buttigieg’s odds remain the same, and the chance that no candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates ticked up very slightly.)
The second thing that’s immediately obvious from this latest batch of polls is that the race in Iowa is still incredibly close. Biden has slightly better odds than Sanders in our forecast, but it’s probably better to think of the two of them as roughly tied, with Buttigieg and Warren not too far behind. That said, this weekend’s polls did change the picture in New Hampshire with Sanders vaulting into the lead, which at least partially explains some of his overall gains in the forecast.
Sanders is looking good in New Hampshire, but Iowa is a toss-up.
In a country where anti-Semitic attacks have spiked and the president has sometimes hesitated to condemn neo-Nazis, two men who celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the 1950s suddenly want to talk about their Jewishness.
“I know I’m not the only Jewish candidate running for president,” Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, told a packed synagogue here today, referencing his Democratic-primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. “But I am the only one who doesn’t want to turn America into a kibbutz.” For the first time in American history, this niche joke fit neatly into a campaign for the White House. And for the first time in American history, there’s a good chance that a Jewish candidate for president will beat another Jewish candidate to become a major party’s nominee.
Before this campaign, neither Bloomberg nor Sanders spent much time publicly discussing, let alone celebrating, their Jewishness. But a few weeks ago, Sanders was ice-skating during a Hanukkah party at a Des Moines rink, lighting a giant menorah with a blowtorch and mouthing the words to a few of the Hanukkah songs. And Bloomberg was here, making a direct appeal to Jewish voters complete with deli references and Catskills-style rim shots. He quoted Leviticus (a book he identified by its Hebrew name, Vaykira) in Hebrew and said, “Lo ta-amode, do not stand by idly while your neighbor’s blood is shed,” stumbling slightly over the pronunciation, much like how he misplaced the emphasis on the word kibbutz.
To those who know Bloomberg well and even spent years working for him, this is a surprising turn. As mayor, he was more of the stop-by-synagogue-on-Rosh-Hashanah kind of observer, not the guy who’d make a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump as “a pharaoh who knows not Joseph,” and speak about “standing together, rejecting demagogues who try to seduce us by playing us against each other, and uniting behind the only shield that can protect us: our common values as American citizens and our common humanity as God’s children.” Bloomberg went all in, going directly from “When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he smashed the golden calf and raised high a tablet of laws,” to noting that Monday is “the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation,” and recalling his own visit to the death camp a few years ago.
This wasn’t a speech like any presidential candidate has delivered before—and that includes Sanders. Before launching his 2020 campaign, Sanders rarely discussed his Jewish roots, publicly or privately. Sanders superfans know he spent a few months after college in Israel working on a kibbutz, but he’s talked about that more through his socialism than through any connection to the Jewish state. For years, Sanders referred to his father as a “Polish immigrant,” which some saw as a pointed erasure of his identity—when Eli Sanders arrived in America, after all, his passport from the Polish government would have listed his nationality as “Jew.” Jewish leaders have criticized him for decisions like speaking at the evangelical Liberty University in 2015 on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Obscure prediction: If Sanders sweeps the first three, there will be insane pressure on Klobuchar and Warren to stay in until Super Tuesday to keep him from racking up delegates in MN and MA.
Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. I know it seems crazy, but a lot of the voters we need – independents and people who might stay home – will look at Biden and Trump and say: “They’re all dirty.”
It looks like “Middle Class” Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans. Converting campaign contributions into legislative favors and policy positions isn’t being “moderate”. It is the kind of transactional politics Americans have come to loathe.
Joe Biden is locking down support from powerful New York donors who have spent the past year flirting with multiple candidates, setting him up for a major cash boost just as 2020 voting begins.
Biden’s campaign — sometimes with help from the candidate himself — has spent the last few weeks reaching out to big donors who have collectively raised tens of millions for past presidential campaigns and are not yet attached to 2020 rivals. The Biden camp, which suffered serious money problems in the fall, came to them with a message: The time is now to join up and back Biden to beat President Donald Trump, after the former vice president lasted the whole year as the Democratic polling frontrunner, despite frequent predictions that his campaign was about to collapse.
The message landed. And Biden’s campaign will cash in on those efforts in mid-February, when Biden will head to New York City for a pair of fundraisers hosted by a litany of Wall Street power players, many of whom previously helped Kamala Harris’ campaign or split their support among several candidates in 2019. Originally scheduled as one event, organizers had to split the Feb. 13 fundraising blowout in two because so many donors new to the Biden fold signed up to help.
Hosts for a cocktail-hour fundraiser will include financiers and former Harris supporters Blair Effron and Marc Lasry, both of whom were major donors to Hillary Clinton, as well as Jon Henes, a lawyer and Harris’ former finance chair, and Tom Nides, a Clinton donor and former State Department aide. Later that evening, another set of major donors will fete Biden, including former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, Blackstone president Jonathan Gray and PR executive Michael Kempner — another who was once a bundler for Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 race in December.
Biden succumbs to tranny pandering:
Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.
Billionaire presidential long shot Michael Bloomberg is trying to poach staff from other campaigns with outsized salaries and fancy perks like three catered meals a day, an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Pro, according to sources.
Bloomberg is paying state press secretaries $10,000 a month, compared to the average going rate of $4,500 for other candidates and state political directors are making $12,000 a month, more than some senior campaign advisers earn, sources said.
National political director Carlos Sanchez pulls in $360,000 a year. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s political director, made $240,000 in 2016.
Every Bloomberg staffer gets a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 11 on day one. They also enjoy three catered meals daily.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Various pundit sorts debate the effectiveness of Bloomberg’s billions. “Is there even a way to effectively spend another billion or $2 billion in a money-drenched election year? “There’s only so much airtime you can buy.'”
Jim McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked as a consultant on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, doubts Bloomberg will really spend nine figures this year, suspecting he is dangling the promise of the massive payout mainly to curry favor with Democrats.
“Do I think he can spend $2 billion? Of course. Do I think he will? No,” McLaughlin said.
And he questioned the impact of that money, either way.
After all, the most expensive presidential campaign in history was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, and she wasn’t able to stop Trump, though she did win the popular vote. She spent almost twice what Trump did per electoral vote won.
“Donald Trump was significantly outspent,” McLaughlin said, “and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.”
When Pete Buttigieg holds “big rally type events” in South Carolina, “it’s mostly white folks showing up,” he acknowledged ruefully Thursday night. And his struggle to fix that problem has become an existential threat to his presidential ambitions.
Buttigieg’s low standing with black voters has been a long-running theme, and as he and his campaign argued that he simply wasn’t well-known enough, it is one he has worked to correct. Over the past month and a half, he has invested more money advertising in South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are African American, than any of the non-billionaire Democrats running for president.
But the more than $2 million Buttigieg poured into TV and radio ads, some featuring black supporters touting the former South Bend (Ind.) mayor, hasn’t budged his stubbornly low poll numbers in the state — 2 percent among African American Democrats in a recent Fox News poll.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She really hates Bernie.
“I just don’t want him to get out there and say the revolution is working, [that] people ‘felt the Bern,’” she says, before quickly leaving the room to beat him to a speech. Clinton adds that she found his socialist proposals unrealistic and phony. “I had people in my campaign say, ‘Just say ‘‘Free college.’’ Millennials love it,’ ” she says. “And I said ‘no.’ ”
Whenever Sanders is onscreen, his underscoring is brooding and villainous, like Darth Vader just took off his helmet for a breather. In a hallway before a debate in New Hampshire, Sanders asks a tense Clinton how she feels about his suit. “Buttoned or unbuttoned?” he says. Irked, she tells him to undo the button as soon as he gets “worked up.”
Last week, it was revealed that Clinton said of her former rival in the doc: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
You would not believe how black that pot is! Here’s a Truthout commentator who thinks she’s running.
In the interview, Clinton is asked if she has considered jumping into the 2020 presidential race. “I have had so many people [urge me to],” she replied. “Every day. And I’m grateful for people’s confidence, but I did think it was right for me to step back. I’ll do anything I can to defeat the current incumbent, and to reverse a lot of his damaging policies. Thankfully, I still have a voice and a following.”
I can’t simply dismiss this as another example of a politician who doesn’t know when to recede. I don’t believe this is just Clinton acting out because Iowa can’t throw a party without inviting her. This interview, and that pointedly vicious quote about Sanders, will explode the rift between the progressive candidates and the establishment candidates on the doorstep of the season’s first caucus. It will exacerbate the tensions already in place to a clamorous degree.
I believe it is deliberate on two levels. First, this is the establishment standard-bearer jumping into the fray in a moment when the establishment is conspicuously worried about the campaigns of Sanders and Warren. I have been nursing a fear that the Democratic Party might prefer a Trump victory over losing control of the party, and this sudden broadside from Clinton has only exacerbated those concerns.
He may be right, but he omits the other probably-even-more-true side of that equation: The radical left may also view losing to Trump acceptable if it means gaining control of the party. This is precisely the scenario that played out in Texas as it went from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state.
Second, Hillary is slated for release in March, an enormously important month that will see 29 primaries and caucuses take place in both the states and the territories. Super Tuesday falls on March 3, and will include make-or-break primary votes in California, Texas, Virginia, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio….Hillary Clinton seems to be hoping for a brokered Democratic convention so she can offer herself up as the “reasonable” compromise candidate.
WHAT CHEER, Iowa—Don’t let the name fool you: What Cheer is a dreary little town. Other than the gas station, the most notable place in the city is an old building that apparently used to house the What Cheer Telephone Company, whatever that was. Today, cheap white curtains are drawn across the windows. It looks like someone is living there.
John Delaney is here at dusk on a Friday night in January because he’s still running for president. Did you know he was running for president? Probably not. If you did once know—Delaney was actually the first Democrat to declare his candidacy, way back in July 2017—you probably forgot. And if you did know he was still running, the question you’re probably asking is the one I am here to explore: Why? Why is a candidate who’s barely registering in any poll still traipsing across Iowa day after day when he has absolutely no chance of winning, or even of seeming like more than an outlying blip on the radar?
I’ve wondered that myself for months. But the Delaney campaign is like the This Is Spinal Tap of Presidential campaigns:
Today began with an event at a pizza place in the small central-Iowa city of Montezuma, which 12 people attended. This evening, the door-knocking starts at a house across the street from the old telephone-company building. No answer. At the second house, a light in the front hall illuminates a Christmas tree, but no one answers the door here either. Third house, also no answer. Finally, at the fourth house a man wearing pajama bottoms answers the door. After listening to Delaney make his pitch for six or seven minutes, he says that while he’s committed to voting for a Democrat in the general election, he’s not planning to caucus—and that if he was, he’d probably go with Andrew Yang, because he likes Yang’s proposed Freedom Dividend, his signature policy of providing a guaranteed basic income of $1,000 a month to all Americans.
“But that can’t happen!” Delaney says.
It’s quickly evident that Delaney can’t get this voter, but courtesy dictates that he now listen politely while the man talks about how he wants to fix up the shed across the road.
After that, Delaney’s small caravan, a big blue-and-red bus trailed by a car, rolls on. No one is home at the next two houses. When a woman pulls into the driveway of the second house, Delaney’s campaign manager tries to talk to her, but she walks in the back door and doesn’t come out again. Up a hill and around a corner is another house that the campaign staff have identified as belonging to a Democratic voter. An old man opens the door. He says he’s recovering from eye surgery but that he doesn’t like Donald Trump and is happy to talk. Finally—a prospect! He says the main thing he’s looking for in a candidate is honesty. Delaney makes his pitch, but the man is soon trying to wrap up the conversation. “Hope you do well,” the man says. Delaney invites him to a free dinner that the campaign is hosting the next town over. The man just smiles noncommittally.
At this late stage of a very long presidential campaign that has by any conventional measure been remarkably unsuccessful, this actually counts as a pretty good hour for Delaney. How, I asked him as he walked away from the old man’s house, does he keep his head up?
“I’m disappointed it hasn’t gone better, but I think it’s a privilege to do this,” he said. “I meet people who are really struggling. And I realize, you know, I have really no problems. And the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives is—what better way to spend my time?”
Has a Union-Leader op ed where he says that “Divisiveness is America’s biggest hurdle.” If only the political party whose nomination he’s running for could bring themselves to accept the results of the 2016 election…
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently it’s “Edward-Isaac Dovere interviews no-hopers week,” because he did the same for Patrick:
Pretty much everyone hates what the Democratic primary race has become. It’s gone on too long, cost too much money, and tended to reward people who’ve been repeating the same lines for years. Pretty much everyone also hates the debates. (How many people watched last week’s debate and saw a future president? How many people saw someone who they’re confident can beat Donald Trump?) And pretty much everyone hates what the process has churned out: A Des Moines Register poll three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and 14 months after the campaign started, showed that 60 percent of people still hadn’t made up their minds. The New York Times endorsed two candidates. “People like the field, but I don’t think they feel that great about the front-runners,” John Delaney, who is still winding down the final days of his own candidacy, told me a few weeks ago. New York magazine’s latest cover headline nailed the Democratic panic: “Well, Here We Are.”
And here I am, in the lobby restaurant of a Marriott, with a candidate who’s telling me it’s not too late to do something about all this. Deval Patrick says voters have been telling him directly that they like him, that they’re ready to go with him, or at least consider him. “I meet donors who say, ‘I am so there; I just want to see this in the polls, and then I want to bundle for you.’ What are you waiting for? If you already think I contribute something that the rest of the field doesn’t, why are you waiting for permission from pundits, pollsters, the party, somebody else?” Patrick said. I’ve heard the same thing from people who’ve been thinking about writing checks. More often, I’ve heard people tell me that they can’t bring themselves to be a part of this.
When the lights in the lobby keep swelling high and low, and the manager comes over to apologize, he doesn’t recognize the former Massachusetts governor. Neither does the waiter.
That’s the problem for Patrick. He got in a year later than he was planning to, because his wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2018. Then he spent this past fall stressing about how far off course the primary race seemed to be spinning, before deciding in November to go for it. That’s a whole year he didn’t spend getting better known, or building any kind of organization. By the time he did jump in, he had to argue with campaign staff he’d never met before about whether to spend days chasing the media exposure they said he needed or follow his gut and campaign more deliberately, one on one, the way he had in his first race, when he’d pulled off his out-of-nowhere win for the governorship of Massachusetts. He’s annoyed about old friends and supporters who’ve been smiling to his face—and then telling reporters like me that they’re heartbroken to see what a flop his campaign seems to be so far.
Not sure “flopping” is quite accurate, since flopping usually makes a sound. He announced support for slavery reparations, because of course he did. That worked out so well for Kamala Harris…
His rise clearly troubles establishment Democrats who are uneasy with his far-left agenda. Among Sanders’s most notable detractors are mainstream Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The former president, for instance, is reported to be so “anxious” about Sanders’s standing that he’s contemplating publicly repudiating him (although some Obama allies deny this account).
Obama and Clinton may have unwittingly contributed to Sanders’s rise, but they are right to be concerned. The man has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office — not even on a guided tour. The fact that the socialist senator is considered a national leader is a disgraceful blemish on the Democratic Party, a party once comprised by men such as John F. Kennedy, who fought communists, while Sanders defended them.
We’ve seen a rash of establishment-minded Democrats speak out against Sanders in recent weeks, but polls suggest it’s done little to stop his rise. The Vermont senator was at or near the top of several early state and national primary polls over the weekend. We’ve heard everyone from Pete Buttigieg to Rahm Emanuel raising concerns about Sanders’ ability to beat President Donald Trump and help vulnerable down-ballot Democrats this fall, even as passionate progressives rally behind him. For now, establishment Democrats are girding for a fight. And the ghosts of 2016 are screaming.
“The ghosts of 2016 are screaming” sounds like an impressive turn of phrase, until you realize that it’s either meaningless, or can mean any of a dozen contradictory things. Is Sanders going to wound Biden so badly he can’t win? Is Trump being underestimated again? Are the shades of Prince and David Bowie going to rise up to haunt the race? “Sanders Apologizes to Biden for Bringing Up Biden’s Corruption Problem.” Bernie takes on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for daring to dis socialism. He has Alexandria Ocasio Cortez out on the trail for him as a surrogate in Iowa. BoldMoveCotton.jpg.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s one of the few candidates still schlepping around Iowa a week before the caucuses, due to either the impeachment farce or other candidates having gone all-in on New Hampshire. Can you imagine the glorious screw-job Steyer would wreck on the race if he won or even placed in Iowa? Deeply unlikely, but stranger things have happened in politics. Can he win Nevada? Since Bloomberg didn’t make the ballot, possibly. And I love this photo of him:
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:
Williamson drops Out, Steyer eclipses Warren in two early states, the billionaire boys keep shoveling wheelbarrows full of cash into the fire, and Biden can’t tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Either my Google-fu is weak or no campaigns have released Q4 fundraising totals this week. Or maybe the press just doesn’t care enough to report on any that have. I’m leaving this up because I suspect official numbers for the rest will start posting after the FEC January 15th deadline.
Fox News (Nevada): Biden 23, Sanders 17, Steyer 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Bloomberg 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Williamson 1. Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign may finally be bearing fruit.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1. Ditto.
Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 21, Warren 13, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 7, Klobuchar 4, Booker 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Williamson 1. If Klobuchar’s “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” strategy won’t work in Wisconsin, where will it work?
Democrats are now beginning to confront a very real scenario where the nomination — and the winnowing — will not be decided in states where campaigns have been plowing ground for more than a year, but in places and calendar dates so deep into primary season that until recently they’ve received almost no attention at all.
The Iowa field is bunched together with little daylight between a handful of well-funded candidates. Each of the four early voting states continues to present the prospect of a different winner. And, at the end of that gauntlet on Super Tuesday, a free-spending billionaire — Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor — is waiting to challenge whichever candidate or candidates emerge.
Snip.
Coloring the thinking of many Democrats is Bloomberg’s apparent willingness to spend limitless sums, leaving him poised to overwhelm their early operations across the Super Tuesday map.
For most candidates, said Scott Kozar, a Democratic ad-maker who is helping Sen. Michael Bennet with his campaign, “No one is playing in those states.”
He predicted the candidates still standing after Super Tuesday will be forced to run a “fast play” as they scramble into March.
In addition to flooding the airwaves with television ads, Bloomberg has already put more than 200 staffers on the ground in states that vote in March and April. He traveled recently to Ohio and Michigan, where he has hired senior state-level staff and plans to open 9 offices and 12 offices, respectively.
His campaign told POLITICO he plans to open five offices in Missouri, 17 in Florida and 12 in Illinois.
“Before Bloomberg got in, I said whoever wins South Carolina on February 29 will be the nominee because of the momentum factor” coming out of the first four primary states, said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California. “Bloomberg kind of puts a pause on that.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with one of the field’s most robust ground operations, has had post-Super Tuesday staffers flung out across the country for months, with a presence in Missouri , Michigan, Washington, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to an aide. And Sen. Bernie Sanders has an army of volunteers held over from his 2016 campaign.
But for every other Democrat, the landscape following Super Tuesday’s gigantic delegate hauls on March 3 is relatively barren — and will likely remain so until after the initial primaries.
Total TV ad spend by 2020 candidates, through this week:
Bloomberg: $153.1 million Steyer: $116.5 million Sanders: $11.7 million Buttigieg: $11.4 million Yang: $7.3 million Warren: $3.7 million Biden: $3 million Klobuchar: $2.9 million Bennet: $1.1 million Gabbard: $1.1 million
How the New Hampshire primary traditionally works: the out-of-town press invades, occupying the Manchester Radisson like a siege army, and leans into a presumed frontrunner until he or she wins.
If the voters are very rebellious, and decide to back a different conventional politician, the press re-calibrates behind the new hotness. If voters decide to think completely for themselves, and pick a candidate not approved by the party or major media – no one knows what happens then, since we’ve never seen it, at least not on the Democratic side.
Two candidates I didn’t catch on a recent tour through the state each show how conventional campaign thinking has been upended in this cycle.
In the days after the New Year, Biden announced he’d be willing to pick a Republican running mate and also said coal miners should “learn to program.” He will go on to say “no one understood Obamacare” in Iowa. Reporters almost universally think he’d be a shit candidate against Trump, but voters haven’t agreed: he’s still at or near the top of polls.
Bernie Sanders meanwhile has spent the last four years serving as the subject of stories detailing his lack of general election viability, declining popularity, Putin-ness, physical unfitness, bad hair, and ideological unsuitability, among other things.
Yet he entered 2020 crushing the field in fundraising, raising $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, and is now a co-frontrunner with Biden in some polls. The failure of years of blunt messaging to derail a candidate like Sanders is part of what’s been driving those stories about “anxiety” among the party elders.
One candidate who has been affected by media, especially of late, is Elizabeth Warren. In Concord, I watched the news cycle take a bite out of her campaign.
New Englanders (I’m one) think they invented everything from baseball to microbreweries to the Democratic Party, and they believe the rest of the country should pay an annual thank-you dividend for the Kennedys. In regional memory, Mike Dukakis won the presidency in a landslide.
That’s why a sizable crowd in Concord responds with howls of approval when Elizabeth Warren asks, “Can we just admit that trickle-down economics is a failure?” In Phoenix, they’d ask, “What the fuck is trickle-down economics?” In parts of New England, Reagan is still president and they’re still mad about ketchup being declared a vegetable. Understanding the vagaries of Masshole chauvinism helps here.
As of this moment, if I had to place a wager I believe Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet much—the race is just too volatile.
There are a batch of polls out showing the Three Bs—Bernie, Biden, and Buttigieg—virtually tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. Keep in mind two implications of this: first, a large portion of the Democratic primary electorate—maybe half or more—is undecided, and second, between undecided Democrats and the share of votes going to the rest of the field, Biden is an extremely weak front-runner. A few more senior moments in his campaign and the race might cascade rapidly to Bernie, who has the most money to go the distance, or Buttigieg, who has the kind of fresh face Democrats often fall for—maybe too fresh a face.
The deciding factor is going to be personality, and Trump has the advantage because he has one. The question is going to be, “Who does America trust not to screw up all the repairs that Trump has made to America post-Barack Obama?”
The answer is going to be, “Not one of those quasi-commie Democrat dorks.”
There are six real candidates – sorry Yangbangers and Tulsi-touters, but those two are not in the mix.
There’s Biden. What a putz. From his bizarre behavior to his brazen demand that we just accept the manifest corruption of his boy Lil’ Crackpipe, Gropey Joe is not merely of the Swamp. He is the Swamp. And there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t drain him.
Right now, he’s the leader in the polls and he’s the most likely to be nominated. There are two reasons. The first is that he has legacy black Democrat support. He’s the closest to a traditional Democrat, as opposed to one of the faculty lounge snobs that makes up most of the rest of the race. The second is that he has been designated The Democrat Most Likely To Succeed in beating The Donald. It’s unclear why. Sure, some polls say it (though they are shifting in Trump’s direction), but the problem for Joe is that so many liberal media types are wishcasting his victory that they never hit him hard. He’s soft and open to attack. Not-Mrs. Willie Brown gently tapped him in a debate (on busing, which is very, very popular among rich Democrats whose kids would never, ever be bused in a zillion years) and Not-Senile Joe went into a tailspin. He’s vulnerable because he’s been coddled – Trump will bash Hoover Biden’s dad all over the stage, as Trump feels no obligation not to talk about the subjects that the media has deemed off-limits, like the ex-senator’s (D-Credit Card Companies) Snortunate Son.
And he’ll pick Amy Klobuchar as his running mate. She’s another one who the Democrats imagine can reach out and touch the working-class folks who went for Trump. Of course, she’ll reach out and touch them with a rock – she’s got a temper and she’ll get pilloried as a tyrant. Tyrannical women are a hard sell – just ask Stumbles McMyturn. Sure, the media has announced that she is “having her moment,” but moments stop. She’s neither interesting nor inspirational, and the very moderation she allegedly represents (she doesn’t – she’s on-board with every pinko policy her pals subscribe to) will keep her from breaking out as a candidate and depress the turn-out among the Dem left (but I repeat myself) when she’s on the ticket with Biden.
Snip.
Then there’s Chief Spewing Bull. Her own brother recently dissed her for inventing more fake family history. Trump would chew her up, spit her out, and wash the residue into the gutter. Where’s the enthusiasm for a serial fraud who compares poorly to every bitter spinster public elementary school teacher who either demanded you use your inside voice or tried to make her class celebrate Kwanza? Maybe at Harvard or The New York Times offices, and nowhere else. She sadly won’t get nominated, because she’s such a disaster Trump might get 45 states, and Biden won’t pick her as veep because he knows she’s going to be scheming and drape-measuring every time she visits the Oval Office, and the budget does not include a presidential food taster.
Maybe Bernie Sanders will get it – which would be great because then all the nimrods who pushed the phony dossier would have to concede that they were going to vote for the one candidate we absolutely know has had sex in Russia – shiver. Yeah, he had his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union, and to people who aren’t college professors or college students or aspiring college students, that’s a disqualifier. He’s a loser, and what will be great is how the Dem bigwigs try to explain to the harder left contingent why their crusty curmudgeon is getting dissed again in the primaries.
Pete Buttigieg…why? Why is he even part of this? He’s a sub-par mayor of a sub-par town in a state most Democrats have never even heard of. Really, if he’s the one the Dems are looking to for salvation – oh yeah, he says he’s a Christian too, incessantly – then they’re pretty hosed already. His candidacy will soon Pete-r out.
Though maybe Biden will pick him for VP – if so, I’ve got $10 that says Smart Joe will get caught on tape at a rally explaining to disappointed feminists that, “Well, a gay guy counts as a woman, right?” You know that will totally happen.
And tiny Michael Bloomberg’s zillion-dollar ad budget has captured him…fifth or sixth place. Fascist Frodo’s not going anywhere. He’s already lost.
Hmmm:
Tweets by Democrat presidential candidates supporting Iranian protesters today:
Joe Biden is the most likely person to win a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary model, which we launched on Thursday morning. This is our first-ever full-fledged model of the primaries and we’re pretty excited about it — to read more about how the model works, see here.
But saying the former vice president is the front-runner doesn’t really tell the whole story. He may be the most likely nominee, but he’s still a slight underdog relative to the field, with a 40 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates1 by the time of the last scheduled Democratic contest — the Virgin Islands caucus on June 6. If one lowers the threshold to a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, then Biden’s chances are almost 50-50, but not quite — he has a 45 percent chance of a delegate plurality, per our forecast.
Second place is a set of steak knives Sanders, and third place is “No one,” so evidently “brokered convention” has a better chance than Warren or Buttigieg. Read the piece for more 538 model wonkery. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Elected Democrats in Texas and California previously backing Castro and Harris have flocked to Biden, but when Leticia Van de Putte is the highest profile name, you’ve got nothing that’s going to move the needle. I don’t see the anti-war Democrats being wild at this statement:
BREAKING: Video emerges of @JoeBiden criticizing antiwar Dems, praising Bush for leading America into the Iraq War & promising he will support Bush's continuation of the war
"The president of the United States is a bold leader & he is popular…I & many others will support him" pic.twitter.com/Sx2zsdbSJV
At a campaign stop here, the former New York mayor said he has no intention of trying to qualify for upcoming debates — even though he almost certainly could participate if he wanted to. It was his most definitive statement to date on a stance that has rankled his opponents, who chafe at his limitless war chest and feel he should have to endure the rigors of campaigning they do.
Bloomberg insisted he’d like to debate if the rules allowed. But the billionaire, a latecomer to the Democratic primary, reasoned it is inappropriate for someone of his wealth to ask supporters for cash.
“It’s up to the Democratic Party. They have a rule that you cannot participate in the debates unless you have a few hundred thousand donors,” he told POLITICO after the campaign event Tuesday. “I don’t take any money from anybody else. I fund my campaign myself.”
Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.
The party he is moving to transform, which he only rejoined in October, has become little more than a bystander to his ambition. With more than 800 employees, $200 million in ad spending so far and a fully catered Times Square office that houses hundreds of employees, “Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc.” does not resemble a primary campaign in any traditional sense. It is an experiment in what happens to democracy when a single faction operates without economic constraints.
AD
While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg’s political career closely in New York. The president has been closely monitoring Bloomberg’s campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise, according to Trump confidants with whom the president has discussed Bloomberg.
Remember, this is the Washington Post, so anytime they “quote” anonymous “sources” like “Trump confidants,” our working assumption should always be that they’re “lying.”
Bloomberg’s aides, in turn, have delighted in trying to find ways to get Trump’s attention and increase his anxiety, like the recent purchase of an $11 million Super Bowl ad that will run against a similar spot purchased by Trump’s campaign.
The extravagance is part of the message, an attempt to demonstrate his competence and show that he can manage something big with good intentions.
“We also want people to know that we are building a juggernaut pointed at Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” said Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been taking the message to state parties around the country. “One of Mike’s goals is to make a machine that lasts. This idea that he wants to do a vanity run or is just buying exposure is belied by that.”
To begin with, that means building a fully staffed general election campaign in January to win primary contests in March, with a suite of high-profile recruits on the payroll, like former top executives for Facebook, Foursquare and GroupM, the world’s largest advertising media company by billings. No one at headquarters knows what he will ultimately choose to spend, but they operate for the moment without budgets, putting the 12th richest person on the planet on a path to spend $1 billion or more.
He wants Democrats to know he is happy to spread the money around. During a swing through Texas on Saturday, when his campaign staged over 150 events in 27 states in a show of organizing prowess, he cast himself as a potential benefactor and mentor for all state and local party organizations.
“I think you look at each,” Bloomberg said, when asked if he would boost them. “You look to see how well they’re run, and if you tried to help, that you’d be able to help. That’s number one. And number two would be that your money would be used efficiently. And it’s not just money. We can bring some advice.”
Whether he wins or loses the nomination, the ubiquitous television and digital ads he is running have been crafted as the opening exchange in a conversation about Trump’s failures that will continue through November.
Also this line: “His policy, though sometimes nuanced on paper, is uncomplicated in presentation, leaning heavily on phrases known to move focus groups.” Left unasked how rank-and-file Democrats feel about their party being taken over by a billionaire. Bloomy is all in on importing cheaper foreign labor.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Everybody knows and understands’ that Hillary Clinton is a ‘warmonger.'” I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but I wonder what Tulsi’s endgame is in this spat, other than reincarnation.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Delaney Looks To Build Momentum As Iowa Caucuses Draw Closer.” That would suggest he had any in the first place.
Iowa political experts say her day job representing a neighboring state, her Midwestern values and the work she has put into meeting voters in big cities and small towns in every corner of the state could result in a surprise payoff when Iowans caucus on Feb. 3.
A win for Klobuchar here doesn’t mean coming in first in Iowa, said Dianne Bystrom, director emerita of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. It means beating expectations.
“I think Klobuchar has a chance. People really like Amy Klobuchar,” said Bystrom, who is neutral in the race.
“She is down home, and she’s funny, and she’s got this quirky charm about her,” Bystrom said.
Klobuchar is not a soaring orator; she is plainspoken and earnest. Sporting a no-muss, no-fuss bob, she offers anecdotes about parenthood and being a woman in the workplace — complete with references to hiding her gray roots — that appeal to the suburban moms who can be key to elections.
All this amounts to “We need to pump her up for the sake of drama, but, yeah, she’s toast.”
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. SuperPac makes $2 million ad buy for Patrick in early states. Given Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing and Patrick’s 0.0 standing in all polls, that’s probably a less effective campaign tactic than throwing a giant kegger in New Hampshire and inviting every state resident to attend. “Since his late entry to the race in November, Patrick has struggled to gain traction with early-state Democratic voters or a national audience.” Like a greased man on a Teflon floor wearing sticks of butter as shoes. He’s concentrating on New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Increasingly alarmed that Bernie Sanders could become their party’s presidential nominee, establishment-minded Democrats are warning primary voters that the self-described democratic socialist would struggle to defeat President Donald Trump and hurt the party’s chances in premier House, Senate and governors’ races.
The urgent warnings come as Sanders shows new signs of strength on the ground in the first two states on the presidential primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire, backed by a dominant fundraising operation. The Vermont senator has largely escaped close scrutiny over the last year as his rivals doubted the quirky 78-year-old’s ability to win the nomination. But less than a month before Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, the doubters are being forced to take Sanders seriously.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, previously a senior aide to President Barack Obama, warned Democrats that Sanders’ status as a democratic socialist and his unwavering support for “Medicare for All” won’t play well among swing voters in the states that matter most in 2020.
“You need a candidate with a message that can help us win swing voters in battleground states,” Emanuel said in an interview. “The degree of difficulty dramatically increases under a Bernie Sanders candidacy. It just gets a lot harder.”
The increasingly vocal concerns are coming from a number of political veterans tied to the Obama administration and the 2020 field’s moderate wing, including those backing former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
(Hat tip: Powerline.) “Of course Bernie can win,” says man waving away idea that a socialist is too far left for the American electorate. I find his arguments (such as they are) unconvincing. Sanders says that the Qassem Suleimani strike is just like Putin assassinating political rivals.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the January debate by polling at 12% in in Nevada and 15% in South Carolina. I never imagined there would ever be a Steyer boomlet, yet here we are. The hilarious thing about this is that it’s going to inspire Bloomberg to dump a ton more money into the race.
Along with Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sanders and Warren are scheduled to speak Wednesday evening with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The group played a central role in what former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes called the administration’s pro-Iran Deal “echo chamber,” spinning journalists, lawmakers, and citizens.
The Democratic candidates’ willingness to engage with NIAC—a group that aggressively pushed the accord and has strongly advocated against U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic—reflects their desire to see America reenter the nuclear deal, which released up to $150 billion in cash to the regime. Much of that money has gone to fund Iran’s regional terror operations, including recent attacks on American personnel stationed in the region.
NIAC has deep ties to Iran’s regime, including senior officials like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif worked closely with NIAC founder Trita Parsi, who, in turn, consulted with the Obama administration.
Parsi lobbied Congress against sanctions on Iran in 2013 and met with Obama administration officials at the White House dozens of times leading up to the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015. Multiple U.S. officials and senior congressional sources informed the Washington Free Beacon that Parsi helped the White House craft its messaging as it tried to sell the nuclear deal to the public. The NIAC chief met with Rhodes, among other top officials, during multiple visits throughout the Obama era.
That’s just part of the Warren weirdness on Iran, where in 24 hours she went from calling Suleimani a “murderer” to just “a government official, a high-ranking military official.” (There’s no end to appeasing the soft-on-Jihad loony left). Castro endorses her. Let’s check the reaction meter:
I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.
As of today, therefore, I’m suspending my campaign.
Farewell, Marianne. We’ll always have the memes…
New trending GIF on GIPHY dnc debates 2019, marianne williamson, dark psychic force, democratic primary debates! pic.twitter.com/gEPdDmPACI
No candidate has leaned more into the fun part of running for president than Yang. He does some high fives, then reminds all: He’s the guy who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. He notes the state of Alaska already does something like this, divvying up oil revenues. What’s the 21st century version of oil?
Murmurs among the teenagers. Yang grins.
“It’s technology,” he says. “Although, I thought someone was going to say marijuana. And that’s cool, because I want to legalize weed, too.”
LOUD cheers. The Beavis and Butthead factor here is through the roof. Also: Yang wants to give 16-year-olds with cash and expanded relaxation options the right to vote. (Studies show this increases like likelihood of future engagement). You could cause brain bubbles in a Fox News host with a video of this Democrat recruitment scene.
Through the eyes of a rival candidate, Yang’s slang-laden pitch to high schoolers might smack of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” routine. His speech is peppered with phrases like “That’s okay, bro.” Describing the political “disaster” previous generations have left children, he says, “You could even call it a shit show.”
But kids spot phonies quickly, and Yang isn’t failing. His campaign is meant as a warning that it’s traditional politicians who are being phony, when they don’t raise alarms about a jobs crisis brought on by automation and changes to the manufacturing economy.
He’s been evangelizing the Democratic Party to a new generation of voters, at events like these and online, where his #YangGang has been one of campaign 2020’s big marketing success stories. He raised $16.5 million in the fourth quarter, fifth among Democrats, hinting at new sources of support for the party.
But the reaction to Yang among party leaders and press has hovered between indifferent and hostile. He’s had trouble getting air time, and thanks to an arbitrary set of criteria, may be shut out of the January 14th candidate debate in Des Moines, despite poll numbers that are competitive with some already-qualified participants.
The standard requires four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two qualifying polls showing 7% or higher support in Iowa or New Hampshire. The problem is, there were no new state polls for over a month, making it nearly impossible for candidates on the edge to meet the increased standard.
Andrew Yang, Ken Jeong, what’s the difference? (Also note the pic for “Tulsi Gabbard.”) The Boston Heraldlikes Yang. “He is real. He talks to people — all kinds of people — and is not hindered by the unwritten rules of political tribalism and Twitter wokeness that have become wholly unproductive, if not totally exasperating….We also know that Yang is the most genuine candidate in the Democratic field, he is a successful businessman who has lived in the real world his entire life, and unlike his political competitors, still does.”
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.
Four months ago 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.
This month, we’ve had our first ever verified decline in Twitter followers for any candidate.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 68,039,448 followers, up 1,008,666 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 27,370,155 followers, 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.
The rate for most of the candidates adding followers slowed, which I attribute to the Christmas season.
Except Joe Biden, who gained some 30,000 more followers in December than November, bucking the trend.
However, Bernie Sanders still gained more overall, even if he gained half as many as he did in November.
Also gaining more: Andrew Yang, who gained more followers than Elizabeth Warren.
Marianne Williamson records the first verifiable decline in Twitter followers since I started tracking the race.
Steyer and Bloomberg are dropping huge amounts into ads, yet their Twitter counts are growing more slowly than Andrew Yang’s.
Biden leans on bundling billionaires, Steyer hits diminishing returns, Bloomberg takes up the “Most Widely Loathed” spot, Warren donations take a nosedive, Sanders 💘 commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
We’re also down to the last two days of the year, so expect Q4 fundraising numbers to start dropping later this week.
Keep an eye on the new faces, I sagely advised: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, plus former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
Sorry about that. Despite a fawning cover story in Vanity Fair, O’Rourke flamed out fast. Harris staged an impressive launch, but then fell to earth. Brown never entered the race. Only Booker is still running, and his campaign is on life support.
Next time I recommend a hot technology stock or a soon-to-be-famous restaurant, ignore the tip.
Snip.
I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg coming. The 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city? Inconceivable, I thought. Iowa voters may shortly prove me wrong.
I did see Elizabeth Warren coming. Her focus on plans to make the economy work better for the middle class was effective, I wrote.
Then Warren stumbled on healthcare. When she belatedly offered a plan, it proposed a government-run health insurance system, but only after a long transition period.
That seemed smart, I wrote. It’s not clear that voters agree.
To be fair, I did get some things right.
I figured out that the controversies over Biden’s verbal gaffes were really a polite proxy for questions about his age. He’ll be 78 on Inauguration Day; is he up to the job?
I noted that most Democratic voters aren’t Bernie Sanders-style socialists, and that the progressive “litmus tests” that dominated early months of the campaign — “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — weren’t a sure path to winning primaries.
Speaking of which, unions, they of the fat health benefits, are not wild about “Medicare for All.” It would be tough going from a Cadillac plan to the equivalent of Medicaid.
Ranking the campaign dropouts. This is a pretty crappy “Have you done the will of the party, comrade?” ranking. No way does Kamala Harris’ disasterous campaign rank at the top.
Joe Biden released the names of more than 200 people and couples who are raising money for his presidential campaign, a list that includes a number of big names in Democratic money like Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and LGBT rights activist Tim Gill and his husband, Scott Miller.
Biden’s list of fundraisers, each of which has brought in at least $25,000 for his presidential bid, includes many of the biggest names in Democratic fundraising. The list spans Wall Street, Silicon Valley and a number of politicians themselves.
The former vice president voluntarily disclosed the list as the Democratic field — and especially Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren — sparred with each other throughout November and December over how to have adequate transparency about money and finances on the campaign trail.
More than any other leading candidate, Biden is relying on big fundraising events to power his bid for the presidency, which makes these bundlers crucial to his success. Other big-name bundlers for Biden include New York venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof, and billionaire real estate broker George Marcus.
Biden is running for president on his longtime experience in public service, and his list of bundlers reflects the many high-powered connections he built over that time. Biden bundlers include current senators Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles is a bundler for Biden, as is Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A number of former ambassadors — who are often longtime bundlers and major political donors in their own right — are also helping Biden. They include Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal; Denise Bauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Anthony Gardner, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; and Mark Gilbert, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, and more.
It occurs to me that if there were a massive foreign aid kickback scheme funneling overseas money to longtime swamp creatures, Belgium and EU ambassadors would be perfectly situated to direct/skim off the graft. Evidently Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been have been feuding since the 1980s. (Worth reading for the many flip-flops in Biden’s career, including on the death penalty.) Remember how Biden is supposed to be the moderate, rational one?
More Hunter Biden dirt? Eh, it’s from a private investigator in the baby momma lawsuit, so caution is probably in order. But the “helping defraud American Indians” charge is new, though the names of Devon Archer, John Galanis and Bevan Cooney are not. Heh:
Just saw the new Star Wars. Wow! Never saw this coming, Rey turned out to be Hunter Biden’s kid! What a twist!
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late.
Yeah, let’s keep throwing money into a proven losing strategy. Can’t see how that one can possibly fail to beat Trump. And as long as we’re rerunning 2016’s Greatest Misses, have you tried expressing outrage over the Billy Bush tape? Bloomy is also dropping a ton of money on Texas for Super Tuesday:
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is ramping up his efforts in Texas, with plans to build a state operation that his campaign says will be unrivaled by anyone else in the primary field.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, his campaign said it will open a Texas headquarters in Houston and 16 field offices throughout the rest of the state between now and the March 3 primary. The offices will be spread across the Houston area, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Austin, East Texas, the San Antonio area, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and the Killeen area.
The campaign also named its first Texas hires:
Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, will serve as Bloomberg’s senior advisor.
Ashlea Turner, a government relations consultant who worked on Bill White’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, will serve as Bloomberg’s state director.
Kevin Lo, who worked on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Iowa campaign before she ended her campaign earlier this month, will serve as Bloomberg’s organizing director. (Update: On March 27, 2020, Texas Tribune sent out this correction via email: “*Editor’s note: Bloomberg’s campaign initially listed Kevin Lo as one of its first Texas hires. Lo later said he was incorrectly listed by the campaign and never worked for the campaign and has asked this story to be updated to remove his name.”)
Lizzie Lewis, communications director for 2018 gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez, will be Bloomberg’s press secretary.
Has anyone there ever run a successful campaign? None of the ones named were. Also:
While he’s only announced one hire, Biden has topped most Texas polls. There have not been many polls since Bloomberg declared his candidacy and launched a massive national TV ad blitz that prominently targeted the state. The one Texas survey since Bloomberg’s launch, released Dec. 11 by CNN, found Bloomberg at 5% — good enough for fifth place in but still far behind Biden, who placed a distant first with 35%.
Amy Keiderling is exactly who Cory Booker’s presidential campaign is looking for as he seeks to build momentum in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
The Waukee small business owner listened to Booker’s remarks in an Adel bowling alley recently — Booker’s first stop of a four-day bus tour across Iowa. She said he gives her the same feeling she had when she caucused for Barack Obama.
He’s the first candidate she’s seen in person this cycle, but before she left, she committed to caucus for the U.S. senator from New Jersey.
She isn’t alone. Tess Seger, a campaign spokeswoman, said Booker surpassed his 10% average of caucus commitments at each of his tour stops. Sometimes 20% or 30% of the crowd signed the commitment cards.
“We’re getting the people who are going to be caucusing for us, precinct captaining for us,” Booker told the Register on Monday. “It’s really exciting. This is how you win here.”
But, so far, Booker is a far short from the winner’s circle. In the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted in November by Selzer & Co., Booker earned 3% support among likely Democratic caucusgoers. He’s been at or below 4% in first choice preferences in the Iowa Poll since 2018.
One cruel explanation is that people are simply lying to the Booker campaign because Democrats don’t have the heart to turn down a black candidate. Alternately, his “10% of tour stops” simply isn’t translating into mass appeal. Another theory: People actually do like him, but no one thinks he’s tough enough to beat Trump. And if you haven’t already had your fill, here’s another “struggles for traction” piece.
Downtown underwent a dramatic transformation under Buttigieg’s leadership. One-way streets became two-way. Speed limits were reduced. Driving lanes were narrowed. Trees were planted. Decorative brick pavers were laid.
I hate him already.
Buttigieg and his supporters say the more pedestrian-friendly downtown has spurred more than $190 million in private investment, as several key buildings found new life, transformed into hotels, apartments and restaurants.
As the economy recovered from the recession of 2008-’09, some of that investment might have been inevitable, as Buttigieg benefited from a rebounding national economy. Supporters still credit the mayor for setting the tone and aggressively pursuing projects.
More than 500 apartments have been built or are under construction downtown, luring new residents to the city.
That’s, what, two whole complexes?
The street changes have also annoyed some motorists. Any news story about Smart Streets that’s shared on social media will draw complaints from residents pointing out there is too much traffic congestion downtown at peak travel times. Buttigieg has said the slowed traffic is worth the larger benefits.
There’s no end to Democrats willing to make life worse for people who drive cars.
There’s also Smart Streets’ roughly $21 million price tag, paid for with bonds that are being repaid with Tax Incremental Financing money, which comes from property taxes paid on the assessed valuation growth in an area. That project, combined with the city’s overhaul of its parks system, means the city could be limited in making other big investments in the near future, depending on their size.
Still, the assessed value of downtown property rose from about $132.8 million in 2013 to roughly $160.9 million last year, a 21-percent increase, according to a Tribune analysis of county property tax records.
Whole things sounds like a mixed bag at best. But since there are no reports of him luring an entire population of drug-addicted beggars to South Bend, it does sound like he did a much better job as a mayor than Steve Adler…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Headline: “Julian Castro sees lift in polls despite being knocked off debate stage.” Reality: He’s up to 4%. Break out the party favors!
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Michael Moore: Trump Will Win in 2020 if Democrats Nominate Another ’Centrist, Moderate’ like Hillary Clinton.” I understand all those words individually…
2. He’s criticized “Medicare for all” a lot. What is his health care plan?
He wants to keep Medicare for people over 65 and create a new government program for people under 65. Everyone under 65 would automatically be enrolled in that program — which would cover all “essential health benefits,” including pre-existing conditions — but people could choose to forfeit the coverage and receive a credit to buy private insurance instead. He argues that this would guarantee universal coverage without forcing people to use a government health plan.
So instead of an expensive, unworkable program, he offers a slightly-less-insane unworkable but expensive program.
Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:
Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.
Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly. Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. All the vaguely interesting Steyer news is also vaguely off target. First: “AOC accepted Tom Steyer contribution, despite accusing Buttigieg of ‘being funded by billionaires.'” (thisismyshockedface.jpg) Second: “Former Tom Steyer aide sues SC Democratic Party for alleged defamation.” Details: “A former aide for 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer who resigned amid allegations that he stole volunteer data from the rival Kamala Harris campaign is now suing the South Carolina Democratic Party, accusing the party’s chairman of defamation.” Being a former Tom Steyer aide must be like getting cut from the Washington Generals.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren’s campaign sounds the alarm as fundraising pace slows about 30% in fourth quarter.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign told supporters in an email on Friday that, so far, it has raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter, a significant drop from her fundraising haul during the third quarter.
The memo asks backers to step up in giving to the campaign.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” it says.
Warren finished the third quarter bringing in $24.6 million, which was much more than most of the other Democratic primary contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders – who, like Warren, shuns big-money fundraisers – led the field with more than $25 million during the third quarter.
If the $17 million total stands that would represent a 30% drop from the previous quarter. The quarter ends in four days.
Poll numbers and fawning media profiles are ephemeral, but cold, hard cash is a great measuring stick for a presidential campaign. Warren is in trouble and donors know it. After all that noise about the most women ever in a presidential field, it seems increasingly likely that it’s going to come down to Biden and Sanders. Warren had no problem taking high dollar donations until she ran for President. If you live in Iowa, own a phone and vote Democrat, there’s a decent chance Warren will call you:
Makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voice mail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials say she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Ms. Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial good-will dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Ms. Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Ms. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials, and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Ms. Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning — she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yet another NYTthree questions piece. “Power of love” question is vapid, and reparations is idiot Social justice Warrior pandering. On the third question, on her views on mental health, she “believes that antidepressants are harmfully overprescribed.” She probably has a point.
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:
Another debate down (like the ratings), Buttigieg brings all the swells to the crystal wine bar, Bloomberg carpet bombs the airwaves with money, and Tom Steyer is the Cats of candidates. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
I’m betting polling will be sparse Christmas week:
Iowa State University (Iowa): Buttigieg 24, Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Castro 1. Sample size of 632.
Emerson: Biden 32, Sanders 25, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Yang 6, Gabbard 4, Bloomberg 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Delaney 1. “Warren appears to be losing to Sanders with younger voters, and losing to Biden with older voters, making it difficult for her to secure a base. With less than 50 days until the Iowa caucus, this strategy of waiting for Sanders or Biden to fall is looking shaky.” But sample size of only 525.
There’s something of a spotlight paradox happening in the Democratic primary this year. The candidates who have spent time under the bright lights have wilted, while those sitting in its shadow have risen.
Why is this? Democrats don’t suddenly dislike the candidates who have undergone the scrutiny that comes with front runner status. What they do dislike, however, is vulnerability. For many Democratic voters, President Trump is an existential threat. As with any existential threat, the most important question is who/what can beat it. In 2019, a candidate’s ideology isn’t as important as his or her ability to take a punch. And be able to punch back.
Biden started the race as the guy best suited to do just that. He started the race as the affable frontrunner, who had a long history with the party and a solid relationship with the country’s first African-American president. What he lacked in energy, he made up for in electability. Who better to win back those Rust Belt states than good old “Scranton Joe.”
But, once in the spotlight, or more specifically, under the debate stage lights, Biden looked anything but invincible. His performances in the first two debates were shaky and uneven. He spent most of the summer on his heels, defending (or changing) past policy positions and struggling to raise money.
From May to November, Biden’s share of the Democratic vote dropped 10 points in Monmouth polls. In Quinnipiac surveys, he dropped nine points from June to October.
As Biden slipped, Sen. Elizabeth Warren started to rise. She was attracting big crowds in Iowa, raising lots of money online and getting a second look from voters and pundits who had written her off earlier in the year as she struggled to explain her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry. By early October, the RealClearPolitics average showed Warren narrowly overtaking Biden, 26.6 to 26.4 percent. But, as she struggled to adequately explain how her plan for a Medicare for All system would work, voters started to get worried. Could the woman with the “plan” for everything, really be this unprepared to answer questions about a central issue in the campaign? And, if so, wouldn’t Trump exploit this?
Since reaching that high on October 8, Warren has begun a steady downward trajectory. The most recent RCP average pegs her vote share at 12 percent —13 points behind Biden.
As Warren slipped, anxious Democrats began to cast about for a candidate who would be steadier and less flawed than Biden or Warren had proven to be. And, right on cue, comes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He has been aggressive in the debates, steady on the stump and has surged into a big lead in Iowa. Since mid-October, Buttigieg has risen eight points in the RealClearPolitics average. The big ole spotlight is now trained directly on him and on his biggest weaknesses, namely his inability to attract voters of color.
As Buttigieg undergoes his ‘stress test,’ there’s another candidate just outside of the spotlight who is well-positioned to take advantage of this moment: Sen. Bernie Sanders. While we were all focused on Warren’s crashing, and Buttigieg’s rise, Sanders has been slowing moving up in the polls. The RealClearPolitics average puts him in second place nationally, and just slightly behind Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also holding a good position in Nevada. This, despite the fact that he spent much of the fall recuperating from a heart attack.
In order to qualify for the next debate, candidates will need to reach one of two polling thresholds as well as a fundraising requirement. The White House hopefuls will have to hit at least 5 percent in four DNC-approved national or early-voting state (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) polls – or reach at least 7 percent in two early-voting state surveys.
The fundraising criteria for the upcoming debate – which will be hosted by CNN and the Des Moines Register – requires campaign contributions from at least 225,000 individual donors as well as a minimum of 1,000 unique donors in at least 20 states.
Candidates have until the end of Jan. 10 to reach the thresholds, and the window for qualifying polling started on Nov. 14.
Megan McArdle offers up some horserace analysis. It’s pretty much consensus opinion stuff, though Yang over Bloomberg for sixth is a result no one would have expected when the campaign began.
Newmark Knight Frank CEO Barry Gosin and GFP Real Estate chairman Jeffrey Gural — bucking the trend of real estate gurus staunchly backing President Trump — are throwing a $2,800-a-ticket soiree for Biden at 6:15 p.m. Jan. 6. Then top Skadden partner Mark N. Kaplan and a host of other luminaries, including art collector and financier Asher Edelman, are hosting a breakfast for Biden in Midtown the following morning.
Bloomberg has committed $160 million from his coffers to fund vaping prohibition efforts, despite e-cigarettes being 95 percent safer than combustible cigarettes according to prestigious international health bodies such as Public Health England. The billionaire also gives generously to left-leaning organizations that advocate for carbon taxation and greater “green” regulation, including the League of Conservation Voters and America’s Pledge.
Yet, Bloomberg believes that with enough of an investment, a message of higher prices at the pump and less reduced-risk options for smokers will somehow translate to electoral success. He clearly hasn’t learned from the losses of his affluent forerunners and will surely have a lot of explaining to do to millions of moderate Democratic voters not sold on radical, costly progressive ideas such as the Green New Deal or his “Beyond Carbon” doppelganger.
The more interesting but barely reported aspect of the litigation is that it has been encouraged and even secretly funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
State attorneys general offices are busy places. They generally don’t generally have time for frivolous litigation, so Bloomberg stepped up to fund law schools, like the one at New York University, to do the climate litigation staff work for the various state attorneys general involved in the litigation, according to emails obtained via public records requests by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Bloomberg has essentially discovered a way for a (wealthy) private citizen to buy a state attorney general and use the state’s powers and resources to pursue his private political agenda. Although there is no specific provision in any law prohibiting such conduct, that is only the case because no one ever imagined that anyone would have the effrontery to do it.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released a list of campaign bundlers. “Among the high-profile donors who have raised at least $50,000 for Booker’s presidential bid are musician Jon Bon Jovi, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D).”
At a Palo Alto, California, fundraiser on Monday, cohosts included Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; the Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s wife, Nicole Shanahan; the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s wife, Wendy Schmidt; and Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, a campaign document obtained by Recode’s Teddy Schleifer indicates. These hosts’ families combined have an estimated net worth of $80 billion, according to Recode.
After that cozy, down-home little gathering, Buttigieg jetted off to lecture people on income inequality. His fellow candidates may have torn into him for it, but the Wine Cave soiree is perfectly emblematic of the Democratic Party’s massive institutional hypocrisy, and of the disconnect between what it demands ordinary people (the ones it keeps claiming to represent) must give up in order to fight the existential crisis that is “climate change,” and the good life enjoyed by the anointed party elite, who make clear they are absolutely unwilling to give up jack squat, refusing to even to forgo their ostentatious displays of wealth.
Ordinary people are supposed to give up cars, toilets that flush and lightbulbs that work. Ordinary people are told to give up meat, eat bugs and recycle, while the party elite who look down on their backward ways continue dining in crystal-bedecked wine caves. Sacrifices, like laws against insider trading and foreign influence, are for the little people. What rankles is the unmitigated gall of railing against “the 1%” while insisting on their own right to live the same lifestyle, and expecting ordinary people to ignore the rank hypocrisy.
Remember, peasants: It’s not your place to question the privileges of your betters. And if that just wasn’t enough hypocrisy all on its own, Buttigieg is the son of a Marxist academic who specialized in the work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Makes you wonder how much of Buttigieg’s moderate persona is a sham from a red diaper baby…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She thinks the election will be close.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “John Delaney Would Like You to Know He’s Still Running for President.” Writer calls up to ask his campaign why and get offered an interview. Delaney says he’s all in on Iowa and wants to bring the country together. I think the country has already united behind not voting for John Delaney.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She voted “present” on impeachment. “My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.” I guess that desire for reconciliation is why Saturday Night Live keeps casting her as the villain in their debate sketches: If you’re not a hyper-left partisan, you’re the enemy. President Donald Trump, chaos magician that he is, said he respected Gabbard for voting present, which is sure to sure to drive the TDS crowd even further around the bend (it’s a very big bend).
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS interview. The headline says “Old allies come out to help Deval Patrick in N.H.” but the only allies actually mentioned are the Massachusetts couple running his campaign. But he is topping the order list for candidates in Massachusetts itself for the March 3rd primary. Is he planning on picking up enough home state delegates to be a kingmaker and wrangle a VP slot? If so, it’s a pretty longshot strategy, but at least it is a strategy, which is more than his stillborn campaign has evidenced thus far.
Nobody forced Bernie Sanders’s campaign to endorse Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. By the time the Sanders camp’s national organizing director, Clair Sandberg, announced that the Vermont senator’s team stood in solidarity with the far-left British candidate, it was already apparent that Corbyn’s party was likely to lose and lose badly. And that’s precisely what happened.
On Thursday, British voters delivered Labour its worst defeat in 85 years. The thrashing it endured was less attributable to the lingering debate over the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union than to Labour’s uniquely repulsive leader. When 100,000 British respondents were asked what they feared most about the prospect of a Labour government, all but the staunchest Labourites and Remainers indicated that the prospect of Corbyn’s ascension to 10 Downing Street was an unacceptable risk.
Corbyn rendered his party toxic. His penchant for standing in solidarity with terrorists and anti-Semites opened a seal out of which a cascade of anti-Jewish sentiments poured, engulfing his party in scandal. His brand of radical socialism was insufferably hidebound. His expressions of sympathy for history’s greatest criminals were thoughtlessly dogmatic. The Labour Party under Corbyn drifted so far toward overt Jew-hatred that Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the institution. The Archbishop of Canterbury agreed with that assessment, as did 85 percent of the country’s Jews. There was no ambiguity here.
So there were many obvious risks and few upsides associated with the Sanders endorsement. And yet, his campaign did it anyway. We can only conclude that this was not an act of political shrewdness but a genuine display of affection.
Bernie Sanders has thus far evaded scrutiny over the values he and his campaign share with the Labour Party’s discredited leader, but that lack of curiosity is indefensible. As of this writing, Sanders is firmly in second place in the average of national Democratic primary polls. He’s in second and gaining in Iowa, too, and is leading in New Hampshire. Sanders is a contender, and it’s time for the press to act like it. But taking that job seriously would entail an examination of the senator’s conspicuously Corbyn-esque instincts, to say nothing of the bigots with whom he has surrounded himself.
Don’t take my word for it; take that of Sanders’s own surrogates. Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of Sanders’s most visible endorsers with whom the senator frequently shares the stage, has apologized for some of what she’s admitted were anti-Semitic remarks. Or, if that’s not good enough, take the Democratic Party’s verdict. Those anti-Jewish slights for which Omar declined to show remorse had been targeted by her fellow caucus members for censure before a revolt of the party’s progressives and Black Caucus Members scuttled the initiative.
For one thing, as Trotsky correctly indicated, socialism tends to corrode all other religious and cultural affiliations. Secular Jewish progressive groups posing as faith-based organizations, for example, have long worked to conflate their ideological positions with Judaism by reimagining the latter to make it indistinguishable from the former. It’s one of the great tragedies of the American Jewish community that they are succeeding.
More bluntly, remember that Sanders honeymooned in Moscow, not Jerusalem, for a good reason. “Let’s take the strengths of both systems,” Sanders insisted even as the reprehensible Soviet system was on the verge of collapse. “Let’s learn from each other,” Sanders said even when over 100 Jewish refuseniks were still being denied permission to leave the Communist regime after enduring decades of anti-Semitic oppression under rhetoric of “anti-Zionism.” As far as I can tell, Sanders never said a word in their defense to his hosts.
Oppressed Russian Jews weren’t his people. Jeremy Corbyn is Bernie’s people. As Rothman notes, no one forced Sanders to compare his movement to Corbynism. Britain’s chief rabbi may have found Corbyn an “existential” threat to his flock, but Sanders never once thought it concerning enough to mention during any of his praise for the British leader.
Bernie’s 2016 press secretary Symone Sanders (who this piece suggests is totally known by insiders) is now backing Biden. Celebrities supporting Sanders: Tim Robbins, Danny DeVito, Willow Smith, Jeff Ross, and somebody by the name of “Anderson .Paak,” which is evidently a rapper rather than a new data compression protocol.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Atlanticinterviews Steyer in the Nixon Library, so it’s all tedious impeachment blather. (Of course, we are talking Steyer, and tedious is his default setting. Historians will look back and wonder how the other billionaire in the race lost a charisma contest to Michael Bloomberg, something scientists previously thought impossible. Steyer is the Cats of the Democratic primary: spending tons of money only to completely horrify people.) He’s campaigning on climate change. Because that worked so well for Jay Inslee.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Obama talks up Warren behind closed doors to wealthy donors.” But! “The former president has stopped short of an endorsement of Warren in these conversations and has emphasized that he is not endorsing in the Democratic primary race.” She attacks Buttigieg in a new ad, for that exciting third place vs. fourth place action. Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus blasts Warren for bashing the rich. Ooopsie!
Warren released a list of endorsements from Obama aides and on the list is Edward B.P. Buck, which is indeed the same Ed Buck who is responsible for the deaths of several black men via drug overdose.
Yang, a candidate who is known for challenging the party consensus, slammed Democrats for their “obsession” with the president and impeachment during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate.
“The media networks didn’t do us any favors by missing the reason why Donald Trump became our president in the first place,” Yang told the PBS Newshour moderators. “The more we act like Donald Trump is a cause of our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what’s going on it our communities and solve those problems.”
“What we have to do is we have to stop being obsessed over impeachment,” he stated.
During his 2016 race, Sanders amassed a grassroots following with ideas like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college, two policies that initially had little mainstream support. That was the first year a majority of Americans backed Medicare for All, and their support has remained steady ever since, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Also since 2016, support for free public college has grown from 47 to 63 percent.
Sanders, of course, didn’t win the Democratic nomination. But his campaign did inspire hundreds of down-ballot progressive candidates across the country to embrace his platform: In the 2018 midterm elections, more than half of all Democratic candidates for the House backed Medicare for All, including his former campaign organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, with Sanders on his second campaign, his trademark proposals have dominated the 2020 primary race: Seven of the remaining 15 Democratic candidates have embraced some version of Medicare for All, and multiple debates have featured a sustained discussion about the proposal. Similarly, almost every candidate has promised to eliminate tuition for two-year community colleges, with several, in addition to Sanders, vowing to make all public four-year colleges free.
Sanders, in other words, has served as a transformational figure on the left—someone who was able to fundamentally shift the Democratic political conversation toward these ambitious policy goals. Whether or not Yang earns his party’s nomination, he, too, could be an influential figure. His policy proposals have already moved the primary’s Overton window, even as many American voters are only just starting to tune in to the race. Before his campaign, UBI wasn’t an often-discussed proposal in the United States outside the lefty-think-tank world, though a few cities have run pilot programs to varying degrees of success. Public support for the proposal increased by 6 percent from February to September of this year, according to the latest Hill and HarrisX polling. Among Democrats in particular, support for UBI ticked up 12 percent in the same period.
As Yang’s campaign has captured more attention, his competitors have been forced to take a position on UBI. Several—including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—expressed openness to the policy in the months after Yang’s candidacy began to gain traction. “I think that it’s worth taking seriously,” Buttigieg said in an interview this spring on the liberal podcast Pod Save America.
In debates, Yang has hammered home his warnings about automation, and during the October contest, the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked a question seemingly inspired by that message. She wanted to know how candidates would prevent job losses due to automation, leading to an argument between Yang and the primary front-runners about whether implementing UBI would be more effective than raising the minimum wage or instituting a federal-jobs guarantee.
“It’s likely,” Dave Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me, “that candidates will only be talking more about automation and its impact and its role in inequality in future years—whether they want to address it with some kind of enhanced safety net and a guaranteed income or not.” Already, Wasserman added, Yang’s ideas are speaking to “anxieties that a number of younger voters have about the future of the economy.”
This once again raises the question of why Yang is so concerned about automation taking American jobs in the future, but not illegal aliens taking American jobs right now. He wants to decriminalize whores, but not johns.
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:
Most campaign postmortems are of the “failure to launch” variety, but the Kamala Harris campaign achieved liftoff, started climbing, and then fell back down to earth followed by a giant explosion.
So let’s dig into her campaign’s cataclysmic demise!
Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.
I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense. Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.
On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.
Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America.
Tell us what you really think.
Jim Geraghty wonders not why Harris departed, but why so many of the no hopes stay in the race:
After you’ve heard Jim Gilmore insist he’s going to win the New Hampshire primary after getting twelve votes in the entire Iowa caucus, treating no-hope candidates as if they still have a shot starts to feel like we’re all enabling delusional people and playing along with their denial.
John Delaney? Senator Michael Bennet? Guys, I don’t know how to break it to you, but most people forgot you were running. Julian Castro? Sorry, pal. On paper, you had a shot, but in reality, people just weren’t interested in buying what you were selling. Tom Steyer? It’s your money, but most Democrats would prefer you spent it in other ways, and the longer you hang around, the more they’ll see you as a fool using up valuable resources on a narcissistic Quixotic effort.
This is precisely why I urge Steyer to stay in the race.
Harris routinely insisted that she was still introducing herself to Americans. But Harris’s campaign, dogged for months by questions about her health-care stance, her political ideology, and, ultimately, her staff’s infighting, never seemed to settle on a single consistent answer to a question voters kept asking: What was she about? At times on the trail, she presented herself as a matter-of-fact progressive, a comforter-in-chief, and an unapologetic prosecutor. Harris, and those who’ve known her for decades, insist all of these are accurate descriptors, but that at her core she’s a results-oriented pragmatist with a long-running disdain for ideological boxes. That, they often said, is precisely what the country could have used right about now. Yet as Harris tried appealing to as broad a swath of the Democratic electorate as possible, she found that in an overflowing field led by three far better-known characters, being a consensus-style candidate who can offer something to everyone meant it was especially difficult to offer everything to anyone.
When Harris sat down over the weekend to re-evaluate her plans and dig deep into her campaign’s financial state after a pair of brutal reports from the New York Times and Washington Post, she saw an operation quickly running out of cash and low on realistic paths to victory, even though she already qualified for the December debate. She spoke with family and close aides, and considered both her short-term options and her political future beyond the primary race. On Monday, she determined there was no politically acceptable way for her sputtering campaign to keep competing. She opted for an abrupt halt to a fall that would have been unfathomable back in Oakland in January, but which could have worsened in the unforgiving Iowa winter.
It would soon get harder, but at the time, the aftermath of the Detroit debate felt like a new low for Harris’s campaign. Looking back four months later, that stretch crystalized what went wrong. As she struggled to find a meeting of minds with the voters she needed between spring and fall — while Biden held onto his support and Elizabeth Warren gained steam — Harris and her team tried out a series of different messages. They didn’t stop trying until they ultimately settled on “Justice Is on the Ballot” late this year. Some political allies urged her to return to the “fearless” message she’d used while running for Senate in 2016. (“Fearless” was also the name of a TV ad she’d ran that was based around footage of Warren praising her.) Others grumbled that her early focus on “truths” meant little to voters, and that her subsequent “3 A.M. Agenda” wasn’t ambitious enough. “Sometimes her over-preparation comes across as a lack of preparation,” said one of her advisors. Still, most in Harris’s corner were convinced that she was close to hitting the right note. “The political consultant class gnashes their teeth over this — they have to market a product,” a Harris friend and longtime political ally told me this fall. “The problem that they have is: She is what she is. She’s complicated.” After the second debate, her team advised her to start telling more personal stories on the campaign trail, fearing the career prosecutor who was campaigning on her toughness was coming across as too lawyerly.
But then, and throughout the campaign, the advice wasn’t always consistent. “I don’t know who’s in charge,” one former Harris aide who remains close with her team told me repeatedly over the summer and fall. Harris has long been surrounded by a wide array of advisors — in addition to campaign chair Maya Harris (her sister), and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, there were strategists Sean Clegg, Ace Smith, and Laphonza Butler, former chief of staff Rohini Kosoglu, adman Jim Margolis, and pollster David Binder, among others. “It’s a Kamala thing to have 9,000 people whispering in her ears, thinking they’re running the show,” said another of her ex-aides.
That doesn’t sound like an effective strategy for running a campaign, or governance. Indeed, it sounds like even more reasons to celebrate the demise of her incompetent campaign long before she could inflict that dysfunction on the White House.
Kamala Harris has ended her presidential campaign. Thus fades into history one of the most overhyped candidates in recent memory.
It’s not hard to see why Harris failed.
She was half the aggressive prosecutor and half the noble social justice warrior, half practical Democrat and half proud progressive, and it was never clear where she stood. With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consolidating the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg fighting over the center ground, Harris’s uncertain political identity denied her a foundation to build on. Instead, the California senator appeared to copy policies that she assumed would be popular in any one moment: most ignominiously, her call to ban President Trump’s Twitter account.
For a Democratic Party craving authenticity, as well as a candidate who can beat Trump, Harris’s strategic ingredients were a poor match for success. The basic point is this: As my colleague Tiana Lowe noted back in the summer, Harris simply wasn’t ready for prime time. She was too desperate to win and lacked established values.
It’s interesting that both Harris and Beto O’Rourke were hyped early and heavily, but both ended up bowing out even before the first primary votes were cast. (You could put Kirsten Gillibrand in this category as well, but honestly, the only people hyping her seemed to be female journalists from New York; everyone else seemed to regard her as a hopeless lightweight.) Neither seem to have ideas or convictions important enough to run a low-cost insurgency campaign ala Jerry Brown in 1992. For Harris and O’Rourke, it was either First Class or nothing.
Taking their campaign all the way to the convention floor:
Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders
Pete Buttigieg
Elizabeth Warren
Michael Bloomberg
Tulsi Gabbard
I believe Bloomberg and Gabbard will soldier on despite no hope of winning. There’s a chance Yang takes this route as well. There’s also a chance Castro and Harris stay in until Super Tuesday in hopes of winning home state delegates in Texas and California, but I think they’re already toast. And with Patrick’s campaign essentially stillborn, there’s a chance he packs it up before Iowa as well.
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.
Three months ago 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.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 67,030,782 followers, up 704,954 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 27,163,640 followers, 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.
Sanders crushed it this month, adding nearly 230,000 followers; no one else even came close six digit follower gains.
Elizabeth Warren gained 237,827 followers last month, but only 79,433 this month. Even though that’s the second biggest gain, it suggests that her campaign may have peaked and that she failed to become the far-left alternative to Sanders.
Andrew Yang’s momentum seemed to slow as well, but it was still enough to carry him up over the 1 million mark.
Along with Joe Biden, Warren and Yang, Tulsi Gabbard was the only candidate to gain over 100,000 followers last month. That momentum seems to have slowed dramatically, with just under 17,000 new followers for November, which is right in line with what Amy Klobuchar and Julian Castro did. All are below The Andrew Yang Line, and none seem a threat to break into a higher tier anymore.
Michael Bloomberg joins the list in seventh place, with 2,343,799 followers, a majority of which I would guess are New York City/business related. Can he gain the 400,000+ followers to overcome the moribund Williamson campaign for sixth place between now and Iowa? I’d bet not.
Deval Patrick joins the race with 51,868 Twitter followers, or the sort of numbers garnered by people who drop out of the race, not get in it.
No one below Joe Biden is on a trajectory to pass Joe Biden in followers before Iowa.
Marianne Williamson’s second straight sub-1,000 gain month shows that the magic is gone and probably isn’t coming back.
Steyer still seems to be getting a pretty pathetic return on his Twitter ad buys.
