2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[storyteller]

I think Warren would be great for labor, Financial reform, and host of over domestic issues. Imo she would be the most progressive president on domestic policies since LBJ. I think you would be surprised at how bold she will be. But if Healthcare is your number one issues Bernie is definitely your guy. As I said before he is the best on this issue.

I have no problem with Warren funding plan, and I actually give her a lot of credit for it. My only problem is with the announcement. That was a mistake. You never go into a negotiation and announce your strategy. It was a really poor decision by her and her team. But we will see. My hope is that by 2024 we will have enough progressives in congress to push through all the major progressive legislation we talk about.

I agree about Warren on Domestic Policy. I think she edges Bernie at points and he edges her at others in Domestic Policy but they'd both be incredible for big changes that help everybody. But I give Bernie a clear edge on my two biggest points which are Healthcare and Foreign Policy (folding in that Bernie's whole Marshall Plan for South America includes Puerto Rico). I still clock Warren as left of Bernie 2016 on a lot of domestic policy though which has me defending her to more zealous Bernie heads at time.

I will admit that I'm really disappointed on the M4A tip. Like you said, I think she showed her hand and hurt her leverage with how she did this. I'd have been cool if we found out that she'd set a Public Option as the line in the sand where she'd compromise but extract concessions in other aspects of her policy or something like that. But you're right, at this point it's wait and see how things unfold. 2024 feels far away but the infrastructure to create progressive success stories and the enthusiasm to run and build seems like it's developing rapidly. We just can't have that enthusiasm squandered (Warren or Bernie has to win).

 

[A.R.$]

At 1:26:00 and for the next like 20+ minutes, Sam Seder calls out Jamie for ruthlessly attacking Warren's healthcare plans and discusses the reality of ANYTHING changing and how to address and frame the discussion around Medicare for All ...and Seder supports Sanders for president!

This was damning.




@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @BigMoneyGrip @Lucky_Lefty @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @88m3 @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @A.R.$

That was fukking brutal. He need to tell this to his cohost Brooks

 

[FAH1223]

@King Kreole

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

I will admit that I'm really disappointed on the M4A tip

no you're not bruh.

relax.

plus, anything warren plans will be done better than anything sanders has ever proposed...a guy who literally is infamous for eschewing details.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

2024 feels far away

The ACA passed in 2009. The individual mandate kicked in ...in 2014.

Some of yall have the memories of goldfish

 

[duncanthetall]

Pete sucks so fukking much, mate.

 

[King Kreole]

A) The payroll tax concept works because it isn't gonna have to be so high, it's replacing private insurance costs and it can function in perpetuity without breaking down.

B) The problems with the head tax don't narrow only to the fact that regardless of your income, the costs are distributed entirely evenly. That is indeed a key bit, but you have to add the second key variable to get into the feedback loop that's so problematic. That's the Independent Contractor workaround. This might not immediately be a big problem, but every employer that sees value in switching or outsourcing to avoid the limits brings down the revenue that is needed to keep the program running. That means you have to increase the cost of the tax to keep up the revenue which incentivizes more employers to outsource..and back and forth...that's at the crux of the "unsustainable" part and why the tax sounds good early but requires a real transition plan to avoid it becoming regressive. To continually talk past that problem and imply that it's a right wing talking point is just oversimplifying the issue. Here's another example where the incentives align better.

Warren's wealth tax gets hit with examples of capital flight from other countries. This is undeniably true, but also oversimplified. That's because Warren adds in an exit tax, boosts IRS funding to have more effective auditing practices and plans to avoid loopholes and exemptions that helped tax avoidance in prior models. We see the pitfalls, but we see a number policy specific ideas to address the pitfalls. That's not there for the head tax and that's why the "how do we transition out of the head tax" question is such a focal point.

C) Comparing the two head taxes is a reach. We're talking about thousands of dollars in additional expense per employee vs hundreds and if I'm not mistaken, that Seattle Head tax actually did include a transition to a payroll tax but it went through a bunch of iterations so I don't remember exactly what they closed on.

The Independent Contractor workaround you're describing exists under the current healthcare system, which did not cause massive increases in outsourcing or employer reclassification. The only thing that's changing under Warren's plan is that employers pay the government instead of private health insurance companies, and their costs are lowered by 2%. I don't see either of those things triggering some catastrophic death spiral. Employee misclassification is indeed a pitfall of the entire economy, not just universal healthcare, which is why Warren addresses it in her labor plan.

So let's start at a key aspect of any scenario where Bernie wins and that's the unavoidable implication that it'd mean the American people voted on a candidate whose number one focal point was M4A. That immediately puts pressure on other Democrats to at least move left from complete no-M4A positions. We can see the gradual impact Trump's win has had in further eroding the behavior of already garbage Republicans as an example. One minute you're PoS Lindsey Graham and the next you're PoS Trump worshipping Graham.

We also don't know what impact that could have Congressional leadership. I've mentioned before that the make-up of Congress will have a large impact on what we can consider realistic and not realistic. A continued blue wave could make passing measures a lot easier and having Leadership push back against a president elected by their own party constituents is a stretch. Leadership could very well change, especially if the American people give a Bernie Sanders a resounding victory in the face of leadership's opposition to his trademark proposals. This could happen with Warren too but she's been more open to compromise and her concession to a Public Option makes it unlikely that she'd rock the boat.

Lastly is the interim election. That's the big place to put pressure on Congressional members to support the bill. My favorite example of primary pressure on a candidate is Hakeem Jeffries. There were stories that Pelosi was really upset on occasions where Jeffries moved more toward Progressive stances (aka sided with the Squad and caused one of Nancy's attacks on them)...but those also followed with rumors that Justice Democrats had marked him for a primary. Bernie's approach of starting this fight out the gate means that if the Dems are dragging their feet, the interim election could see them facing progressive primary challengers that force their hands. This might also extend to Dems challenging Republicans.

These are obviously moving parts and impossible to put a clear conclusion on. But assuming the worst and conceding ahead of time is simply bad strategy. If Bernie is forced to fall back to a Public Option and Medicare expansion but with limits, you've acknowledged that he'll likely do that. But the key here is that he's not folding beforehand when so many variables aren't even decided.

I think you're right to look at Trump's Presidency as the closest analogy we would have to a Bernie Presidency (in style, not substance). And Trump's wall is the equivalent of M4A. And for all of his bluster and threatening and cajoling, the wall still hasn't gone up. In fact, he hasn't really accomplished much of record legislatively that the Republicans didn't already want. The tax cut is his only big win, and he barely ran on it while it was a mainstream Republican pet project for a long time. It's very possible that Bernie would be a more adept political operator than Trump, but I don't see much evidence that the Bernie/Trump style is effective at getting people in their own party to vote against their desires/interests. But overall, these are good, fair points.

Popular with who? We've seen polling tricks to make it sound worse than it is, but once constituents know that they can keep their physicians, they're good with it. The unpopularity is more out of representatives than constituents. We've seen similar scenarios play out before, specifically impeachment. A lot of Dems slowly came around after time off where they had to face angry constituents. Not only that but if you really want to undermine a negotiating position, spend your first two years establishing one healthcare reform and then immediately press a new healthcare reform to follow up. Even worse, let all of your opponents know the plan so that even if they have to concede the first reform, they can spend years poisoning the well on the second fight.

Yes, I meant popular with representatives, but also the popularity wanes with constituents the more you describe what M4A fully entails, particularly the "loss of choice" that comes with the eradication of private insurance. I obviously think this is foolish and due to decades of Republican conditioning around "freedom" and "choice", but it is a real phenomenon. But ultimately, even if we can get the popularity of full M4A up amongst constituents, that doesn't mean it's much more likely to pass congress. We see the same thing with gun control. Hugely popular with the people, nearly impossible to implement congressionally. Liz's transition plan bypasses the congressional gridlock and spends the first two years reducing the insurance industry's power and expanding M4A coverage to millions of people to show and prove that it can really work. Basically, I think the gap between here and M4A is too large to traverse in one big leap. We don't have the lower body strength. I think you need to take two big steps.

As for letting opponents know the plan, it's not like these are big secrets. Anti-M4A forces know all of this, they're not idiots. There are more to negotiations than just coming in with the furthest position. How much you give up is dependant on how committed you are to the end goal and how good of a negotiator you are. An idiot can start with full M4A and give up the farm in their first concession. A prudent negotiator can start with public option and only give up small features, ending up to the left of the idiot. I'm not saying Bernie is an idiot or Liz is a prudent negotiator, I'm just saying negotiations aren't mathematics. It's not starting position - 1.

Everything you've just said applies to Bernie's plan except he's not spending the first two years with a focus on middleman legislation. Bernie has the same tools at his disposal, the same year one goal for expansion (age 50) and the same executive privilege to lower drug prices. Through the course of fighting for the rest, he could also fix parts of the ACA that Trump has tarnished as a stopgap. The only addition to this debate is that actual M4A legislation will not be on the table for discussion at all until year three. Before that, you've set up an unnecessary benchmark as a goal instead of something you can fall back on as a compromise tactic. You've set up a focal point on the Public Option instead of on the broader goal and by doing so, you've added a step to M4A that only might be necessary. And we can address that need when we understand it to be a need.

And here's where the trust issue comes in. My concern is that everything Warren is talking about would be delayed heavily by obstruction and virtually no different from what a Public Option would face is that was set up to be the goal. Everyone knows that a reform is going to be what constituents want. Republicans and Dems who are beholden to lobbyists won't be so much focused on deading the legislation as extracting as many concessions as they can from it. With Warren already conceding to a middle ground, my concern is that other priorities will render this fight of less importance once she gets to her first benchmark. Then she can preach the waiting game, "just wait and the American people will come around..." My concern being that the people coming around will take a lot longer than expected and face a ton of a propaganda that got a two year head start.

And regardless I'm glad we've gone from a belief that Warren filled in crucial gaps to the idea that Warren is using a different strategy. Her funding mechanism vs Bernie's funding mechanism and Her transition vs Bernie's Transition are actual debatable parts but it was never about gaps in Bernie's plan. It's about strategic differences which lies at the crux of damn near ever critique yall get mad about until we drill down into the theory underlying the claims being made. The Native American crap is disingenuous. Distrust of Warren on corporate levels or as a shill are totally off base imo. But calling out potential pitfalls or places where her vision does not suffice strategically is worth actually drilling down instead of dismissal and attack.

Bernie's plan relies on passing M4A with 60+ votes in the Senate before any transition or work can get started. Liz's plan does not. That's the major difference. There is no transitional work being done before M4A is signed into law under Bernie's plan, whereas Liz is not waiting on the revolution to flip Joe Manchin into a pro-M4A vote to start expanding M4A coverage.

Your concern about the rest of M4A being pushed back due to other issues taking priority is totally legitimate, but I would just say that I am more optimistic that the successful rollout of M4A coverage to millions of people will make it easier to eventually pass the last step of M4A. I believe this is a more realistic route to full M4A than trying to force the whole thing down congress's throat through threats of primarying.

Liz did fill in gaps. As of right now, Bernie Sanders has no M4A financing plan. The list of options is not a plan, because he has not committed to one route, which is why we've had to use Matt Breunig's plans as a stand-in for Bernie's. He himself has said he doesn't feel the need to put out a financing plan right now. That's a fair strategy, but it's still not a plan. Bernie's plan to get M4A passed through an intrasigent congress is to threaten to primary the senators in his way. I guess you can call that a plan, but it's not realistic in my opinion. The gap Liz filled in here is one of reality, by providing a (more) realistic pathway to M4A that doesn't rely on a "revolution" taking place.

 

[the next guy]

It's happening people

 

[Warren Moon]

It's happening people

wtf

 

[JoogJoint]

Pete sucks so fukking much, mate.

What good is just funding HBCU's going to do for Black people as a whole? Most of us have degrees and the playing field is still at an disadvantage for us. I'm sick of this substitute approach for the real reason we have such a wide gap of Wealth amongst Black ADOS people compared to everybody else. It's ignoring the real problems.

 

[TrapParis]

wtf

He gets single digits in every poll but somehow gets 20+ here and there.... its bullshyt lol

 

[Warren Moon]

What good is just funding HBCU's going to do for Black people as a whole? Most of us have degrees and the playing field is still at an disadvantage for us. I'm sick of this substitute approach for the real reason we have such a wide gap of Wealth amongst Black ADOS people compared to everybody else. It's ignoring the real problems.

most ados go to pwi’s it’s over 75%

 

[88m3]

Bernie being a tough on crime legislation supporter is always lost/ignored for whatever reasons.

He is at his core too. An acquaintance got arrested there and they shipped him to some private prison gulag in the midwest. I hold Bernie Sanders personally accountable for the hell he lived through. That's the Bernie Sanders I know. He preys on people by telling them what they want to hear, he is a politician with few accomplishments other than self promotion.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]