2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
It's the internet. You're nothing more than text.
Not based on your reactions breh
Another misleading video. I watched the whole thing. The lady screamed out the gate soon as Biden started. Biden was trying to calm her down. He was saying this is not a Trump rally to people that began to get rowdy with the hecklers and to say that this isn't where people act wild in general. I've watched a few of his rallies where he literally said "let her go this is not a Trump rally". Biden asked for them to meet after the show. What more could he do? He could have told them to go fukk themselves. Now that I think about it, fukk her. Good that he didnt meet with her because she would have screamed in his face some more.
Ya'll really gotta step calling for anti-Biden these videos. The same way people need to stop falling for misleading anti-Bernie videos.
They're going to need to add Sen. Booker to this.
They all kiss the ring in the end
intra vires
Glory to Michigan
Bow down or get put downThey all kiss the ring in the end
Dusty Bake Activate
Fukk your corny debates
Yeah, I think I’m good on voting for president in November.
truly
Instead of a stimulus aimed at the green energy and healthcare we'll get another round of tax cuts instead
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thatrapsfan
Superstar
Look how wide the gap is with voters without a college degree aka working class.
53 percent Biden to 36 Bernie overall
58 percent Biden to 30 percent Bernie among white voters without college degree!
Y’all gotta deal with these numbers
The campaign message did not resonate with the main intended audience. @FAH1223
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Simple Reason the Left Won’t Stop Losing
By David Leonhardt
8-9 minutes
Progressives need to care more about winning.
- March 8, 2020
Stickers for voters on the day of the South Carolina primary in Union, S.C., last month.Credit...Mark Makela/Reuters
How did the political left squander the opportunity that was the 2020 primary campaign?
The Trump presidency has created tremendous energy among progressives. More than half of Democratic voters now identify as liberal. Most favor “Medicare for all.” A growing number are unhappy with American capitalism.
This year’s campaign offered the prospect of transformational change, with a Democratic nominee who was more liberal than any in more than a half-century. Instead, the nominee now seems likely to be a moderate white grandfather who first ran for president more than 30 years ago and whose campaign promises a return to normalcy.
True, Bernie Sanders could make a comeback, but it would need to be a big one. Among people who voted on Super Tuesday itself — rather than voting early, before Joe Biden won South Carolina — Biden trounced Sanders. The race would have to change fundamentally for Sanders to win.
If he doesn’t, the obvious questions for progressives is what went wrong and how they can do better in the future. I think there are some clear answers — empirical answers that anybody, regardless of ideology, should be able to see. I’d encourage the next generation of progressive leaders to think about these issues with an open mind.
The biggest lesson is simply this: The American left doesn’t care enough about winning.
It’s an old problem, one that has long undermined left-wing movements in this country. They have often prioritized purity over victory. They wouldn’t necessarily put it these terms, but they have chosen to lose on their terms rather than win with compromise.
You can see this pattern today in the ways that many progressive activists misread public opinion. Their answer to almost every question of political strategy is to insist that Americans are a profoundly progressive people who haven’t yet been inspired to vote the way they think. The way to win, these progressives claim, is to go left, always.
Immigration? Most Americans want more of it. Abortion? This is a pro-choice country. Fracking? People now understand its downsides. Strict gun control? Affirmative action? A wealth tax? Free college? Medicare for all? Widely available marijuana? Americans want it all, activists claim.
This belief helps explain why so many 2020 candidates hoping to win the progressive vote — including Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris — embraced ideas like a ban on fracking and the decriminalization of the border. The left persuaded itself that those policies were both morally righteous and politically savvy. To reject any one of them was to risk being labeled a neoliberal sellout.
The thing is, progressive activists are right about public opinion on some of these issues. Most Americans do favor higher taxes on the rich, marijuana legalization and additional gun control. But too many progressives aren’t doing an honest analysis of the politics. They are instead committing what the journalist Matthew Yglesias has called “the pundit fallacy.” They are conflating their own opinions with smart political advice. They are choosing to believe what they want to believe.
They often do so by pointing to polls with favorably worded, intricate questions — and by ignoring evidence to the contrary. Affirmative action, for example, typically loses ballot initiatives. Polls show that most Americans favor some abortion restrictions and oppose the elimination of private health insurance.
By designing campaign strategies for the America they want, rather than the one that exists, progressives have done a favor to their political opponents. They have refused to make tactical retreats, which is why they keep losing.
I think Warren may have been the person most damaged by this dynamic in 2020. (And, yes, she was also hurt by sexism.) She could have positioned herself as the candidate who excited much of the left but was more acceptable to the center-left than Sanders. Instead, she mimicked Sanders, making many Democratic voters who were rooting for her worried that, like him, she couldn’t win a general election.
Or look back at the 2018 midterms. In competitive districts, candidates backed by progressive groups like Justice Democrats and Our Revolution were shut out. They lost in either the primaries or the general election. There isn’t a single Sanders-like member of Congress from a purple or red district. There are dozens of moderates.
Remember: The policy positions of Sanders, Warren and other progressives — on Medicare for all, for instance — are often closer to the views of most Democratic voters than the moderate position is. Yet many Democrats spurn the progressive candidate. These voters care more about winning than about perfect policy agreement, and they support the candidate whom they (correctly) see as more in tune with the full electorate.
The progressive wing of the party has still had a good few years, pushing the party left in multiple ways. Even Biden’s platform is strikingly liberal. But if progressives aren’t satisfied being influential runners-up, I would suggest three broad principles.
First, don’t become PINOs (progressives in name only). Decide on a few core ways in which you think moderate Democrats are wrong, and stake out different positions.
Second, stop believing your own spin. Analyze public opinion objectively. Acknowledge when a progressive position brings electoral costs.
Finally, start testing some new political strategies. A single break with orthodoxy can send a larger signal. It can make a candidate look flexible, open-minded, less partisan and more respectful of people with different views.
Maybe the new approach should involve economic progressivism and cultural moderation, which happens to reflect American public opinion. Maybe it involves a different approach on immigration — insisting on a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants but also a slowdown of future immigration. Maybe it means announcing that fracking and nuclear energy are crucial to fighting climate change. Or maybe it involves finding more progressive candidates who hunt or talk about their relationship with Jesus Christ and have some related policy positions.
I realize that political compromise usually feels unpleasant. But I’d ask: How does losing feel?
As luck would have it, the Democratic Party has a loyal group of voters who, though hardly monolithic, tend to be more pragmatic and less wishful than progressive activists. They also tend to be culturally moderate, as many swing voters are.
This group, of course, is black voters, especially those middle-aged and older. They just swung the 2020 nomination away from Sanders and toward Biden. Until progressives figure out how to do better with black voters, they are going to have a hard time winning. And the same strategies that will help progressives win more black voters in the primaries are also likely to win over more swing voters in a general election.
David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief for The Times, was the founding editor of The Upshot and the head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
Anyone wanna start a nihilism political party with me?
I'm not showing anything. I hate hecklers with a passion.Really showing your ass over Joe fukking Biden, my guy?
Man, Joe potentially nominating Jaime Dimon as Treasury Secretary is very concerning for me. I already wasn't enthusiastic about voting for him (or Bernie for that matter).
However, this just makes it even worse. Jaime Dimon is a scumbag and plays a big role in why the Recession happened in 2008. Come the fukk on Joe. You already do a poor job with young voters...don't depress young voter turnout even more. He still needs enough young people to show up and vote for him.
Man, why did Democratic voters really vote for these 2 old white men? 
However, this just makes it even worse. Jaime Dimon is a scumbag and plays a big role in why the Recession happened in 2008. Come the fukk on Joe. You already do a poor job with young voters...don't depress young voter turnout even more. He still needs enough young people to show up and vote for him.
Man, why did Democratic voters really vote for these 2 old white men?
fivethirtyeight.com
Why So Many Black Voters Are Democrats, Even When They Aren’t Liberal
Chryl Laird
4-5 minutes
At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes — the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That’s one of the reasons why South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 29 is seen as a bellwether for the Democratic field — if a candidate can’t win a state where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black, what does that mean for his or her candidacy going forward?
But black voters aren’t the monolith exit polls make them out to be. Pew Research Center found that a quarter of black Democrats identify as conservative, and 43 percent identify as moderate.
So how to square that circle? How can a big chunk of black voters be unwavering Democrats who differ ideologically from the party? We spent years investigating that question for our new book, “Steadfast Democrats.” We found that black voters are so loyal to the Democratic party in part because of social pressure from other black voters. Rather than throw the whole book at you, we’re going to highlight a couple pieces of evidence that show how that dynamic works.
Our first piece of evidence came from survey data collected by the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In that survey, interviewers asked respondents face to face which party they identify with. We then looked at the race of the interviewer and the race of the respondents to see if black respondents generally answered differently depending on who asked the question. We concluded black respondents were more likely to report they were a Democrat when they were with a black interviewer (96.4 percent) than a nonblack interviewer (83.9 percent) or an online survey (85 percent).Black interviewers weren’t randomly assigned to respondents, so it’s possible that the respondents interviewed by black interviewers differed from those interviewed by nonblack interviewers. For instance, black interviewers were more common in the South. However, the effect of having a black interviewer does not diminish when controlling for a host of pretreatment variables, including being in the South.
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We ran a separate study around the 2012 presidential election to test the same theory. We wanted to determine the likelihood that black individuals would defect from the norm (supporting Democratic candidates) when offered money. In the study, 106 black students at a midwest college were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Each was given $10 by an interviewer and told the money could be donated to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. Subjects were informed that they were not obligated to donate the money and that they could decide to keep it. But if they chose to give it to a candidate, $10 would be donated for every $1 they allocated. (This was just a ruse — the money was not actually donated.) They were also told that they should make their decision once they entered a separate room, away from the interviewer, where there would be one contribution box for Romney and another for Obama.
But not all the students were in the room alone. One group of students was, but two other groups were paired with an actor pretending to be another participant. In each scenario, the actor was instructed to walk into the room and immediately say out loud that he or she was donating all the money to Obama, then make the donation. One group paired participants with a white actor; in the other, the actor was black.
People in the first group — the loners — kept most of the money, donating on average $3.74 to the Obama campaign. In the group with the white actor, individuals donated $4.45 to the Obama campaign. This amount was not statistically different from the scenario in which no actor was present. But in the third group, with the black actor, the average Obama contribution increased to $6.85 — a significant increase relative to the group where no actor was present.Only two subjects donated to Romney, so there was not enough data to perform the same analysis.
">2
In other words, black participants were less likely to pocket the money when another black person said he or she would be donating to Obama. The participant felt pressure to comply with the expectation of behavior by someone similar to them.
As you see the results from South Carolina and other states with a percentage of black Democrats, keep that dynamic in mind. The values of the Democratic party appeal to many black voters, but their steadfast loyalty to the party goes beyond common interest. Social pressure is what cements that relationship between the black electorate and the Democratic party.
Why So Many Black Voters Are Democrats, Even When They Aren’t Liberal
Chryl Laird
4-5 minutes
At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes — the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That’s one of the reasons why South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 29 is seen as a bellwether for the Democratic field — if a candidate can’t win a state where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black, what does that mean for his or her candidacy going forward?
But black voters aren’t the monolith exit polls make them out to be. Pew Research Center found that a quarter of black Democrats identify as conservative, and 43 percent identify as moderate.
So how to square that circle? How can a big chunk of black voters be unwavering Democrats who differ ideologically from the party? We spent years investigating that question for our new book, “Steadfast Democrats.” We found that black voters are so loyal to the Democratic party in part because of social pressure from other black voters. Rather than throw the whole book at you, we’re going to highlight a couple pieces of evidence that show how that dynamic works.
Our first piece of evidence came from survey data collected by the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In that survey, interviewers asked respondents face to face which party they identify with. We then looked at the race of the interviewer and the race of the respondents to see if black respondents generally answered differently depending on who asked the question. We concluded black respondents were more likely to report they were a Democrat when they were with a black interviewer (96.4 percent) than a nonblack interviewer (83.9 percent) or an online survey (85 percent).Black interviewers weren’t randomly assigned to respondents, so it’s possible that the respondents interviewed by black interviewers differed from those interviewed by nonblack interviewers. For instance, black interviewers were more common in the South. However, the effect of having a black interviewer does not diminish when controlling for a host of pretreatment variables, including being in the South.
">1
We ran a separate study around the 2012 presidential election to test the same theory. We wanted to determine the likelihood that black individuals would defect from the norm (supporting Democratic candidates) when offered money. In the study, 106 black students at a midwest college were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Each was given $10 by an interviewer and told the money could be donated to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. Subjects were informed that they were not obligated to donate the money and that they could decide to keep it. But if they chose to give it to a candidate, $10 would be donated for every $1 they allocated. (This was just a ruse — the money was not actually donated.) They were also told that they should make their decision once they entered a separate room, away from the interviewer, where there would be one contribution box for Romney and another for Obama.
But not all the students were in the room alone. One group of students was, but two other groups were paired with an actor pretending to be another participant. In each scenario, the actor was instructed to walk into the room and immediately say out loud that he or she was donating all the money to Obama, then make the donation. One group paired participants with a white actor; in the other, the actor was black.
People in the first group — the loners — kept most of the money, donating on average $3.74 to the Obama campaign. In the group with the white actor, individuals donated $4.45 to the Obama campaign. This amount was not statistically different from the scenario in which no actor was present. But in the third group, with the black actor, the average Obama contribution increased to $6.85 — a significant increase relative to the group where no actor was present.Only two subjects donated to Romney, so there was not enough data to perform the same analysis.
">2
In other words, black participants were less likely to pocket the money when another black person said he or she would be donating to Obama. The participant felt pressure to comply with the expectation of behavior by someone similar to them.
As you see the results from South Carolina and other states with a percentage of black Democrats, keep that dynamic in mind. The values of the Democratic party appeal to many black voters, but their steadfast loyalty to the party goes beyond common interest. Social pressure is what cements that relationship between the black electorate and the Democratic party.
Who would you suggest for treasury secretary? You need someone with banking experience to run that agency and Jamie has JPMorgan chase doing exceptionally well, and he is our competitor.Man, Joe potentially nominating Jaime Dimon as Treasury Secretary is very concerning for me. I already wasn't enthusiastic about voting for him (or Bernie for that matter).
However, this just makes it even worse. Jaime Dimon is a scumbag and plays a big role in why the Recession happened in 2008. Come the fukk on Joe. You already do a poor job with young voters...don't depress young voter turnout even more. He still needs enough young people to show up and vote for him.
Man, why did Democratic voters really vote for these 2 old white men?