Warren nailed him right out the gate. If you aren’t watching you should – must see TV!
doublemansays
Good lord. It is ugly. Bloomberg ain’t ready for this. It’s clear he’s an awful candidate. I hope the media narrative from this debate is how bad he is .
Bad night for Pete as well. Getting called out on his bad policies and smugness.
Warren is masterful. Best debate performance of anyone by far in this campaign. Looks like the “unity” candidate idea is out the window – as it should be. The fighter role is much better for her.
Bernie is good. His usual consistent talking points, but with some more edge. He tore Pete a new one. Like always, Bernie probably isn’t converting a lot of new folks with debate performances alone. He has to get sharper on his socialism defense I think.
Biden not doing great, but no one is noticing. He’s not the target nor on the attack. He wants to get to SC as fast as possible and hold on to his lead.
Amy’s hatred of Pete is so pure. She’s had some stumbles tonight. Uneven.
Christophersays
The Pete-Amy spat surprised me. That was probably the last pairing I would have predicted to go at it, though I wasn’t expecting Warren to go after Klobuchar as hard as she did either. I’m not convinced fighter and unity are mutually exclusive in this context.
doublemansays
Yeah, Warren’s later-in-the-debate attack on Amy seemed strange. I loved the Bloomberg stuff. That one on Amy seemed unnecessary.
Pete ain’t winning over anyone with how he turned to Amy and went in on the immigration stuff.
jotaemeisays
Klobuchar had previously gone after Mayo McKinsley in at least one other debate. So, some of us were looking forward to a reprise in Nevada.
doublemansays
Wow. Chuck Todd asked everyone if they thought the person with the most pledged delegates should be the nominee.
Everyone except Sanders said to let the convention process work.
Insane position. Very sad to see everyone support it.
Trickle upsays
“Insane?”
Explain.
How it seems to me: Sanders 49%, Warren, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, K.obachar, Biden at 10% each: no brainer, Bernie is right.
But Bloomberg the “leader” with 17% to everyone else’s 16.5%: nope, that is what conventions are for.
SomervilleTomsays
I think Chris Matthews summed it up rather nicely after the debate: In 2016, when Bernie Sanders was not the candidate with the most delegates, he opposed awarding the nomination to the candidate with the most delegates going into convention. In 2020, while Bernie Sanders leads the field, he supports it.
It’s a position of expediency and it’s wrong.
fredrichlaricciasays
Joe Biden’s strongest debate to date. Clear on ACA reform with option, not mandatory MFA which couldn’t even pass muster in Bernie’s home state of Vermont, let alone the US Senate. He hit Sanders for not voting for the ’07 Comprehensive Immigration bill that BS called ‘slavery’ yet would have created 6 million new citizens. .
doublemansays
You’re recapping Joe’s interview with MSNBC after the debate not his performance in the debate. No one remembers one line from him on stage last night.
He got the VT story wrong, too. They never implemented it and then got rid of it. They did a study and found that yes taxes would have to go up to cover a system for 300,000 people (almost half he state was exempted from the plan, which made it more expensive) in a state-funded system that cannot print its own money like the federal government can. When the VT governor saw a high payroll tax number, he killed the plan without any additional work. It’s much less expensive per person to cover the entire country than to cover a single small state. The federal government has funding mechanisms not available to states. Yes, taxes go up, but overall costs go down. People pay less – but I guess paying less in taxes is much scarier than paying more in premiums, copays, deductibles, and direct out of pocket. This may be an effective political attack against M4A, but it’s a lie. It would be nice if Dems didn’t use it to undercut such a progressive policy.
fredrichlaricciasays
I remember Joe Biden saying he was the only leader with coattails that helped Democrats win back the House in 2018 AND will help them win the Senate in 2020.
If Bernie is the nominee, how many down ballot Democratic candidates are going to want a socialist campaigning for them?
johntmaysays
Bernie is not a socialist. This is BlueMassGroup, not Fox news.
fredrichlaricciasays
Bernie describes himself as leader of a revolutionary democratic socialist movement.
Hell, Bloomberg and Trump are already attacking him as a Communist!
Get real.!
Christophersays
I winced when Bloomberg went that far, however.
petrsays
Bernie is not a socialist. This is BlueMassGroup, not Fox news.
Yes, this is not Fox News, which means we must deal with the truth as it is. And the truth is that Sen. Bernie Sanders is a self-described Democratic Socialist and always has been. It has been his most consistent stance.
terrymcgintysays
I wouldn’t say it has been consistent, because more often than not over the years he described himself as a “socialist”, not a democratic socialist. That only started with regularity in 2016.
terrymcgintysays
Huh? I admired Bernie for decades BECAUSE he insisted on joining a party in Vermont called, verbatim, “Socialist”. Wadda you talk?
doublemansays
Pretty much everyone will want the most popular person in the party who can turn out enormous crowds campaigning for them. If Bloomberg is the nominee they’ll be begging him to stay away and just send checks.
Yes, 2018 had some important victories by moderates (some of whom vote like absolute garbage in the House, by the way, or like Sinema in the Senate – barf!). 2018 was also the year of AOC, Ihlan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. It wasn’t just some moderate wave year.
Christophersays
AOC and Pressley held strongly Dem districts, so not really part of the blue wave. However, they would not get elected in some of the districts flipped by moderates.
jotaemeisays
I remember Joe Biden saying he was the only leader with coattails that helped Democrats win back the House in 2018
Biden’s known for telling tall tales – either willfully or from getting confused – but he believes that he was on the ballot in 2018 and is the reason that Dems retook control of the House of Representatives? Oh boy.
doublemansays
No. He was wrong in 2016. He is right now.
The person with the most pledged delegates (i.e. the person who received the most votes in the primaries) should be the nominee.
fredrichlaricciasays
No, Bernie was right in 2016 and is wrong now. The Democratic party rules are that a candidate must win a MAJORITY, not plurality, of delegate votes to win the nomination of the party. Those are the rules . And if that requires multiple ballots to reach majority, so be it.
jconwaysays
I interpreted Bernie’s comments that he would have either an outright majority or a big enough plurality on the first ballot that a second ballot would be superfluous. I think Bernie going in even with 40% would mean he’s the nominee, otherwise there’s a real risk of splitting the party. Bernie would be wise to pick a centrist VP.
Also I liked what I saw tonight. Warren is making a strong comeback which could resonate in NV and SC, I thought Biden had one of his better debates in the early rounds. Amy and Pete neutralized one another and Bloomberg just got taken to the woodshed. It’s hard for me to see how he recovers but people who don’t watch debates might not care.
fredrichlaricciasays
It’s time to get real.
40% is NOT a majority, so Bernie is definitely NOT the nominee.
There already IS a split in the party between the Sanders revolutionary socialist wing and center left Democrats (Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar).
Bloomberg? Stick a fork in him. He’s done.
doublemansays
If Bernie has 40% and is not the nominee, we will guarantee a Trump victory.
I hope the party is not that dumb, but I’m not convinced. Party diehards like you seem to be fine with that outcome.
There is really little evidence that mainstream Dems will go anywhere. ~90%+ say they will support the nominee regardless of who it is. Also, Sanders is the candidate with highest overall approval from Democratic voters (shocking, but true). The idea that he is too divisive in the party seems to be a storyline of online people not real life.
Not giving Sanders a nomination when he has a clear plurality, however, will lose the left from the Democratic Party for good. Young people will be gone from the party.
fredrichlaricciasays
Your theory that Democrats will guarantee a Trump victory if Bernie’s tantrum, foot-stomping, screaming 40% is not placated at the convention is just wrong.
The eventual Democratic nominee, whoever he or she is, must demonstrate an ability to build a Big Tent winning coalition by negotiating with ALL factions of the party —
including the center left — in order to win majority.
Thus far, Bernie has not demonstrated any desire or ability to do what is necessary in order to win by the rules.
jconwaysays
Thus far, Bernie has not demonstrated any desire or ability to do what is necessary in order to win by the rules.
How is competing in the primaries and winning delegates not playing by the rules? What rules has he broken? That’s an awful incendiary charge. I wonder with all your Fox News hang ups over the world socialism if you’re ready to support the nominee if his name is not Joe Biden.
fredrichlaricciasays
Bull!
You know damn well that I publicly stated on DAY f****** ONE that I will the support the Democratic nominee.
fredrichlaricciasays
Are you a Democrat this year?
Trickle upsays
What if Bernie gets 40% and Joe, say, or Amy gets 39? Is it still so clear cut for you? What if Joe gets 41?
I agree with you about the “clear plurality.” But what does that mean? For how small a plurality, and how close a second-place runner, does that apply?
doublemansays
If Bernie gets 40% and Amy gets 39% that should be the ticket.
A near tie is very very unlikely, a clear plurality is very likely.
Christophersays
That would definitely be smart.
fredrichlaricciasays
Wrong, again.
The nominee, and the nominee alone, chooses his or her running mate based on a variety of factors. It has NOTHING to do with other candidates’ vote tally at the convention.
doublemansays
I am not making an argument about what DOES happen at a convention.
It is about what SHOULD happen.
The winner of the most votes and pledged delegates during the primaries SHOULD be the nominee.
If there were two candidates close in delegate count who combined for a significant majority, those candidates SHOULD be on a combined ticket.
SomervilleTomsays
@The winner of the most votes and pledged delegates during the primaries SHOULD be the nominee:
Not when the result is that 60% of the voters rejected a “winning” candidate.
In an evenly divided three-way race, each candidate gets 33.3%. By your standard, if the result is 40/30/30, you argue that the candidate with 40% should be the nominee.
I think that’s just plain wrong. I think the result is minority rule, and I think the result is likely to result in disaster in the general.
I think if Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were on top of a 40/30/30 split, you’d be shouting about how corrupt and wrong “the system” is.
jconwaysays
Double man is making it very clear that the popular vote total is what matters more than the delegate count. I think if the popular vote leader is Sanders or anyone else going into the convention, it makes sense for the party to rally around him or her. This is also more reason why we should have ranked choice primaries to ensure that the ultimate nominee is supported by a majority of voters.
fredrichlaricciasays
Politics is a hardball contact sport, not beanbag.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda doesn’t cut.
Hell, if my aunt had b**** she’d be my uncle.
centralmassdadsays
This problem seems like an artifact of the weird way delegates are awarded proportionately. That’s not how it works in November and I’m not sure what the rationale for doing it in March is. It just seems like a way for a minority candidate to run a zombie campaign well into early summer, and it doesn’t help, and seems to actively encourage there to be 15 candidates well beyond the point that such is helpful at all.
Obama was able to overcome this self-inflicted handicap; Clinton was not, and it isn’t looking great for Sanders now. If the primaries were run well, he would have every delegate so far. If the states about to vote are uncomfortable with Mr. Soviet Union as the nominee, then those primary results will reflect that. In either event, the field is thinned quickly to one or two candidates, who can then duke it out in the big states, and then you have someone who won, instead of the possibility that someone can win with more votes cast against than for.
As it is now, it is like playing a season of football to qualify for the championship, but the championship is in baseball.
Christophersays
We have a hybrid of proportional and winner take some since we have the 15% threshold. I would award strictly proportional letting the math by default block those who can’t even round to a single whole delegate.
jconwaysays
That was not the case in 1960 when it was obviously a way to prevent a prolonged convention and bring the party together. I might note, Kennedy won a very narrow on the first ballot and has strong incentives to bring the Johnson people on board. So I think a scenario where Bernie is both the clear popular vote and delegate leader heading into the convention is one where the delegates selecting another nominee is a big problem. A scenario where Bernie comes in the delegate leader but has not won a popular vote majority of very different, but problematic for other reasons. I hope after Super Tuesday we have an undisputed frontrunner and can rally around him or her.
terrymcgintysays
That’s a reasonable argument. In fact, it’s so reasonable, that it’s likely that over 50% of delegates would agree with you. So in such a scenario, that should be put to the test at the convention.
(Nightmare ticket, by the way, unless we’re the white party or something.)
Christophersays
Comments like that and it makes you wonder why some of us feel Sanders supporters are trying to hold the nomination hostage. Whomever the convention picks will be worlds better than Trump. Earlier you used the word “insane”. I’ll tell you what’s insane – allowing Trump to be re-elected because some people can’t contain their temper tantrum over inside baseball!
doublemansays
We just like democracy. That’s all.
SomervilleTomsays
My understanding of democracy (with a lower-case “d”) is based on the premise of majority rule. I don’t remember anybody going to the barricades to fight for “plurality rule”.
A system that anoints a candidate that lost 60% of the vote is not “democratic” as I understand democracy.
It gets even worse when there are more candidates.. There are six candidates right now. It’s mathematically possible for the candidate with the most votes to have just 20% of the total (if none of the six drop out).
Will you argue that a candidate rejected by 80% of primary voters should be the nominee? Will you argue that that is “democracy”?
doublemansays
I’d say that the person who gets the most votes should win. Yeah, that’s an OK definition of democracy for me.
If the rule is “majority only wins” and not “most votes wins” then we’re going to have to throw out thousands and thousands of elections each year.
How is a system that anoints someone that lost 70% of the vote over someone who lost 60% of the vote more democratic???
SomervilleTomsays
As to your last sentence, who proposed that?
The bedrock principle of democracy is majority rule. There are a variety of ways to winnow the field to two candidates, some better than others.
Many of us don’t like a President elected by a plurality rather than a majority. Many of us find it undemocratic that the GOP majority in Congress is supported by a minority of the population.
Here, according to 538, is a list of party nominees (of both parties) ordered by popular vote in their respective primary:
2000 D Al Gore 75% +54
1988 R George H.W. Bush 68 +49
2000 R George W. Bush 62 +31
2004 D John Kerry 61 +42
1980 R Ronald Reagan 60 +24
1996 R Bob Dole 59 +38
2016 D Hillary Clinton 55 +12
1992 D Bill Clinton 52 +32
2012 R Mitt Romney 52 +32
2008 R John McCain 47 +25
2008 D Barack Obama 47 -1
2016 R Donald Trump 45 +20
1988 D Michael Dukakis 42 +13
1976 D Jimmy Carter 40 +26
1984 D Walter Mondale 38 +2
1972 D George McGovern 25 -1
In the above list, the first figure is the percentage of primary votes the candidate gathered. The second figure is the candidate’s margin over the next highest competitor.
Here are the nominees who won their primary races by a plurality, rather than majority:
2008 R John McCain 47 +25
2008 D Barack Obama 47 -1
2016 R Donald Trump 45 +20
1988 D Michael Dukakis 42 +13
1976 D Jimmy Carter 40 +26
1984 D Walter Mondale 38 +2
1972 D George McGovern 25 -1
Here are the Democratic nominees with a majority:
2000 D Al Gore 75% +54
2004 D John Kerry 61 +42
2016 D Hillary Clinton 55 +12
1992 D Bill Clinton 52 +32
Of that last only one — John Kerry — failed to win the popular vote nationwide.
Here are the Democratic nominees with a plurality:
2008 D Barack Obama 47 -1
1988 D Michael Dukakis 42 +13
1976 D Jimmy Carter 40 +26
1984 D Walter Mondale 38 +2
1972 D George McGovern 25 -1
Of that list, only two won the popular vote.
When you compare those two lists, which group do you think produced the better nominee?
doublemansays
As to your last sentence, who proposed that?
You implied it by saying that the winner of a plurality should not necessarily be the nominee. That means someone with less than a plurality of pledged delegates (or perhaps even zero delegates) should receive the majority of delegates – which is somehow more democratic in your mind.
When you compare those two lists, which group do you think produced the better nominee?
The majority winners having the two people who lost the most consequential general elections of the last 30 years doesn’t impress me.
Also, Barack Obama and Carter are the only Democratic candidates on your list to win a majority of votes in a general election.
Now let’s do a list of times a candidate won the Presidency after not being the leader in pledged delegates . . .
doublemansays
I agree it’s not great for a winner of a plurality to get the nomination, but giving the nomination to someone who is NOT the leader in primary votes and pledged delegates is straight up catastrophic.
SomervilleTomsays
I think this exchange has just made a compelling case for RCV.
There is no solution with the current system.
Trickle upsays
Kind of ironic since RCV is essentially a paper mechanical version of what a convention does when it goes into multiple ballots.
Christophersays
What is your view on RCV? Many of us favor it because our current system allows a winner with just a plurality even if the majority does not want that person. Would you be OK if a second convention ballot were only among the top two finishers on the first?
Trickle upsays
I am entirely in favor of it in electoral settings, and in many parliamentary settings. But if you go to the trouble and expense of bringing together an entire grass-roots convention, I think you should let it grind its merry way. Multiple ballots until we have a winner.
Otherwise dispense with the conventions and have a national RCV primary, the end.
jconwaysays
Otherwise dispense with the conventions and have a national RCV primary, the end.
How wonderful would that be? A citizen can dream. Maybe we can even dispense with parties at some point too.
Christophersays
No to a national primary. Only the well-established and financed would have a prayer. No parties too? – ugh!
jconwaysays
A system that anoints a candidate that lost 60% of the vote is not “democratic” as I understand democracy.
I agree Tom but by that standard neither Coakley nor Katherine Clark won democratic elections. Neither did Lori Trahan. All ran in crowded fields and got plurality victories.
I think the bigger realization we have yet to have on this thread is that the convention is not directly democratic. It’s an electoral college and we are sensing delegates to vote on our behalf at the convention. After the first ballot, according to the rules all candidates agreed to, they are free to vote however they please and it’s a free for all. I do think it would be unwise for the party to elevate Sanders with a small plurality and equally unwise to block Sanders if he has a large plurality.
SomervilleTomsays
@by that standard neither Coakley nor Katherine Clark won democratic elections:
I don’t know about Katherine Clark (I’m not in her district), so I can’t speak to her.
I do know about Ms. Coakley, and I’d say that her nomination was further evidence of a failed system. Similarly, the campaign finance abuses of Ms. Trahan suggest to me that her nomination is certainly not a success story for the party.
I think that some sort of state-by-state RCV primary is preferable to the chaos we have today. I don’t like the idea of doing all the elections on the same day because I agree with Christopher that there is value in spreading out the states so that candidates have an opportunity to focus on smaller states.
I like the approach of having a limited primary season in an randomly-selected order each year and with each primary being RCV so that we eliminate archaic and obsolete artifacts like state conventions and — to hear Christopher describe it — perhaps even state party organizations (at least as we know them now).
If a state party has no effective power, if state caucuses are poorly attended and yield content-free results, and if state conventions yield un-democratic results in comparison to RCV primary elections then why do we continue to do ANY of it?
jconwaysays
Yes and no. I think if Bernie really wanted to go for bat for small d democracy he would have pressed to eliminate caucuses and pushed for ranked choice voting. He is undisputedly benefiting in a fractured field from caucuses and first past the post voting. Both anti-majoritarian voting systems in my judgment. If he comes in with 40% he has a strong case, if it’s 31/30/29 it’s an entirely different ballgame.
Christophersays
Rules require a majority, so that would still require a second ballot to confirm. The ex officio delegates are experienced politicians so they probably understand that if the plurality is convincing the smart move is to go along.
Trickle upsays
You give them much credit.
It seems more and more likely that the superdelegates are going to settle this thing. I really hope they conduct themselves impeccably leading up to that.
No more loose talk about “saving” the party, or examples of Wasserman-Schultiz-esq favoritism. Or, it could go very badly for the eventual nominee afterwards.
Christophersays
Sometimes saving the party is exactly the job of the ex officio delegates.
petrsays
Sometimes saving the party is exactly the job of the ex officio delegates.
Maybe so, but if they want to actually do that job well they need to forgo any and all credit for it: they should STFU and save the party, not their ego..
Trickle upsays
I wish they would behave like it.
terrymcgintysays
The system of requiring at least half the elected delegates to support a candidate has been the system since the 19th century. Do you not like political parties or something? Why was Bernie wrong in 2016?
The way delegates are chosen in Democratic Party is quite democratic, in part thanks to the very reforms that Bernie rightly pushed through after 2016. Bernie was right to push those changes through then.
bob-gardnersays
It’s apples and oranges to compare Sanders’ position on delegates in 2016 (when so many super delegates were included) to his position in 2020.
SomervilleTomsays
Do you mean the beginning of the 2016 campaign — when Mr. Sanders opposed superdelegates — or do you mean the end, when Mr. Sanders supported superdelegates?
In 2016, Mr. Sanders was diametrically opposed to superdelegates at the start of the campaign. By the end of the campaign, when gaining superdelegates was his only prayer of a nomination, he supported them.
Mr. Sanders posture towards the Democratic Party and its nomination procedures has been opportunistic since at least 2016. Of course, the party has also been opportunistic in its embrace of Mr. Sanders for the same period.
It is frankly a mystery to me that Mr. Sanders is even allowed on the ticket when he hasn’t ever been a registered Democrat.
jconwaysays
I uprate all but your last sentence which is silly.
Christophersays
I’m glad Sanders runs as a Dem rather than third party, but I wish we wouldn’t bend to his demands so much when he won’t join.
Christophersays
It’s the right position, though I would have qualified it by saying the person with the most pledged delegates has a strong argument for being the nominee. Remember, most pledged could mean plurality, not necessarily majority. Nobody is questioning whether the candidate with the majority of delegates should be the nominee.
Trickle upsays
Sure they are, Christopher.
SomervilleTomsays
Indeed, I am.
I think your point upthread that RCV is quite similar to RCV is important.
A significant advantage of RCV, in comparison to horse-trading in a contested convention, is that RCV does a better — or at least more predictable — job of ensuring that each primary voter’s voice is heard.
SomervilleTomsays
Oh, maybe Christopher and I are agreeing.
I think the candidate with the majority of primary votes should win. If the primary is working properly, that means that the candidate with the majority of primary delegates should win (because delegates are a proxy mechanism for voters).
I think that a majority (as opposed to a plurality) should be required.
Christophersays
Absolutely, if one candidate gets 1991 delegates on the first ballot, s/he is the nominee.
SomervilleTomsays
I saw exactly two winners last night, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden struck me as a step behind and off-target. Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar seemed to be fighting for who was going claim the title of third runner-up — nobody cares. Mr. Bloomberg was just demolished last night.
I disagree that last night’s debacle killed Mr. Bloomberg as a candidate. If that were true, then none of the candidates would still be on the stage because each of the current candidates has survived at least one painfully bad debate performance. Published reports are that both Ms. Warren and Mr. Biden reached out to Mr. Bloomberg privately during and after the debate to say something to the effect of “Don’t worry, we’ve all been there, we’ve just had more practice than you.”
I think we’re going to see the campaign narrow to Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Sanders, and Ms. Warren sooner rather than later. I don’t think any of the other candidates will survive super Tuesday.
In my view, Mr. Sanders did his usual debate performance, Ms. Warren helped herself enormously, and Mr. Bloomberg hurt himself enormously. In other words, I don’t think Mr. Sanders attracted any new supporters or repelled any existing supporters last night. I think Ms. Warren attracted many new supporters, and I think Mr. Bloomberg lost ground. I think last night will prove to be a net negative for the other three in terms of primary voter support.
doublemansays
I don’t think any of the other candidates will survive super Tuesday.
I think Amy will move heaven and earth to not drop out before Pete. lol.
SomervilleTomsays
Indeed. Well, she might outlast him by a day or two.
Christophersays
Warren definitely. I didn’t see anything from Sanders I hadn’t already. I think Biden may have had his best debate so far.
SomervilleTomsays
@ [Joe] Biden may have had his best debate so far:
That may well be true. In my view, he has never been competitive. I think that’s why he’s already so far behind in actual votes, delegates, and polling.
Let me just cite an example of what I mean.
He attempted to join the attack on Mr. Bloomberg by citing Mr. Bloomberg’s 2004 support for George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Mr. Biden seems to forget that that affront was sixteen long years ago. Mr. Bloomberg’s huge donations to our successful 2018 mid-term victories more than compensate for that.
In my view, a fatal weakness of Mr. Biden’s campaign is that his accomplishments are all fading into the distant past. They may only be a few elections ago. but today’s 18 year old voters were first graders when Joe Biden helped accomplish the ACA.
I think a winning campaign — whether for the primary or the general election — has to be about the events of today and tomorrow. I think that criteria rules out Mr. Biden.
Trickle upsays
No place to go but up, for sure.
jconwaysays
Biden was great in the tag team against Bloomberg, but felt like an also ran when the debate moved on. He seemed to be begging the moderators for speaking time and then awkwardly yielding it back like he was still on the Senate. He came very close to stuttering a few times too. I wish we had the Biden who clobbered Palin and Ryan from 2008 and 2012, it would be a much better race. We don’t, and his supporters have to concede that. It’s really too bad he didn’t stay out.
Christophersays
Stuttering is a thing he has struggled with and I really don’t think we should hold it against him. I think if you get him one on one with a GOPer we may still see what we saw previously from him. I’m not going to make the concession you call for in the last sentence.
centralmassdadsays
I wasn’t ready to anoint Bloomberg prior to a debate or primary, and I’m not ready to leave him for dead just yet. I still think that there is a sizable group of voters who are casting about for a Not Bernie, Not Warren candidate, and one has not emerged from the pack yet. Most of the pundits and others who are, today, posting things like this thread are those who a week ago thought a Bloomberg nomination would be The Single Worst Thing Ever in All of History, and didn’t need much convincing anyway. I guess we will see how much these things harm him with voters.
Biden doing better than he has been does not help the emergence of a Non-Sanders/Warren candidate at all. On the other hand, Warren’s signs of life might slow Sanders’ roll enough so that a Non-Sanders?Warren candidate has time to coalesce.
Trickle upsays
Well really, these people want Deval Patrick. But they blew that.
In my view, the only non S, non W candidate who is viable at this point is Warren. Or Sanders. Hey, non people, you’d get half your non wish either way.
centralmassdadsays
The main appeal of Patrick was his similarity to Obama, whom I wish could run again. I’m glad I have the luxury of living in MA, so that I don’t have to worry so much about voting third party or write in, which is what I will most likely do.
The establishment erred in gutting Warren so early in the process when she appeared to overtake Biden. They essentially deflated her and inflated Bernie in the process. It also cannot be overstated that Biden is like the Jeb! of this cycle. He sucked a lot of money and earned media that should have gone to more relevant center left figures like Harris and Booker. They both erred by moving leftward when they should have stayed true to their own center-left positions, but they were far more viable general election options than Biden. You need coalition builders and unifiers, and unfortunately the remaining candidates are all factional to one degree or another. Hopefully Warren can bring the Biden and Bernie people together or Bernie can put a younger center left candidate on the ticket. I hear Harris and Booker aren’t busy…
doublemansays
It seems that the candidates who couldn’t break 5% being the unifying “viable” ones doesn’t have a lot of evidence other than feeling. And the ones with the highest overall favorability ratings in the party being the “factional” ones also seems out of line with available polling – but certainly very much in line with cable news punditry.
jconwaysays
I think it’s disingenuous for the media not to call the guy who won the most votes in the first two contests the frontrunner. It’s also something that has helped Bernie tremendously. We will likely wake up on Super Tuesday with Bernie having run the table in the first four contests and suddenly nobody can stop him. The other candidates should have attacked him but the were too busy tearing down Bloomberg (which was awesome to watch) and one another.
I also think it’s disingenuous to say someone who presently has just 30% of the party behind him in polling is the majority choice. I think a lot more Democratic voters who liked Booker or Harris or Warren or Biden were deciding between their campaigns, and not necessarily rejecting them.
Christophersays
Technically Pete is the frontrunner since delegates are what matter, but I’ve heard Sanders referred to as such plenty.
jconwaysays
Think Pete can win another contest? I don’t. He’s the Marco Rubio of this cycle with Amy being the Christie. It’s expectations and media coverage that matter.
Christophersays
Get back to me after Super Tuesday before we count anyone out, though I admit to being skeptical of his chances in the South.
jconwaysays
That’s a big problem though. Usually the field is down to 2 or 3 by now. So I see a bottleneck to be the anti-Bernie while his support inches closer and closer to 40% an eventually 50+1. Or, everyone else gets their 10-15% and we have a contested convention. IA really screwed the pooch. It cannot be underestimated how different things would be if IA produced a clear winner when it was supposed to.
Christophersays
Why do you seem to be in a rush? I for one like it when the May states get a real say in choosing our nominee. I thought you would have too given the complaining you’ve been doing about how much influence the early states supposedly have.
doublemansays
Really surprised by Pete’s fundraising numbers this year. He raised $6M in January (for comparison, Bernie raised $25M, Warren raised $10.3M). He has $6.6M on hand (Bernie has $16.8M, Warren has $2.2M). Only 29% of the money he has raised this year has come from people who donated less than $200. For 2019, this number was at 44%. He’s burning a ton and not raising a ton.
Pete is apparently at $11M so far in February. For comparison, Amy is at $12M for February and spending a lot less.
No reports from Sanders fundraising in February, but it’s safe to assume it’s better than fine. No news from Warren yet either, but I suspect she’s raised as much or more since the debate than she raised in the first two and half weeks of the month.
doublemansays
Pete’s lead in Iowa SDEs is down to 0.08 and there are still known errors in calculations in some precincts that have not been remedied by the state. He’ll likely lose that lead during the full recanvassing because the current errors have been favorable in his direction.
Another thing that adds to “frontrunner” status is consistent national and state polling in all upcoming states. Buttigieg is not expected to win a single other state, including his home state.
I also think it’s disingenuous to say someone who presently has just 30% of the party behind him in polling is the majority choice.
I didn’t say majority choice, but saying someone is only factional doesn’t seem right when they lead everyone in the race on the question of “who are you considering voting for?” (by double digits on this question compared to people like Pete and Amy) and have the highest overall favorability in the party (shocking, but true), and also twice as many donors as anyone else. If you’re listening to Chris Matthews and MSNBC you’d think that it’s only a radical, destructive faction of the party rather than a broadly popular one. Actually, if you are listening to Chris Matthews, you may be worried that Sanders is going to start executions of liberals in Central Park.
There is an assumption that the Sanders ceiling is 25-30%. Maybe. We’ll see. There’s also the potential that after the first four states, the guy looks like a winner and a bandwagon happens (he is the second choice of many Biden voters, afterall) and states could go for Sanders with 40-50%.
Winning changes things.
doublemansays
Also, interesting to see these two-person race matchups.
Sanders beats everyone in a hypothetical two person race. The narrowest race is Sanders v. Warren (44-42) followed by Sanders v. Biden (48-44).
He’s +21 on Klobuchar
+17 on Pete
+15 on Bloomberg
Obviously everything is hypothetical, but if these are the results, where’s the evidence that Sanders is more “factional” than anyone else running?
jconwaysays
I think the caveat is those polls are taking place now. It might be different as candidates drop out and lanes consolidate. It might not be. My top two picks for the outcome right now are Bernie winning outright or a contested convention. It’s also proof that the establishment should have backed Warren if they wanted to block Bernie rather than ganging up on her over her health care plan.
jconwaysays
I don’t doubt the bandwagon effect is already taking place. Bernie is front in national polls and a point behind Biden in black voters. It’s still a long way to go before he gets to 50%, and some magnanimous overtures right his rivals and their supporters by him and his supporters couldn’t hurt. He doesn’t have the entire party yet, and it would be nice if he and his supporters recognized they needed him.
Honestly it’s my interactions with Sanders supporters here and online matched with Warren’s debate performance that are keeping me in her camp. Just as Fred yelling at me that only Biden can win (after a 4th and 5th place finish no less) isn’t helping me come to his side, neither is the insistence on Sanders inevitability. The likeliest outcome right now is he comes into a convention with 30-40% of the delegates and votes and will need to convince the other delegates he can beat Trump. That’s the homework he and his supporters have to do.
Trickle upsays
It really astonishes me that Harris (or Booker, or Deval Patrick) is not here when the establishment needs her. Had she hung in with more consistently establishment positions and vibe, she would be positioned to be flavor of the month going into Super Tuesday.
I say this as an observer, since I would nonetheless prefer Warren or Sanders. But it is instructive how these candidates were sidelined over the Great Rich Hope of Bloomberg –sidelined over money. I hope the party learns something from that.
BTW: I take issue, strongly, with the term “center left” to describe this aisle. That is using the same framework that calls Senate republicans moderates.
My party is still in thrall to the ideology of centrism and the romance of settling things with the opposition amicably over a few beers or rounds of golf. The establishment wing is still profoundly clueless about everything from climate change (Joe Biden, O my god) to income inequality. There is nothing “left” about it except for wrapping paper to try to win votes.
Christophersays
I remain surprised that Harris dropped out when she did. She definitely could have been a factor at this point. Patrick should try again next time. He just plain entered the race too late to get traction.
jconwaysays
Patrick should have dropped out the day nobody showed up for him at Morehouse. He should have run in 2016 (a lot more candidates should have), when the memory of his governorship and friendship with Obama was fresher in the minds of non-MA voters. He just did not do what he needed to do to keep his profile and policies updated with the party.
doublemansays
He also probably should have passed on Bain and started his own social venture fund, which I am sure would have taken about a week to fully fund.
SomervilleTomsays
I enthusiastically agree with this.
No matter how much lipstick and perfume is applied, and no matter how intense the spin, Mr. Patrick’s choice to join Bain was a career-ending decision for Deval Patrick as a politician.
He was not a politician before being elected governor. His political chops were among weakest aspects of his administration while in office. His decision to join Bain sent a loud, clear, and — in my view at least — irreversible message that he was done with politics.
Mr. Patrick is a financial executive. That’s different from being a politician, and it should be incompatible with being a president.
Christophersays
My understanding is that he used his time at Bain for good. 2016 was supposed to be Hillary’s year so I’m glad we did not crowd that field. I’m glad Patrick tested the waters this time.
jconwaysays
This attitude: “2016 was supposed to be Hillary‘s year” is a big reason that it was not. Everyone complaining about Sanders now can point to her crowding out the field as one of the reasons he came into the stage. This is not to bash Hillary at all, if anything, she would have benefited from a more crowded field like 2008.
It would have either made her a better candidate earlier and drowned out Sanders as the only viable alternative or we would have had a candidate better than both of them. Possibly running for re-election. A big reason we have Sanders and Biden running in 2020 is because the deck clearing had the effect of delaying Biden’s brush with reality by four years and elevating an unknown gadfly Senator into the leader of his own party faction. A faction that pushed a lot of establishment friendly nominees toward his side of the divide to try and co-opt his votes. Turns out, Bernie Lite didn’t work for a lot of them. Might still work for Warren. Might’ve worked for Pete had he not decided to become Young Biden.
jconwaysays
A race where Harris takes Amy’s place in the pecking order would be a real contest. The other mistake she made was not investing enough in IA and NH before it was too late and viewing Biden as her main competition. She needed to have the kind of spring and summer Pete had.
jconwaysays
Biden and Bloomberg are clueless, I would argue Booker or Harris recognizes the need to fight Republicans and beat them rather than wine and dine them. I also think some of their proposals (Harris’ family allowance and Booker’s baby bonds) were innovative and went far beyond what Obama-Clinton era democrats were willing to do in the domestic sphere.
Trickle upsays
I did not mean to say that I thought these candidates (Harris, Biden, etc) were all the same. On reread it sounds like that.
Christophersays
I don’t think clueless is necessary, especially on Biden.
SomervilleTomsays
Necessary or not, I think it’s apt.
Neither Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Biden show any command of CURRENT issues at all, nor do they show any connection to any meaningful constituency.
I might not agree with Mr. Sanders or his movement, but it is real, palpable, and tangible. I don’t see any evidence of that from Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Biden.
Maybe George W. and George H. W. Bush have permanently poisoned the electoral waters for any presidential candidate whose last name begins with “B”.
Christophersays
I will disagree in the strongest terms about Biden and Bloomberg not having command of current issues.
Christophersays
I really wish we’d stop with the establishment bogeyman. They do not control the fortunes of the candidates.
jconwaysays
You don’t think the DNC qualification rules kept Booker, Castro, and Harris out of some debates while Steyer and now Bloomberg could buy their way in? I think there’s a case to be made for that. I also find it crazy that Steyer blew all that money to get individual donors and then Bloomberg walks in and they fold rather than call his bluff and waive that requirement. I’d be pretty PO’d if I were the other billionaire running.
Christophersays
I think the rules were known well enough in advance that anyone could have played by them. You need some standards and the only alternative I’ve come up with will probably strike many as even more insidery. Don’t forget Harris withdrew right before a debate she HAD qualified for. How would you have policed the debate admissions?
jconwaysays
The rules were changed at the last minute to help Bloomberg!
There’s no good way to do it, but some kind of point system where being an elected official counts for some points and a more stringent polling requirement at the start. We wasted a lot of time on Delaney, Williamson, etc. who never had a real shot while campaigns like Bennet and Bullock who are the kind of candidates we should want to highlight, we’re stuck spending $3-$10 fishing for every unique donor dollar they got. In an ideal world we would have a public finance system so money wasn’t something we had to evaluate at all.
Christophersays
We knew all along they were likely to change once people started voting, and I don’t know how you can exclude someone who was so obviously going to be a factor.
Trickle upsays
Wondering here how to describe the party establishment. Who bend the rules for Bloomberg, plot clumsily against Sanders, and do their best to erase Warren from public view as if she did not even exist.
Christophersays
You tell me. I am so far satisfied with how this has gone for the most part.
jconwaysays
Really? It’s either a Sanders nomination which a lot of Democrats (not this one) feel is a suicide note or a contested convention which would irrevocably divide the party.
SomervilleTomsays
Our a contested convention that would see Elizabeth Warren unite all the followers of all the candidates — genuine progressive leadership for supporters of Mr. Sanders, genuine moderation in manner for supporters of the many center/moderate Democrats, and a powerful woman with a successful track record and without the baggage that rightly or wrongly came with Ms. Clinton.
I think that a consensus selection of Ms. Warren followed by a blue tidal wave in November would go a long way towards healing the wounds of this endless primary.
Trickle upsays
To me, this feels like a million-to-one bank shot. But we’ll see.
It is arguably the best outcome for the party and the election (and the country).
SomervilleTomsays
I hate it, frankly.
I just can’t see any of the other candidates generating the overwhelming mandate needed in November. As you observe, it’s a long shot. It’s a least a possibility, though.
I think the negatives of each of the other candidates are so strong that it will be difficult or impossible to create the kind of blue juggernaut that we saw in 2008.
doublemansays
yeah, she’d make the perfect VP pick for Bernie. 🙂
To be the nom, she better have the most delegates going in. If she’s sitting at 15% at gets the nom over someone with 35%, we can throw out any idea at unity – it won’t matter that she ostensibly straddles the progressive wing and the center-left.
Also, while she may not have baggage like Clinton, she certainly has a lot (as do all the candidates). We’ve seen it much more in MA, but nationally they haven’t even scratched the surface of the Pocahontas crap. All of the candidates have a ton of stuff that the GOP will savage. Klobuchar probably has the least because they won’t care as much about her bad DA record. The smears will bring any of them down. It’s a question of how far down they can go.
SomervilleTomsays
Mr. Sanders brings as many opportunities for false and baseless attacks as Ms. Warren.
We’ve been over this ground before. If the party continues to be split between the revolutionaries and the “center/moderates”, then awarding the nomination to the most polarizing revolutionary candidate with 35% versus a candidate who attracts 55-60% delegate support in convention-floor horse-trading is a prescription for disaster.
The best we can hope for is that one of our candidates clinches the nomination before convention.
If we go into a contested convention, all bets are off.
doublemansays
I agree on the baggage. My point is that Warren is not baggage-free.
You’re saying he is polarizing, but there is evidence showing that he is the most liked candidate among Democrats.
If Bernie comes in with 35% and the nomination goes to someone who had 15% but then got a majority of other delegates to give them the nom, we will find out what polarization means, and it will look nothing like what we see today.
The idea that having some committed party diehards grumpy about a choice is worse than having 15-20% of potential Dem voters leave the party for good is some wild thinking.
SomervilleTomsays
You’re saying he is polarizing, but there is evidence showing that he is the most liked candidate among Democrats.
That’s a different metric.
“Polarizing” means that he has both high positives AND high negatives.
Phrases like “some committed party diehards grumpy about…” don’t advance a conversation.
The purpose of a primary is to select a nominee who comes closest to being a consensus choice among Democratic voters of the candidate who most ably embodies Democratic values and priorities. It implies a hive-mind balance of a host of competing dimensions (such as “electability” and various purity tests for various interest groups).
A candidate of either party who adopts a position that says, in essence “Fill-in-the-blank is the one true way, all others are disbelievers and heathens” is not, in my opinion, going to good for the party or for America.
I don’t like that from Mr. Sanders and his supporters, and I don’t like that from Mr. Biden and his supporters. I don’t hear it from any other of the Democratic candidates. Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t count yet because he hasn’t been a candidate long enough and visible to make any impression in this regard.
Trickle upsays
No doubt it is better, electorally, for someone to clinch the nomination before the convention.
But if people conduct themselves well, and limit the outcome to candidates who have made themselves known during the primary season (no dark horse in other words), I think a brokered convention can also nominate a winner.
The pitfall, and the thing I worry about, is “conduct themselves well.”
Christophersays
Sometimes successful coalitions do not include the highest single vote-getter, as any parliamentary democracy can tell you.
Christophersays
I’m not ready to limit us to those two choices just yet.
centralmassdadsays
Warren Self-gutted. She tried to make a detailed Medicare For All plan, which was not believable, and mostly just showed how titanically expensive it would actually be. And then she picked a weird personal fight with Sanders that she really needed to not have, even if she was right.
SomervilleTomsays
The “titanically expensive” M4A plan of both Ms. Warren and Ms. Sanders pales in comparison to the costs of continuing what we have now for the same period. And the costs of continuing what we have will continue to explode as the impact of removing the individual mandate from the ACA kicks in.
The GOP has succeeded in killing the ACA, and the media won’t tell us about it.
Have you read the just-published Lancet study?
I’m reminded of the people complaining about the titanically expensive big dig. What those critics neglected to mention was that rebuilding the Central Artery in-place would have cost three or four times as much, taken longer, and produced ZERO increased in traffic capacity.
People who don’t like titanically expensive health care should be falling over themselves to replace the current monstrosity with M4A.
Christophersays
Um, last I checked the ACA is still the law of the land.
SomervilleTomsays
@last I checked the ACA is still the law of the land.:
You haven’t been paying careful enough attention. The pre-2018 congress already removed the penalty for the individual mandate. That removal did three things:
1. It made the entire ACA actuarilly unsound, because the ACA, like all insurance, depends on low premium payments coerced from young and healthy Americans to fund the expenses of old and sick Americans. The result is that people won’t sign up for health insurance until they’re sick.
2. It made the ban on preexisting conditions impossible for insurance companies to conform to and break even, see 1 above.
3. It cut the legs out from under the narrow Supreme Court decision making the ACA constitutional. As you recall, John Roberts cast the deciding vote of the 5-4 decision upholding the ACA based on the creative (at the time) theory that the individual mandate was a tax and that Congress has the Constitutional authority to levy taxes. A lower court has already ruled that removing the individual mandate removes that justification and makes the entire ACA an unconstitutional overreach by Congress.
While the ACA is the law of the land, sort of, it is also unenforceable. Without the individual mandate and with no enforcement, the ACA is operationally dead even if its carcass still sits on the table.
centralmassdadsays
I just don’t buy it. I wish I did. there is a reason Bernie is hazy on the details. It will save money in the long run, decades from now. Meantime there will be a huge budgetary hole to fill, and this will be done by hitting my particular cohort pretty hard, or by making the plan cheap and crappy (hi the doctor is scheduling appointments for 2022). “Wealth taxes” are great in theory but extremely hard to administer, and therefore aren’t a budgetary panacea. Estate and gift taxes are great, but more for the budget a decade from now. Meanwhile, the easiest way to raise money is income tax, and the real money isn’t in the wealthy, but those whose primary asset is their salary.
I’m not young enough to adjust; MFA would be ruinous for me.
SomervilleTomsays
I fear you exaggerate the several aspects of your concern.
My wife and son have been on my COBRA plan for the last 18 months. That’s an $1,800/month premium for high-deductible and high co-pay BCBS PPO coverage. It’s an expensive plan that provides coverage that sucks in comparison to our counterparts in Germany and Austria.
My family’s health insurance has been north of $1,500/month for at least ten years. Sometimes that’s been paid by an employer (when we’ve had one), sometimes it’s been paid by us (when we were on our own).
I’m now fortunate enough to be on Medicare with a decent BCBS advantage plan. I’m in great shape until the Trumpists kill Medicare. My wife has a few more years during which she has to buy coverage for herself. Even the minimalist high-deductible HMO plans cost in excess of $600/month. That’s a lot of premium for little or no coverage unless she gets run over by a bus.
We’ve been administering wealth taxes for decades with no problems at all — they’re called “property taxes”. Ms. Warren’s plans are only going to affect the ultra wealthy (households with a net worth in excess of $50M), and cost only $0.02 for the amount in excess of $50M. Your too-casual dismissal of the concept is perhaps clouded by inaccurate intuition about how much wealthier the very wealthy are. While there aren’t very many of them, the top of the wealth distribution is extremely wealthy. Mr. Bloomberg, for example, has a net worth of about $65B. His wealth tax would be about $2B. That buys a lot of school lunches in Springfield.
While it’s true that full impact of the $68 TRILLION wealth transfer from boomers occurs over the next 25 years, there are still people dying every day. The current federal threshold is $11M. That means that only 0.06% of estates in 2018 were eligible for estate taxes. According to the White House, estate and gift taxes totaled $22.8 B for 2017. Doubling that to the 1975 rates of 78% yields about $20B/year in new revenue.
That’s BEFORE the boomer boom kicks in.
I remind us that there are multiplier effects at play here, because putting these extra tens of billions of dollars back into circulation breathes life back into our dying consumer economy.
Families who can’t afford child-care today can work more hours. A thousand workers getting $500 more per week generate FAR MORE income taxes in the new business their consumption generates than a single insurance company executive pocketing $30M/year in executive compensation.
I suggest you take another look at what MFA would mean for you.
scott12masssays
I think Bloomberg survived his debut. There were no knockout punches IMO, and the 19 million who watched will continue to watch as the field is narrowed down. The attacks are becoming more vicious and it makes for good TV and news clips. But the combined audience of around 18 million who watched Criminal Minds, The Masked Singer and Survivor instead of the debate saw Bloomberg solving all sorts of problems running NY city, working effectively with Obama, and calmly preparing to take on Trump.
Politics on this site is a passion but for most people it is a necessary evil.
jconwaysays
This is also a strong take. It did not budge my spouse or my father from backing Bloomberg. They watched the debate highlights, but they still buy the hype it takes a rich Republican to beat a rich Republican. I was never ready to buy that in the primary, but could have defended it if he was our nominee. Hard to argue it now, the dude just isn’t ready to compete on the big stage. He came across as petty and prickly and not particularly enthusiastic to be talking about his record.
Christophersays
He’ll live to fight another day, especially with his money, but I think he did get bloodied.
Trickle upsays
I subscribe to the PO service that tells me what mail I have coming to me.
(which is pretty cool, I recommend it)
It tells me to expect a Bloomberg mailer today.
Torn between the aphorism about a fool and his money and the other about one being born every minute.
Christopher says
Warren nailed him right out the gate. If you aren’t watching you should – must see TV!
doubleman says
Good lord. It is ugly. Bloomberg ain’t ready for this. It’s clear he’s an awful candidate. I hope the media narrative from this debate is how bad he is .
Bad night for Pete as well. Getting called out on his bad policies and smugness.
Warren is masterful. Best debate performance of anyone by far in this campaign. Looks like the “unity” candidate idea is out the window – as it should be. The fighter role is much better for her.
Bernie is good. His usual consistent talking points, but with some more edge. He tore Pete a new one. Like always, Bernie probably isn’t converting a lot of new folks with debate performances alone. He has to get sharper on his socialism defense I think.
Biden not doing great, but no one is noticing. He’s not the target nor on the attack. He wants to get to SC as fast as possible and hold on to his lead.
Amy’s hatred of Pete is so pure. She’s had some stumbles tonight. Uneven.
Christopher says
The Pete-Amy spat surprised me. That was probably the last pairing I would have predicted to go at it, though I wasn’t expecting Warren to go after Klobuchar as hard as she did either. I’m not convinced fighter and unity are mutually exclusive in this context.
doubleman says
Yeah, Warren’s later-in-the-debate attack on Amy seemed strange. I loved the Bloomberg stuff. That one on Amy seemed unnecessary.
Pete ain’t winning over anyone with how he turned to Amy and went in on the immigration stuff.
jotaemei says
Klobuchar had previously gone after Mayo McKinsley in at least one other debate. So, some of us were looking forward to a reprise in Nevada.
doubleman says
Wow. Chuck Todd asked everyone if they thought the person with the most pledged delegates should be the nominee.
Everyone except Sanders said to let the convention process work.
Insane position. Very sad to see everyone support it.
Trickle up says
“Insane?”
Explain.
How it seems to me: Sanders 49%, Warren, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, K.obachar, Biden at 10% each: no brainer, Bernie is right.
But Bloomberg the “leader” with 17% to everyone else’s 16.5%: nope, that is what conventions are for.
SomervilleTom says
I think Chris Matthews summed it up rather nicely after the debate: In 2016, when Bernie Sanders was not the candidate with the most delegates, he opposed awarding the nomination to the candidate with the most delegates going into convention. In 2020, while Bernie Sanders leads the field, he supports it.
It’s a position of expediency and it’s wrong.
fredrichlariccia says
Joe Biden’s strongest debate to date. Clear on ACA reform with option, not mandatory MFA which couldn’t even pass muster in Bernie’s home state of Vermont, let alone the US Senate. He hit Sanders for not voting for the ’07 Comprehensive Immigration bill that BS called ‘slavery’ yet would have created 6 million new citizens. .
doubleman says
You’re recapping Joe’s interview with MSNBC after the debate not his performance in the debate. No one remembers one line from him on stage last night.
He got the VT story wrong, too. They never implemented it and then got rid of it. They did a study and found that yes taxes would have to go up to cover a system for 300,000 people (almost half he state was exempted from the plan, which made it more expensive) in a state-funded system that cannot print its own money like the federal government can. When the VT governor saw a high payroll tax number, he killed the plan without any additional work. It’s much less expensive per person to cover the entire country than to cover a single small state. The federal government has funding mechanisms not available to states. Yes, taxes go up, but overall costs go down. People pay less – but I guess paying less in taxes is much scarier than paying more in premiums, copays, deductibles, and direct out of pocket. This may be an effective political attack against M4A, but it’s a lie. It would be nice if Dems didn’t use it to undercut such a progressive policy.
fredrichlariccia says
I remember Joe Biden saying he was the only leader with coattails that helped Democrats win back the House in 2018 AND will help them win the Senate in 2020.
If Bernie is the nominee, how many down ballot Democratic candidates are going to want a socialist campaigning for them?
johntmay says
Bernie is not a socialist. This is BlueMassGroup, not Fox news.
fredrichlariccia says
Bernie describes himself as leader of a revolutionary democratic socialist movement.
Hell, Bloomberg and Trump are already attacking him as a Communist!
Get real.!
Christopher says
I winced when Bloomberg went that far, however.
petr says
Yes, this is not Fox News, which means we must deal with the truth as it is. And the truth is that Sen. Bernie Sanders is a self-described Democratic Socialist and always has been. It has been his most consistent stance.
terrymcginty says
I wouldn’t say it has been consistent, because more often than not over the years he described himself as a “socialist”, not a democratic socialist. That only started with regularity in 2016.
terrymcginty says
Huh? I admired Bernie for decades BECAUSE he insisted on joining a party in Vermont called, verbatim, “Socialist”. Wadda you talk?
doubleman says
Pretty much everyone will want the most popular person in the party who can turn out enormous crowds campaigning for them. If Bloomberg is the nominee they’ll be begging him to stay away and just send checks.
Yes, 2018 had some important victories by moderates (some of whom vote like absolute garbage in the House, by the way, or like Sinema in the Senate – barf!). 2018 was also the year of AOC, Ihlan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. It wasn’t just some moderate wave year.
Christopher says
AOC and Pressley held strongly Dem districts, so not really part of the blue wave. However, they would not get elected in some of the districts flipped by moderates.
jotaemei says
Biden’s known for telling tall tales – either willfully or from getting confused – but he believes that he was on the ballot in 2018 and is the reason that Dems retook control of the House of Representatives? Oh boy.
doubleman says
No. He was wrong in 2016. He is right now.
The person with the most pledged delegates (i.e. the person who received the most votes in the primaries) should be the nominee.
fredrichlariccia says
No, Bernie was right in 2016 and is wrong now. The Democratic party rules are that a candidate must win a MAJORITY, not plurality, of delegate votes to win the nomination of the party. Those are the rules . And if that requires multiple ballots to reach majority, so be it.
jconway says
I interpreted Bernie’s comments that he would have either an outright majority or a big enough plurality on the first ballot that a second ballot would be superfluous. I think Bernie going in even with 40% would mean he’s the nominee, otherwise there’s a real risk of splitting the party. Bernie would be wise to pick a centrist VP.
Also I liked what I saw tonight. Warren is making a strong comeback which could resonate in NV and SC, I thought Biden had one of his better debates in the early rounds. Amy and Pete neutralized one another and Bloomberg just got taken to the woodshed. It’s hard for me to see how he recovers but people who don’t watch debates might not care.
fredrichlariccia says
It’s time to get real.
40% is NOT a majority, so Bernie is definitely NOT the nominee.
There already IS a split in the party between the Sanders revolutionary socialist wing and center left Democrats (Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar).
Bloomberg? Stick a fork in him. He’s done.
doubleman says
If Bernie has 40% and is not the nominee, we will guarantee a Trump victory.
I hope the party is not that dumb, but I’m not convinced. Party diehards like you seem to be fine with that outcome.
There is really little evidence that mainstream Dems will go anywhere. ~90%+ say they will support the nominee regardless of who it is. Also, Sanders is the candidate with highest overall approval from Democratic voters (shocking, but true). The idea that he is too divisive in the party seems to be a storyline of online people not real life.
Not giving Sanders a nomination when he has a clear plurality, however, will lose the left from the Democratic Party for good. Young people will be gone from the party.
fredrichlariccia says
Your theory that Democrats will guarantee a Trump victory if Bernie’s tantrum, foot-stomping, screaming 40% is not placated at the convention is just wrong.
The eventual Democratic nominee, whoever he or she is, must demonstrate an ability to build a Big Tent winning coalition by negotiating with ALL factions of the party —
including the center left — in order to win majority.
Thus far, Bernie has not demonstrated any desire or ability to do what is necessary in order to win by the rules.
jconway says
How is competing in the primaries and winning delegates not playing by the rules? What rules has he broken? That’s an awful incendiary charge. I wonder with all your Fox News hang ups over the world socialism if you’re ready to support the nominee if his name is not Joe Biden.
fredrichlariccia says
Bull!
You know damn well that I publicly stated on DAY f****** ONE that I will the support the Democratic nominee.
fredrichlariccia says
Are you a Democrat this year?
Trickle up says
What if Bernie gets 40% and Joe, say, or Amy gets 39? Is it still so clear cut for you? What if Joe gets 41?
I agree with you about the “clear plurality.” But what does that mean? For how small a plurality, and how close a second-place runner, does that apply?
doubleman says
If Bernie gets 40% and Amy gets 39% that should be the ticket.
A near tie is very very unlikely, a clear plurality is very likely.
Christopher says
That would definitely be smart.
fredrichlariccia says
Wrong, again.
The nominee, and the nominee alone, chooses his or her running mate based on a variety of factors. It has NOTHING to do with other candidates’ vote tally at the convention.
doubleman says
I am not making an argument about what DOES happen at a convention.
It is about what SHOULD happen.
The winner of the most votes and pledged delegates during the primaries SHOULD be the nominee.
If there were two candidates close in delegate count who combined for a significant majority, those candidates SHOULD be on a combined ticket.
SomervilleTom says
@The winner of the most votes and pledged delegates during the primaries SHOULD be the nominee:
Not when the result is that 60% of the voters rejected a “winning” candidate.
In an evenly divided three-way race, each candidate gets 33.3%. By your standard, if the result is 40/30/30, you argue that the candidate with 40% should be the nominee.
I think that’s just plain wrong. I think the result is minority rule, and I think the result is likely to result in disaster in the general.
I think if Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were on top of a 40/30/30 split, you’d be shouting about how corrupt and wrong “the system” is.
jconway says
Double man is making it very clear that the popular vote total is what matters more than the delegate count. I think if the popular vote leader is Sanders or anyone else going into the convention, it makes sense for the party to rally around him or her. This is also more reason why we should have ranked choice primaries to ensure that the ultimate nominee is supported by a majority of voters.
fredrichlariccia says
Politics is a hardball contact sport, not beanbag.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda doesn’t cut.
Hell, if my aunt had b**** she’d be my uncle.
centralmassdad says
This problem seems like an artifact of the weird way delegates are awarded proportionately. That’s not how it works in November and I’m not sure what the rationale for doing it in March is. It just seems like a way for a minority candidate to run a zombie campaign well into early summer, and it doesn’t help, and seems to actively encourage there to be 15 candidates well beyond the point that such is helpful at all.
Obama was able to overcome this self-inflicted handicap; Clinton was not, and it isn’t looking great for Sanders now. If the primaries were run well, he would have every delegate so far. If the states about to vote are uncomfortable with Mr. Soviet Union as the nominee, then those primary results will reflect that. In either event, the field is thinned quickly to one or two candidates, who can then duke it out in the big states, and then you have someone who won, instead of the possibility that someone can win with more votes cast against than for.
As it is now, it is like playing a season of football to qualify for the championship, but the championship is in baseball.
Christopher says
We have a hybrid of proportional and winner take some since we have the 15% threshold. I would award strictly proportional letting the math by default block those who can’t even round to a single whole delegate.
jconway says
That was not the case in 1960 when it was obviously a way to prevent a prolonged convention and bring the party together. I might note, Kennedy won a very narrow on the first ballot and has strong incentives to bring the Johnson people on board. So I think a scenario where Bernie is both the clear popular vote and delegate leader heading into the convention is one where the delegates selecting another nominee is a big problem. A scenario where Bernie comes in the delegate leader but has not won a popular vote majority of very different, but problematic for other reasons. I hope after Super Tuesday we have an undisputed frontrunner and can rally around him or her.
terrymcginty says
That’s a reasonable argument. In fact, it’s so reasonable, that it’s likely that over 50% of delegates would agree with you. So in such a scenario, that should be put to the test at the convention.
(Nightmare ticket, by the way, unless we’re the white party or something.)
Christopher says
Comments like that and it makes you wonder why some of us feel Sanders supporters are trying to hold the nomination hostage. Whomever the convention picks will be worlds better than Trump. Earlier you used the word “insane”. I’ll tell you what’s insane – allowing Trump to be re-elected because some people can’t contain their temper tantrum over inside baseball!
doubleman says
We just like democracy. That’s all.
SomervilleTom says
My understanding of democracy (with a lower-case “d”) is based on the premise of majority rule. I don’t remember anybody going to the barricades to fight for “plurality rule”.
A system that anoints a candidate that lost 60% of the vote is not “democratic” as I understand democracy.
It gets even worse when there are more candidates.. There are six candidates right now. It’s mathematically possible for the candidate with the most votes to have just 20% of the total (if none of the six drop out).
Will you argue that a candidate rejected by 80% of primary voters should be the nominee? Will you argue that that is “democracy”?
doubleman says
I’d say that the person who gets the most votes should win. Yeah, that’s an OK definition of democracy for me.
If the rule is “majority only wins” and not “most votes wins” then we’re going to have to throw out thousands and thousands of elections each year.
How is a system that anoints someone that lost 70% of the vote over someone who lost 60% of the vote more democratic???
SomervilleTom says
As to your last sentence, who proposed that?
The bedrock principle of democracy is majority rule. There are a variety of ways to winnow the field to two candidates, some better than others.
Many of us don’t like a President elected by a plurality rather than a majority. Many of us find it undemocratic that the GOP majority in Congress is supported by a minority of the population.
Here, according to 538, is a list of party nominees (of both parties) ordered by popular vote in their respective primary:
In the above list, the first figure is the percentage of primary votes the candidate gathered. The second figure is the candidate’s margin over the next highest competitor.
Here are the nominees who won their primary races by a plurality, rather than majority:
2008 R John McCain 47 +25
2008 D Barack Obama 47 -1
2016 R Donald Trump 45 +20
1988 D Michael Dukakis 42 +13
1976 D Jimmy Carter 40 +26
1984 D Walter Mondale 38 +2
1972 D George McGovern 25 -1
Here are the Democratic nominees with a majority:
2000 D Al Gore 75% +54
2004 D John Kerry 61 +42
2016 D Hillary Clinton 55 +12
1992 D Bill Clinton 52 +32
Of that last only one — John Kerry — failed to win the popular vote nationwide.
Here are the Democratic nominees with a plurality:
2008 D Barack Obama 47 -1
1988 D Michael Dukakis 42 +13
1976 D Jimmy Carter 40 +26
1984 D Walter Mondale 38 +2
1972 D George McGovern 25 -1
Of that list, only two won the popular vote.
When you compare those two lists, which group do you think produced the better nominee?
doubleman says
You implied it by saying that the winner of a plurality should not necessarily be the nominee. That means someone with less than a plurality of pledged delegates (or perhaps even zero delegates) should receive the majority of delegates – which is somehow more democratic in your mind.
The majority winners having the two people who lost the most consequential general elections of the last 30 years doesn’t impress me.
Also, Barack Obama and Carter are the only Democratic candidates on your list to win a majority of votes in a general election.
Now let’s do a list of times a candidate won the Presidency after not being the leader in pledged delegates . . .
doubleman says
I agree it’s not great for a winner of a plurality to get the nomination, but giving the nomination to someone who is NOT the leader in primary votes and pledged delegates is straight up catastrophic.
SomervilleTom says
I think this exchange has just made a compelling case for RCV.
There is no solution with the current system.
Trickle up says
Kind of ironic since RCV is essentially a paper mechanical version of what a convention does when it goes into multiple ballots.
Christopher says
What is your view on RCV? Many of us favor it because our current system allows a winner with just a plurality even if the majority does not want that person. Would you be OK if a second convention ballot were only among the top two finishers on the first?
Trickle up says
I am entirely in favor of it in electoral settings, and in many parliamentary settings. But if you go to the trouble and expense of bringing together an entire grass-roots convention, I think you should let it grind its merry way. Multiple ballots until we have a winner.
Otherwise dispense with the conventions and have a national RCV primary, the end.
jconway says
How wonderful would that be? A citizen can dream. Maybe we can even dispense with parties at some point too.
Christopher says
No to a national primary. Only the well-established and financed would have a prayer. No parties too? – ugh!
jconway says
I agree Tom but by that standard neither Coakley nor Katherine Clark won democratic elections. Neither did Lori Trahan. All ran in crowded fields and got plurality victories.
I think the bigger realization we have yet to have on this thread is that the convention is not directly democratic. It’s an electoral college and we are sensing delegates to vote on our behalf at the convention. After the first ballot, according to the rules all candidates agreed to, they are free to vote however they please and it’s a free for all. I do think it would be unwise for the party to elevate Sanders with a small plurality and equally unwise to block Sanders if he has a large plurality.
SomervilleTom says
@by that standard neither Coakley nor Katherine Clark won democratic elections:
I don’t know about Katherine Clark (I’m not in her district), so I can’t speak to her.
I do know about Ms. Coakley, and I’d say that her nomination was further evidence of a failed system. Similarly, the campaign finance abuses of Ms. Trahan suggest to me that her nomination is certainly not a success story for the party.
I think that some sort of state-by-state RCV primary is preferable to the chaos we have today. I don’t like the idea of doing all the elections on the same day because I agree with Christopher that there is value in spreading out the states so that candidates have an opportunity to focus on smaller states.
I like the approach of having a limited primary season in an randomly-selected order each year and with each primary being RCV so that we eliminate archaic and obsolete artifacts like state conventions and — to hear Christopher describe it — perhaps even state party organizations (at least as we know them now).
If a state party has no effective power, if state caucuses are poorly attended and yield content-free results, and if state conventions yield un-democratic results in comparison to RCV primary elections then why do we continue to do ANY of it?
jconway says
Yes and no. I think if Bernie really wanted to go for bat for small d democracy he would have pressed to eliminate caucuses and pushed for ranked choice voting. He is undisputedly benefiting in a fractured field from caucuses and first past the post voting. Both anti-majoritarian voting systems in my judgment. If he comes in with 40% he has a strong case, if it’s 31/30/29 it’s an entirely different ballgame.
Christopher says
Rules require a majority, so that would still require a second ballot to confirm. The ex officio delegates are experienced politicians so they probably understand that if the plurality is convincing the smart move is to go along.
Trickle up says
You give them much credit.
It seems more and more likely that the superdelegates are going to settle this thing. I really hope they conduct themselves impeccably leading up to that.
No more loose talk about “saving” the party, or examples of Wasserman-Schultiz-esq favoritism. Or, it could go very badly for the eventual nominee afterwards.
Christopher says
Sometimes saving the party is exactly the job of the ex officio delegates.
petr says
Maybe so, but if they want to actually do that job well they need to forgo any and all credit for it: they should STFU and save the party, not their ego..
Trickle up says
I wish they would behave like it.
terrymcginty says
The system of requiring at least half the elected delegates to support a candidate has been the system since the 19th century. Do you not like political parties or something? Why was Bernie wrong in 2016?
The way delegates are chosen in Democratic Party is quite democratic, in part thanks to the very reforms that Bernie rightly pushed through after 2016. Bernie was right to push those changes through then.
bob-gardner says
It’s apples and oranges to compare Sanders’ position on delegates in 2016 (when so many super delegates were included) to his position in 2020.
SomervilleTom says
Do you mean the beginning of the 2016 campaign — when Mr. Sanders opposed superdelegates — or do you mean the end, when Mr. Sanders supported superdelegates?
In 2016, Mr. Sanders was diametrically opposed to superdelegates at the start of the campaign. By the end of the campaign, when gaining superdelegates was his only prayer of a nomination, he supported them.
Mr. Sanders posture towards the Democratic Party and its nomination procedures has been opportunistic since at least 2016. Of course, the party has also been opportunistic in its embrace of Mr. Sanders for the same period.
It is frankly a mystery to me that Mr. Sanders is even allowed on the ticket when he hasn’t ever been a registered Democrat.
jconway says
I uprate all but your last sentence which is silly.
Christopher says
I’m glad Sanders runs as a Dem rather than third party, but I wish we wouldn’t bend to his demands so much when he won’t join.
Christopher says
It’s the right position, though I would have qualified it by saying the person with the most pledged delegates has a strong argument for being the nominee. Remember, most pledged could mean plurality, not necessarily majority. Nobody is questioning whether the candidate with the majority of delegates should be the nominee.
Trickle up says
Sure they are, Christopher.
SomervilleTom says
Indeed, I am.
I think your point upthread that RCV is quite similar to RCV is important.
A significant advantage of RCV, in comparison to horse-trading in a contested convention, is that RCV does a better — or at least more predictable — job of ensuring that each primary voter’s voice is heard.
SomervilleTom says
Oh, maybe Christopher and I are agreeing.
I think the candidate with the majority of primary votes should win. If the primary is working properly, that means that the candidate with the majority of primary delegates should win (because delegates are a proxy mechanism for voters).
I think that a majority (as opposed to a plurality) should be required.
Christopher says
Absolutely, if one candidate gets 1991 delegates on the first ballot, s/he is the nominee.
SomervilleTom says
I saw exactly two winners last night, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden struck me as a step behind and off-target. Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar seemed to be fighting for who was going claim the title of third runner-up — nobody cares. Mr. Bloomberg was just demolished last night.
I disagree that last night’s debacle killed Mr. Bloomberg as a candidate. If that were true, then none of the candidates would still be on the stage because each of the current candidates has survived at least one painfully bad debate performance. Published reports are that both Ms. Warren and Mr. Biden reached out to Mr. Bloomberg privately during and after the debate to say something to the effect of “Don’t worry, we’ve all been there, we’ve just had more practice than you.”
I think we’re going to see the campaign narrow to Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Sanders, and Ms. Warren sooner rather than later. I don’t think any of the other candidates will survive super Tuesday.
In my view, Mr. Sanders did his usual debate performance, Ms. Warren helped herself enormously, and Mr. Bloomberg hurt himself enormously. In other words, I don’t think Mr. Sanders attracted any new supporters or repelled any existing supporters last night. I think Ms. Warren attracted many new supporters, and I think Mr. Bloomberg lost ground. I think last night will prove to be a net negative for the other three in terms of primary voter support.
doubleman says
I think Amy will move heaven and earth to not drop out before Pete. lol.
SomervilleTom says
Indeed. Well, she might outlast him by a day or two.
Christopher says
Warren definitely. I didn’t see anything from Sanders I hadn’t already. I think Biden may have had his best debate so far.
SomervilleTom says
@ [Joe] Biden may have had his best debate so far:
That may well be true. In my view, he has never been competitive. I think that’s why he’s already so far behind in actual votes, delegates, and polling.
Let me just cite an example of what I mean.
He attempted to join the attack on Mr. Bloomberg by citing Mr. Bloomberg’s 2004 support for George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Mr. Biden seems to forget that that affront was sixteen long years ago. Mr. Bloomberg’s huge donations to our successful 2018 mid-term victories more than compensate for that.
In my view, a fatal weakness of Mr. Biden’s campaign is that his accomplishments are all fading into the distant past. They may only be a few elections ago. but today’s 18 year old voters were first graders when Joe Biden helped accomplish the ACA.
I think a winning campaign — whether for the primary or the general election — has to be about the events of today and tomorrow. I think that criteria rules out Mr. Biden.
Trickle up says
No place to go but up, for sure.
jconway says
Biden was great in the tag team against Bloomberg, but felt like an also ran when the debate moved on. He seemed to be begging the moderators for speaking time and then awkwardly yielding it back like he was still on the Senate. He came very close to stuttering a few times too. I wish we had the Biden who clobbered Palin and Ryan from 2008 and 2012, it would be a much better race. We don’t, and his supporters have to concede that. It’s really too bad he didn’t stay out.
Christopher says
Stuttering is a thing he has struggled with and I really don’t think we should hold it against him. I think if you get him one on one with a GOPer we may still see what we saw previously from him. I’m not going to make the concession you call for in the last sentence.
centralmassdad says
I wasn’t ready to anoint Bloomberg prior to a debate or primary, and I’m not ready to leave him for dead just yet. I still think that there is a sizable group of voters who are casting about for a Not Bernie, Not Warren candidate, and one has not emerged from the pack yet. Most of the pundits and others who are, today, posting things like this thread are those who a week ago thought a Bloomberg nomination would be The Single Worst Thing Ever in All of History, and didn’t need much convincing anyway. I guess we will see how much these things harm him with voters.
Biden doing better than he has been does not help the emergence of a Non-Sanders/Warren candidate at all. On the other hand, Warren’s signs of life might slow Sanders’ roll enough so that a Non-Sanders?Warren candidate has time to coalesce.
Trickle up says
Well really, these people want Deval Patrick. But they blew that.
In my view, the only non S, non W candidate who is viable at this point is Warren. Or Sanders. Hey, non people, you’d get half your non wish either way.
centralmassdad says
The main appeal of Patrick was his similarity to Obama, whom I wish could run again. I’m glad I have the luxury of living in MA, so that I don’t have to worry so much about voting third party or write in, which is what I will most likely do.
jconway says
You can always vote for Lincoln Chaffee!
jconway says
The establishment erred in gutting Warren so early in the process when she appeared to overtake Biden. They essentially deflated her and inflated Bernie in the process. It also cannot be overstated that Biden is like the Jeb! of this cycle. He sucked a lot of money and earned media that should have gone to more relevant center left figures like Harris and Booker. They both erred by moving leftward when they should have stayed true to their own center-left positions, but they were far more viable general election options than Biden. You need coalition builders and unifiers, and unfortunately the remaining candidates are all factional to one degree or another. Hopefully Warren can bring the Biden and Bernie people together or Bernie can put a younger center left candidate on the ticket. I hear Harris and Booker aren’t busy…
doubleman says
It seems that the candidates who couldn’t break 5% being the unifying “viable” ones doesn’t have a lot of evidence other than feeling. And the ones with the highest overall favorability ratings in the party being the “factional” ones also seems out of line with available polling – but certainly very much in line with cable news punditry.
jconway says
I think it’s disingenuous for the media not to call the guy who won the most votes in the first two contests the frontrunner. It’s also something that has helped Bernie tremendously. We will likely wake up on Super Tuesday with Bernie having run the table in the first four contests and suddenly nobody can stop him. The other candidates should have attacked him but the were too busy tearing down Bloomberg (which was awesome to watch) and one another.
I also think it’s disingenuous to say someone who presently has just 30% of the party behind him in polling is the majority choice. I think a lot more Democratic voters who liked Booker or Harris or Warren or Biden were deciding between their campaigns, and not necessarily rejecting them.
Christopher says
Technically Pete is the frontrunner since delegates are what matter, but I’ve heard Sanders referred to as such plenty.
jconway says
Think Pete can win another contest? I don’t. He’s the Marco Rubio of this cycle with Amy being the Christie. It’s expectations and media coverage that matter.
Christopher says
Get back to me after Super Tuesday before we count anyone out, though I admit to being skeptical of his chances in the South.
jconway says
That’s a big problem though. Usually the field is down to 2 or 3 by now. So I see a bottleneck to be the anti-Bernie while his support inches closer and closer to 40% an eventually 50+1. Or, everyone else gets their 10-15% and we have a contested convention. IA really screwed the pooch. It cannot be underestimated how different things would be if IA produced a clear winner when it was supposed to.
Christopher says
Why do you seem to be in a rush? I for one like it when the May states get a real say in choosing our nominee. I thought you would have too given the complaining you’ve been doing about how much influence the early states supposedly have.
doubleman says
Really surprised by Pete’s fundraising numbers this year. He raised $6M in January (for comparison, Bernie raised $25M, Warren raised $10.3M). He has $6.6M on hand (Bernie has $16.8M, Warren has $2.2M). Only 29% of the money he has raised this year has come from people who donated less than $200. For 2019, this number was at 44%. He’s burning a ton and not raising a ton.
Pete is apparently at $11M so far in February. For comparison, Amy is at $12M for February and spending a lot less.
No reports from Sanders fundraising in February, but it’s safe to assume it’s better than fine. No news from Warren yet either, but I suspect she’s raised as much or more since the debate than she raised in the first two and half weeks of the month.
doubleman says
Pete’s lead in Iowa SDEs is down to 0.08 and there are still known errors in calculations in some precincts that have not been remedied by the state. He’ll likely lose that lead during the full recanvassing because the current errors have been favorable in his direction.
Another thing that adds to “frontrunner” status is consistent national and state polling in all upcoming states. Buttigieg is not expected to win a single other state, including his home state.
I didn’t say majority choice, but saying someone is only factional doesn’t seem right when they lead everyone in the race on the question of “who are you considering voting for?” (by double digits on this question compared to people like Pete and Amy) and have the highest overall favorability in the party (shocking, but true), and also twice as many donors as anyone else. If you’re listening to Chris Matthews and MSNBC you’d think that it’s only a radical, destructive faction of the party rather than a broadly popular one. Actually, if you are listening to Chris Matthews, you may be worried that Sanders is going to start executions of liberals in Central Park.
There is an assumption that the Sanders ceiling is 25-30%. Maybe. We’ll see. There’s also the potential that after the first four states, the guy looks like a winner and a bandwagon happens (he is the second choice of many Biden voters, afterall) and states could go for Sanders with 40-50%.
Winning changes things.
doubleman says
Also, interesting to see these two-person race matchups.
Sanders beats everyone in a hypothetical two person race. The narrowest race is Sanders v. Warren (44-42) followed by Sanders v. Biden (48-44).
He’s +21 on Klobuchar
+17 on Pete
+15 on Bloomberg
Obviously everything is hypothetical, but if these are the results, where’s the evidence that Sanders is more “factional” than anyone else running?
jconway says
I think the caveat is those polls are taking place now. It might be different as candidates drop out and lanes consolidate. It might not be. My top two picks for the outcome right now are Bernie winning outright or a contested convention. It’s also proof that the establishment should have backed Warren if they wanted to block Bernie rather than ganging up on her over her health care plan.
jconway says
I don’t doubt the bandwagon effect is already taking place. Bernie is front in national polls and a point behind Biden in black voters. It’s still a long way to go before he gets to 50%, and some magnanimous overtures right his rivals and their supporters by him and his supporters couldn’t hurt. He doesn’t have the entire party yet, and it would be nice if he and his supporters recognized they needed him.
Honestly it’s my interactions with Sanders supporters here and online matched with Warren’s debate performance that are keeping me in her camp. Just as Fred yelling at me that only Biden can win (after a 4th and 5th place finish no less) isn’t helping me come to his side, neither is the insistence on Sanders inevitability. The likeliest outcome right now is he comes into a convention with 30-40% of the delegates and votes and will need to convince the other delegates he can beat Trump. That’s the homework he and his supporters have to do.
Trickle up says
It really astonishes me that Harris (or Booker, or Deval Patrick) is not here when the establishment needs her. Had she hung in with more consistently establishment positions and vibe, she would be positioned to be flavor of the month going into Super Tuesday.
I say this as an observer, since I would nonetheless prefer Warren or Sanders. But it is instructive how these candidates were sidelined over the Great Rich Hope of Bloomberg –sidelined over money. I hope the party learns something from that.
BTW: I take issue, strongly, with the term “center left” to describe this aisle. That is using the same framework that calls Senate republicans moderates.
My party is still in thrall to the ideology of centrism and the romance of settling things with the opposition amicably over a few beers or rounds of golf. The establishment wing is still profoundly clueless about everything from climate change (Joe Biden, O my god) to income inequality. There is nothing “left” about it except for wrapping paper to try to win votes.
Christopher says
I remain surprised that Harris dropped out when she did. She definitely could have been a factor at this point. Patrick should try again next time. He just plain entered the race too late to get traction.
jconway says
Patrick should have dropped out the day nobody showed up for him at Morehouse. He should have run in 2016 (a lot more candidates should have), when the memory of his governorship and friendship with Obama was fresher in the minds of non-MA voters. He just did not do what he needed to do to keep his profile and policies updated with the party.
doubleman says
He also probably should have passed on Bain and started his own social venture fund, which I am sure would have taken about a week to fully fund.
SomervilleTom says
I enthusiastically agree with this.
No matter how much lipstick and perfume is applied, and no matter how intense the spin, Mr. Patrick’s choice to join Bain was a career-ending decision for Deval Patrick as a politician.
He was not a politician before being elected governor. His political chops were among weakest aspects of his administration while in office. His decision to join Bain sent a loud, clear, and — in my view at least — irreversible message that he was done with politics.
Mr. Patrick is a financial executive. That’s different from being a politician, and it should be incompatible with being a president.
Christopher says
My understanding is that he used his time at Bain for good. 2016 was supposed to be Hillary’s year so I’m glad we did not crowd that field. I’m glad Patrick tested the waters this time.
jconway says
This attitude: “2016 was supposed to be Hillary‘s year” is a big reason that it was not. Everyone complaining about Sanders now can point to her crowding out the field as one of the reasons he came into the stage. This is not to bash Hillary at all, if anything, she would have benefited from a more crowded field like 2008.
It would have either made her a better candidate earlier and drowned out Sanders as the only viable alternative or we would have had a candidate better than both of them. Possibly running for re-election. A big reason we have Sanders and Biden running in 2020 is because the deck clearing had the effect of delaying Biden’s brush with reality by four years and elevating an unknown gadfly Senator into the leader of his own party faction. A faction that pushed a lot of establishment friendly nominees toward his side of the divide to try and co-opt his votes. Turns out, Bernie Lite didn’t work for a lot of them. Might still work for Warren. Might’ve worked for Pete had he not decided to become Young Biden.
jconway says
A race where Harris takes Amy’s place in the pecking order would be a real contest. The other mistake she made was not investing enough in IA and NH before it was too late and viewing Biden as her main competition. She needed to have the kind of spring and summer Pete had.
jconway says
Biden and Bloomberg are clueless, I would argue Booker or Harris recognizes the need to fight Republicans and beat them rather than wine and dine them. I also think some of their proposals (Harris’ family allowance and Booker’s baby bonds) were innovative and went far beyond what Obama-Clinton era democrats were willing to do in the domestic sphere.
Trickle up says
I did not mean to say that I thought these candidates (Harris, Biden, etc) were all the same. On reread it sounds like that.
Christopher says
I don’t think clueless is necessary, especially on Biden.
SomervilleTom says
Necessary or not, I think it’s apt.
Neither Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Biden show any command of CURRENT issues at all, nor do they show any connection to any meaningful constituency.
I might not agree with Mr. Sanders or his movement, but it is real, palpable, and tangible. I don’t see any evidence of that from Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Biden.
Maybe George W. and George H. W. Bush have permanently poisoned the electoral waters for any presidential candidate whose last name begins with “B”.
Christopher says
I will disagree in the strongest terms about Biden and Bloomberg not having command of current issues.
Christopher says
I really wish we’d stop with the establishment bogeyman. They do not control the fortunes of the candidates.
jconway says
You don’t think the DNC qualification rules kept Booker, Castro, and Harris out of some debates while Steyer and now Bloomberg could buy their way in? I think there’s a case to be made for that. I also find it crazy that Steyer blew all that money to get individual donors and then Bloomberg walks in and they fold rather than call his bluff and waive that requirement. I’d be pretty PO’d if I were the other billionaire running.
Christopher says
I think the rules were known well enough in advance that anyone could have played by them. You need some standards and the only alternative I’ve come up with will probably strike many as even more insidery. Don’t forget Harris withdrew right before a debate she HAD qualified for. How would you have policed the debate admissions?
jconway says
The rules were changed at the last minute to help Bloomberg!
There’s no good way to do it, but some kind of point system where being an elected official counts for some points and a more stringent polling requirement at the start. We wasted a lot of time on Delaney, Williamson, etc. who never had a real shot while campaigns like Bennet and Bullock who are the kind of candidates we should want to highlight, we’re stuck spending $3-$10 fishing for every unique donor dollar they got. In an ideal world we would have a public finance system so money wasn’t something we had to evaluate at all.
Christopher says
We knew all along they were likely to change once people started voting, and I don’t know how you can exclude someone who was so obviously going to be a factor.
Trickle up says
Wondering here how to describe the party establishment. Who bend the rules for Bloomberg, plot clumsily against Sanders, and do their best to erase Warren from public view as if she did not even exist.
Christopher says
You tell me. I am so far satisfied with how this has gone for the most part.
jconway says
Really? It’s either a Sanders nomination which a lot of Democrats (not this one) feel is a suicide note or a contested convention which would irrevocably divide the party.
SomervilleTom says
Our a contested convention that would see Elizabeth Warren unite all the followers of all the candidates — genuine progressive leadership for supporters of Mr. Sanders, genuine moderation in manner for supporters of the many center/moderate Democrats, and a powerful woman with a successful track record and without the baggage that rightly or wrongly came with Ms. Clinton.
I think that a consensus selection of Ms. Warren followed by a blue tidal wave in November would go a long way towards healing the wounds of this endless primary.
Trickle up says
To me, this feels like a million-to-one bank shot. But we’ll see.
It is arguably the best outcome for the party and the election (and the country).
SomervilleTom says
I hate it, frankly.
I just can’t see any of the other candidates generating the overwhelming mandate needed in November. As you observe, it’s a long shot. It’s a least a possibility, though.
I think the negatives of each of the other candidates are so strong that it will be difficult or impossible to create the kind of blue juggernaut that we saw in 2008.
doubleman says
yeah, she’d make the perfect VP pick for Bernie. 🙂
To be the nom, she better have the most delegates going in. If she’s sitting at 15% at gets the nom over someone with 35%, we can throw out any idea at unity – it won’t matter that she ostensibly straddles the progressive wing and the center-left.
Also, while she may not have baggage like Clinton, she certainly has a lot (as do all the candidates). We’ve seen it much more in MA, but nationally they haven’t even scratched the surface of the Pocahontas crap. All of the candidates have a ton of stuff that the GOP will savage. Klobuchar probably has the least because they won’t care as much about her bad DA record. The smears will bring any of them down. It’s a question of how far down they can go.
SomervilleTom says
Mr. Sanders brings as many opportunities for false and baseless attacks as Ms. Warren.
We’ve been over this ground before. If the party continues to be split between the revolutionaries and the “center/moderates”, then awarding the nomination to the most polarizing revolutionary candidate with 35% versus a candidate who attracts 55-60% delegate support in convention-floor horse-trading is a prescription for disaster.
The best we can hope for is that one of our candidates clinches the nomination before convention.
If we go into a contested convention, all bets are off.
doubleman says
I agree on the baggage. My point is that Warren is not baggage-free.
You’re saying he is polarizing, but there is evidence showing that he is the most liked candidate among Democrats.
If Bernie comes in with 35% and the nomination goes to someone who had 15% but then got a majority of other delegates to give them the nom, we will find out what polarization means, and it will look nothing like what we see today.
The idea that having some committed party diehards grumpy about a choice is worse than having 15-20% of potential Dem voters leave the party for good is some wild thinking.
SomervilleTom says
That’s a different metric.
“Polarizing” means that he has both high positives AND high negatives.
Phrases like “some committed party diehards grumpy about…” don’t advance a conversation.
The purpose of a primary is to select a nominee who comes closest to being a consensus choice among Democratic voters of the candidate who most ably embodies Democratic values and priorities. It implies a hive-mind balance of a host of competing dimensions (such as “electability” and various purity tests for various interest groups).
A candidate of either party who adopts a position that says, in essence “Fill-in-the-blank is the one true way, all others are disbelievers and heathens” is not, in my opinion, going to good for the party or for America.
I don’t like that from Mr. Sanders and his supporters, and I don’t like that from Mr. Biden and his supporters. I don’t hear it from any other of the Democratic candidates. Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t count yet because he hasn’t been a candidate long enough and visible to make any impression in this regard.
Trickle up says
No doubt it is better, electorally, for someone to clinch the nomination before the convention.
But if people conduct themselves well, and limit the outcome to candidates who have made themselves known during the primary season (no dark horse in other words), I think a brokered convention can also nominate a winner.
The pitfall, and the thing I worry about, is “conduct themselves well.”
Christopher says
Sometimes successful coalitions do not include the highest single vote-getter, as any parliamentary democracy can tell you.
Christopher says
I’m not ready to limit us to those two choices just yet.
centralmassdad says
Warren Self-gutted. She tried to make a detailed Medicare For All plan, which was not believable, and mostly just showed how titanically expensive it would actually be. And then she picked a weird personal fight with Sanders that she really needed to not have, even if she was right.
SomervilleTom says
The “titanically expensive” M4A plan of both Ms. Warren and Ms. Sanders pales in comparison to the costs of continuing what we have now for the same period. And the costs of continuing what we have will continue to explode as the impact of removing the individual mandate from the ACA kicks in.
The GOP has succeeded in killing the ACA, and the media won’t tell us about it.
Have you read the just-published Lancet study?
I’m reminded of the people complaining about the titanically expensive big dig. What those critics neglected to mention was that rebuilding the Central Artery in-place would have cost three or four times as much, taken longer, and produced ZERO increased in traffic capacity.
People who don’t like titanically expensive health care should be falling over themselves to replace the current monstrosity with M4A.
Christopher says
Um, last I checked the ACA is still the law of the land.
SomervilleTom says
@last I checked the ACA is still the law of the land.:
You haven’t been paying careful enough attention. The pre-2018 congress already removed the penalty for the individual mandate. That removal did three things:
1. It made the entire ACA actuarilly unsound, because the ACA, like all insurance, depends on low premium payments coerced from young and healthy Americans to fund the expenses of old and sick Americans. The result is that people won’t sign up for health insurance until they’re sick.
2. It made the ban on preexisting conditions impossible for insurance companies to conform to and break even, see 1 above.
3. It cut the legs out from under the narrow Supreme Court decision making the ACA constitutional. As you recall, John Roberts cast the deciding vote of the 5-4 decision upholding the ACA based on the creative (at the time) theory that the individual mandate was a tax and that Congress has the Constitutional authority to levy taxes. A lower court has already ruled that removing the individual mandate removes that justification and makes the entire ACA an unconstitutional overreach by Congress.
While the ACA is the law of the land, sort of, it is also unenforceable. Without the individual mandate and with no enforcement, the ACA is operationally dead even if its carcass still sits on the table.
centralmassdad says
I just don’t buy it. I wish I did. there is a reason Bernie is hazy on the details. It will save money in the long run, decades from now. Meantime there will be a huge budgetary hole to fill, and this will be done by hitting my particular cohort pretty hard, or by making the plan cheap and crappy (hi the doctor is scheduling appointments for 2022). “Wealth taxes” are great in theory but extremely hard to administer, and therefore aren’t a budgetary panacea. Estate and gift taxes are great, but more for the budget a decade from now. Meanwhile, the easiest way to raise money is income tax, and the real money isn’t in the wealthy, but those whose primary asset is their salary.
I’m not young enough to adjust; MFA would be ruinous for me.
SomervilleTom says
I fear you exaggerate the several aspects of your concern.
My wife and son have been on my COBRA plan for the last 18 months. That’s an $1,800/month premium for high-deductible and high co-pay BCBS PPO coverage. It’s an expensive plan that provides coverage that sucks in comparison to our counterparts in Germany and Austria.
My family’s health insurance has been north of $1,500/month for at least ten years. Sometimes that’s been paid by an employer (when we’ve had one), sometimes it’s been paid by us (when we were on our own).
I’m now fortunate enough to be on Medicare with a decent BCBS advantage plan. I’m in great shape until the Trumpists kill Medicare. My wife has a few more years during which she has to buy coverage for herself. Even the minimalist high-deductible HMO plans cost in excess of $600/month. That’s a lot of premium for little or no coverage unless she gets run over by a bus.
We’ve been administering wealth taxes for decades with no problems at all — they’re called “property taxes”. Ms. Warren’s plans are only going to affect the ultra wealthy (households with a net worth in excess of $50M), and cost only $0.02 for the amount in excess of $50M. Your too-casual dismissal of the concept is perhaps clouded by inaccurate intuition about how much wealthier the very wealthy are. While there aren’t very many of them, the top of the wealth distribution is extremely wealthy. Mr. Bloomberg, for example, has a net worth of about $65B. His wealth tax would be about $2B. That buys a lot of school lunches in Springfield.
While it’s true that full impact of the $68 TRILLION wealth transfer from boomers occurs over the next 25 years, there are still people dying every day. The current federal threshold is $11M. That means that only 0.06% of estates in 2018 were eligible for estate taxes. According to the White House, estate and gift taxes totaled $22.8 B for 2017. Doubling that to the 1975 rates of 78% yields about $20B/year in new revenue.
That’s BEFORE the boomer boom kicks in.
I remind us that there are multiplier effects at play here, because putting these extra tens of billions of dollars back into circulation breathes life back into our dying consumer economy.
Families who can’t afford child-care today can work more hours. A thousand workers getting $500 more per week generate FAR MORE income taxes in the new business their consumption generates than a single insurance company executive pocketing $30M/year in executive compensation.
I suggest you take another look at what MFA would mean for you.
scott12mass says
I think Bloomberg survived his debut. There were no knockout punches IMO, and the 19 million who watched will continue to watch as the field is narrowed down. The attacks are becoming more vicious and it makes for good TV and news clips. But the combined audience of around 18 million who watched Criminal Minds, The Masked Singer and Survivor instead of the debate saw Bloomberg solving all sorts of problems running NY city, working effectively with Obama, and calmly preparing to take on Trump.
Politics on this site is a passion but for most people it is a necessary evil.
jconway says
This is also a strong take. It did not budge my spouse or my father from backing Bloomberg. They watched the debate highlights, but they still buy the hype it takes a rich Republican to beat a rich Republican. I was never ready to buy that in the primary, but could have defended it if he was our nominee. Hard to argue it now, the dude just isn’t ready to compete on the big stage. He came across as petty and prickly and not particularly enthusiastic to be talking about his record.
Christopher says
He’ll live to fight another day, especially with his money, but I think he did get bloodied.
Trickle up says
I subscribe to the PO service that tells me what mail I have coming to me.
(which is pretty cool, I recommend it)
It tells me to expect a Bloomberg mailer today.
Torn between the aphorism about a fool and his money and the other about one being born every minute.
Christopher says
Although I hear 20 million saw the debate.