- Last night, Sanders captured only a fraction of his 2016 NH vote, but it was enough to win
- Since 2016, Sanders' coalition seems to have coalesced into a young-and-urban identity
- Wallace-Wells paints NH voters as careening, if not wildly, at least moderately between candidates, as they search for the knight in shining armor who can deliver them from Trump. 'I can beat Trump' is Klobuchar's sales pitch, and it may well account for her climb into third place
- Biden may already be on life support, and Warren may be, if not quite in hospice, seeking admittance to intensive care.
- This one is worth quoting: "the time for the moderate Democrats to unite may be ending. Bloomberg, with his hundreds of millions to spend, is already up to third place in some national polls, so the coming contest for the soul of the Democratic Party may be between two figures who, until very recently, were not Democrats at all."
For a precedent of a candidate who didn't have long tenure in the party yet managed to wrest the nomination with the a support of something like 1/3 of the voters, while the rest of the party was unwilling or unable to coalesce around an alternative, cf the saga of the GOP in 2016. And while it would give me a certain amount of satisfaction to add, "... and then he was shellacked in the general election", we all know how that worked out.
Update 2/12/2020, 4:17 pm CST: Josh Kraushaar at National Journal, in a column echoing much of Wallace-Wells' analysis, makes a crucial point regarding the divided field:
Update 2/12/2020, 4:17 pm CST: Josh Kraushaar at National Journal, in a column echoing much of Wallace-Wells' analysis, makes a crucial point regarding the divided field:
All of the Democratic contests allocate delegates proportionally, while Republicans [in 2016] allowed many states to allocate all of the delegates to the statewide winner. Those Republican rules allowed Trump to build an insurmountable lead, a luxury Sanders won’t have. The most likely long-term outcome is a muddle, with Sanders slowly racking up more delegates than his rivals but well short of the majority necessary to win the nomination.
I get a different picture from the experiment I tried. The tallies for the top 5 are as follows (in percentage points): Sanders 25.7, Buttigieg 24.4, Klobuchar 19.8, Warren 9.2, and Biden 8.4. Sanders and Warren are the more progressive, the other three are moderates. The progressive total percentage points is 34.9. The moderates total is 52.6. The NH voters favoring moderate candidates are 17.7 point ahead of those favoring progressives. I don't think the moderates are losing their window to unite. I think we will see them uniting around a standard bearer at least after super Tuesday. And though Bloomberg is a bit of a wild card, I consider him in the moderate camp. He has said that his main goal is to beat Trump; I think if he doesn't get enough support to be the candidate, he will throw his support behind the top ranking moderate.
ReplyDeleteAnd at the end of the day the whole party needs to unite behind ABT (anybody but Trump). Whether the moderate or progressive candidate gets the nomination, they need to vote blue in November.
DeleteKatherine, yes, Raber was also crunching the numbers as you were.
DeleteProgressive or Left Wing?
ReplyDeleteProgressive.
Delete"The Democrat Party in disarray" is a favorite theme of Republicans.
ReplyDeleteLook to your own house, GOP.
You nominated and helped elect the biggest jackass in American history. Better qualified Republicans in a similarly cluttered field four years ago said he was unfit for office. Now they're chanting "four more years" and their lips are orange from all the tushe kissing.
Republicans who renounce Trump and all his works are unable to mount even a token opposition because the religious nuts believe he loves the unborn and the Captains of Capitalism love his slash-and-burn policies of deregulation and tax cuts.
The mostly respectful and substantive debates among Democratic candidates is a long, long way from the utter corruption in the GOP that makes excuses for Trump.
It is worth noting that Klobuchar had some encouraging words for pro-life Democrats (at least more encouraging than others have been) saying that though she is pro-choice, they need to make the tent big enough to include pro-life.
DeleteIt would sure be nice if abortion politics would take a back burner while we try and save the democracy.
""The Democrat Party in disarray" is a favorite theme of Republicans."
DeleteWell, yeah. But this is a New Yorker piece.
With takeaway points by our a Republican ...
DeleteYes, I'm conservative. But whatever takeaway points I managed to come up with were based on that New Yorker article. FWIW, I didn't use the word "disarray", and neither did Wallace-Wells (of whom I've never previously heard, but I am assuming he is not a Republican). Whoever wrote the headline to that piece used the word "jumbled", which is more neutral than "disarray", and also seems reasonably accurate. The race is unsettled. Bernie now is being proclaimed the frontrunner, albeit with a weak hold on the top spot. He's the latest in a line of frontrunners, and in three weeks, the picture may be clearer and different than it is now. I'd consider the current situation interesting but murky.
DeletePfft. Your own party was "jumbled" last time out. Look at who you people picked. I'm hard-pressed to see how anybody coming out of our jumbled, murky, chaotic disarray could be as craven, insane, destructive, and ugly as your party's pick.
DeleteIf Bernie or Warren wins the nomination, I'll vote for them and contribute to their campaigns. If Buttigieg or the others gets it, I'll vote for them in the presidential election, but I'll leave the contributing to their billionaire buddies who are the only ones who'll matter post election.
ReplyDeleteBottom half of the first inning. Time to find a pinch-runner for the former vice president, though. New York Mike is still in the dugout, rubbing pine tar on his bat. Have a beer, buy some popcorn, and remember the remarkable thing the Republican Party did in 1940. "Win With Wilkie." "No Third Term." Didn't work but, still, 'twas remarkable.
ReplyDeleteThe young people are the key to the future of the Democratic party and our nation. They have time on their side. They know they are going to outlive Trump so you have to appeal to their issues (e.g. income inequality, college debt, the environment). The Democratic nominee has to have a very creditable plan to deal with their issues. If the Democrats chooses a moderate who ignores their issues, the Democrats will loose.
ReplyDeleteWe have two more elections and two more candidate debates before Super Tuesday. A lot of chances for candidates including Warren and Biden to present themselves to the Super Tuesday voters.
ReplyDeleteOnly after Super Tuesday will we have the type of data about voting patterns to say much about how successful the candidates are likely to be in the rest of the primaries as well as in the general election. So maybe Bloomberg was wise to skip the early primaries.
Re the update: Kraushaar, like the rest of his breed, really lusts for a convention that requires reporting instead of sitting around watching J Lo or whomever the DNC throws into prime time to cover up the fact that you are watching a done deal, your awareness of which would not be good for the advertisers. Think: Super Bowl half time without gyrations. Or the Oscars with presenters but no winners.
ReplyDeleteI won't even think of the convention as more than an excuse to sneak out to Mader's until after Super Tuesday, by which time no one else will be thinking of he convention in such terms either.
Just to be clear: The fate of the Republic does not hang on each primary that pops up on Chuck Todd's schedule, nor is every primary a set of tea leaves in which the future of the party s written in straight lines that only political junkies can discern. Sometimes all a primary says is that a lot of people in the state liked, say, Sanders.
Delete"Re the update: Kraushaar, like the rest of his breed, really lusts for a convention that requires reporting"
DeleteSure - but that view can be held for reasons other than (or in addition to) personal self-interest.
I'd be surprised if anyone here would contradict my belief that the Republicans' winner-take-all-delegates method, as described by Kraushaar, served the country poorly in 2016. And I've been screaming since long before Trump sewed up that nomination that Republican party leaders had an obligation to make Trump go away - essentially, to remove his name from Republican ballots and kick him out of the primaries.*
This column by Steve Chapman argues that the primary-and-caucus system has been a surfeit of democracy that has not served the country well. Headline: "After the Iowa caucuses disaster, let's bring back the smoke-filled rooms."
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/steve-chapman/ct-column-iowa-caucuses-sanders-chapman-20200205-fs5pnqu6ejethoxykugi3fza4y-story.html
* Whether Trump has as president has been bad for Republicans is a complicated question. Looking back at his record as president, he has been a fairly orthodox GOP president on a number of fronts: cutting taxes, nominating conservative judges, championing pro-life efforts, funding the military, deregulating, etc. This track record surely is the chief reason that Republicans have remained loyal to him. At the same time, it is undeniable that Trump has changed the GOP significantly, and probably permanently. The party that is so loyal to him today is not the same party that voted for Reagan in record numbers, nor even GW Bush, nor even that put on the silly tri-corner hats in 2010. Trump's ascent in 2016 has been described, accurately in my view, as a hostile takeover. If Trump's effectiveness as party leader is to be measured by election results, the track record is mixed: 2016 was a win, 2018 was a debacle for the GOP. The party as a whole has receded from its high water mark of controlling governorships and statehouses under his watch, but that was bound to happen in any case. As for me personally, I'm more of a traditional conservative, including valuing character and competence in leaders. If those no longer are core values for the GOP, then my attachment to the party is much-attenuated. I try to be more of a Catholic-social-teaching guy than a party guy these days.
Jim, I agree with you that Trump's ascent was a hostile takeover. Also that the reason the party sticks with him is a list of fairly standard GOP priorities. But it's all the other stuff that isn't standard that makes his administration a train wreck. It certainly would have been better for the country if his name had never been on the ballot. There were lots of Republicans who said he was unfit for office prior to his nomination. Which is why I can't figure out why they all went "Stepford Wives" since. I can't believe none of then mounted a serious effort to primary him and take back their party. As it is, if he goes down, the cooties are going to stick to them, too.
DeleteJim, I agree with everything Steve Chapman said in that column except his certainty that Bernie Sanders would necessarily lead his party over a cliff, a la McGovern (and Goldwater). That sounds like something he would have said about Trump in 2016. But, yeah, he is right on the res of it. The current nominating systems substitute the burrs for the saddle.
DeleteMy comment about Kraushaar is just a repeat that the pros in political reporting long the the 1924 Democratic convention, but that won't be allowed to happen again. (If it were to, it just occurred to me, the right-to-lifers would play about the same role the Klan did in '24. But, as I say, ain't gonna happen.)
Here is an interesting take on the supposed progressive/moderate divide, suggesting there isn't such a chasm as some might think. Hopefully the link isn't paywalled.
ReplyDeleteObama's appeal, when running against Hillary, was his contrasting himself with Clinton as a change from corporatist Democrats. Once in office, he showed himself to be a total friend of Wall Street. In other words. he made the right sounds to sell himself but was not sincere. I trust the reformist statements of Sanders and Warren but not the others. However, I would even vote for Bloomberg over Trump because, if you have to have an emperor, better a Claudius than a Nero.
DeleteIt is interesting that Bloomberg has proposed a 5% surtax on those making over 5 million a year. Not something I'll ever have to worry about. But would be step in the direction of economic fairness.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteIf our only choice is between billionaires, fire the current one every four years.
DeleteSo I see that Trump is needling Bloomberg about his height. He must be a little concerned, you can always tell when someone shows up on his radar, he has to diss them about something stupid.
DeleteThe Post is right. Buttigieg vs Sanders is a discussion of nuance. Trump vs either one of them is a chasm. The pundits are pumping up the differences to make the preliminary bouts seem almost as exciting as the main event, but it's the difference between Debate Club and World War III.
ReplyDelete