2020 Democratic presidential primary

I heard Buttigieg on the radio and after spending a few weeks privately laughing to myself about his name I was really impressed when I finally heard him talk. I hope he doesn't get sidelined and left out of the debates.

really wish I had checked Politifart before posting :(

Based entirely on that agenda (which is what has been presented to base first takes off) this does look like another helping of "if we can just fix the economy then race relations should just sort themselves out" - this didn't work so well in 2016, I really can't see it going anywhere in 2020.

What would you do to repair race relations in America that is not enumerated in Bernie’s platform?

And which other candidate has better solutions in this area?

I was going to post this story published a couple days ago. It's not a surprise, though, cuz we talked about it exhaustively at the time. No doubt he'll do better this time.

Recent polling, inasmuch as it can be trusted, suggests he may have already closed that gap

Criminal justice reform, gender pay equity, and the DREAM act are not purely economic issues.

Sure, but he demonstrated little interest last time in changing his approach for the sake of the audience. Again, if he's the nominee I'll vote for him, but he's not whom I'm looking at most closely this time.

it's not him I object to as much as his idiot BernieBro base that might still not vote for the Dem candidate in 2020.

do we need to go over the stats again

Lol extraordinary

some 'mainstream Dems' are as deluded as Trumpists, see above

Oh man pwned

IT'S OFFICIAL DAD IS RUNNING pic.twitter.com/eisSCAJgdt

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) February 19, 2019

I just got one of those personalized Bernie canvassing texts messages. SIgh.

crossover content with the 'itt: pictures of dinosaurs gazing haplessly at the arriving meteor' thread

https://i.redd.it/axz60fb8nih21.jpg

What's missing from that pic is Bernie's baggage.

burned off in the upper atmosphere of a resurgent american left iirc

The point in the WaPo article about the likelihood of actually enacting that agenda even if Sanders became President, given the realities of having to work with Congress, is the issue that would probably most concern me tbh.

if I were Bernie, I'd concentrate less on his record, less on Trump, and more on the idea of reshaping the presidency itself, acting as a sort of "activist president" interested in activating citizens to help pressure existing power structures/institutions into necessary change, inviting people to take a more participatory role. In other words exactly what O ended up not doing with the base who were excited about him.

Because the institutional obstacles do exist and no single candidate can fix them without pretty much completely reorienting a whole lot of peoples' relationships to politics and their representatives

The point in the WaPo article about the likelihood of actually enacting that agenda even if Sanders became President, given the realities of having to work with Congress, is the issue that would probably most concern me tbh.

― silent as a seashell Julia (Sund4r), Tuesday, 19 February 2019 16:02 (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

vs candidate x, whose name is....?

Could everyone who believes what presidential candidates say they are "going to do" is literally linked to reality please move to the kids' table, where there will be party favors and Jell-O.

what flavour

it's not him I object to as much as his idiot BernieBro base that might still not vote for the Dem candidate in 2020.

― fuck the NRA (Neanderthal), Tuesday, February 19, 2019 9:54 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the ignorance needed to write something like this is frankly astounding, considering the relationship “our side” is supposed to have with facts

vs candidate x, whose name is....?

Every candidate faces those obstacles but if electing Sanders results in similar policies that you would get from Biden or Klobuchar, what is there to get excited about?

It’s politics baby what need have we of facts

Every candidate faces those obstacles but if electing Sanders results in similar policies that you would get from Biden or Klobuchar, what is there to get excited about?

why even bother engaging in politics at all then really

A sanders or warren victory would, at the very least, send a different kind of message about the american people want than a harris or gillibrand victory. Transformative progressive policies aren’f just parts of sanders’ platform—that’s the core of what he represents as a politica figure.

Estimates from multiple surveys estimate between 6-12% of people who voted Bernie in the Primary voted for Trump but go on, bestow your facts upon me k3ller

*Trump in the gen election that is

Can you please cite these?

Even if it’s true, it’s not Bernie’s fault. There was a slew of reasons Clinton was an unpopular candidate, some her fault—like having voted for the fucking Iraq War—and some not, like the massive disinformation campaign that grew from the email hacks.

25% of hillary backers voted for mccain in 2008 iirc

if we're playing that game

Sounds like a good reason to nominate him actually

I don't think 6-12% is exceptionally high for primary voters crossing over? I thought similar estimates had over 20% of Clinton voters voting for McCain in 08? No expert on these stats, though.

I'm still p pro-Sanders/Warren btw. Just thinking out loud, I guess.

6xp

Yeah. I have a theory that he helped Hillary if anything because he got more people interested in the political process. If hillary was seen to have run unopposed people may have been more skeptical or bored by her than they were.

(Granted it didn't prove anything as it was one of three estimates and even Larry Sabato stated there's no good case to be made that BernieBros swung the election):

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

Anyway i apologize for the diversion, onward and downward.

Xxpost a lot of Hillary supporters in 08 weren't democrats. Like my mother for instance

I can support this theory with stats but you need to go through my office assistant to get them.

Self xp

xps to sund4r but are you predicting/speculating that there are other dem candidates that get better policies through?

if so, idk do i see that. obama struggled enough and im not sure anyone in the field is in his class

if the argument is "theyd all achieve the same but bernie is an old white man" then hey good for u kinda thing thats fine

if the president might be an aspirational figurehead type that doesnt get bogged down in wonkishness (that might possibly only serve to combat that aspirational quality cf obama again) then bernie would imo seem a better bet than many again

Yeah. I have a theory that he helped Hillary if anything because he got more people interested in the political process. If hillary was seen to have run unopposed people may have been more skeptical or bored by her than they were.

I didn’t say it wasn’t a bad theory. It is a theory though.

I actually think it's pretty sound, though of course basically impossible to verify or debunk

I wasn't necessarily making an argument for other candidates over Sanders. I was tempering my enthusiasm for the platform announcement (which did sound good). 3xp to darraghmac

Without any clear statistics (and how would we get them?), it seems pointless to me to try to analyse the extent to which a primary candidate helped or hurt the winner of the nomination, unless he e.g. refused to endorse her or campaigned against her in the general, which did not happen.

In any case, the idea that he was a nader-type spoiler is preposterous

he ran his campaign past a point where he had any reasonable path to victory. at the very least you can make a claim that that wasn’t good for Clinton. unless of course you’re operating with this theory that the guy who spent half a year making the country associate Clinton with Goldman Sachs and disillusioning Democrats on her was actually good for her.