2020 Democratic presidential primary

I think you confuse House leadership (which, yes, hangs out with rich donors, duh) and House members, Onesecond.

Yeah, the stuff I'm saying does apply more to leadership than regular members for sure.

The median net worth of a senator was $3.2 million, versus $900,000 for members of the House of Representative

https://qz.com/1190595/the-typical-us-congress-member-is-12-times-richer-than-the-typical-american-household/

it ain't just leadership

Of the Top 50 wealthiest members of the Senate/Congress, only 14 of those are Democrats in the House, and you can probably guess who at least a few of them are (Pelosi, Kennedy, Delaney, Khanna).

I think that speaks more to the astronomical wealth of Republican senators than it does to the merely great wealth of congresspeople in general

^^^

You can look up the Democratic caucus' net worths here:
http://www.rollcall.com/wealth-of-congress

You can clearly see by filtering for Democrats the large majority of the House caucus is worth less than $0.5 million, with the lowest member actually being $2.4 million in debt (I feel for sorry Alice Hastings)

yes was abt to:

I stand corrected it does turn out only 13 of those 50 are R senators : /

though the four wealthiest of those appear to be democrats

Having a debt load in the multimillions is an upper class thing.

generally true rules of thumb: Senators on average are way wealthier (although it's always interesting to see who isn't), and Republicans on average are a wealthier caucus than the Democrats

xp

Hastings is in debt because of legal fees for corruption charges from 80s FYI

Hastings is a classic corrupt South Florida machine politician who will never die.

exactly. idk if I would call him "upper class" as much as just garden variety sleazy

John Delaney is so rich

the top 2 richest congressmen are real dickheads, hmmm

"the "most votes of any presidential candidate ever" argument is symbolic but mostly meaningless -- the country's population is going up, which also means the population of voters"

For sure. The only real import it has is a counterpoint against the argument that the electorate is too misogynistic to vote for Harris or Warren...65 million Americans still voted for Hilary even after all the bullshit.

also worth noting that that data isn't for the current Congress, which (given the influx of new members and flipped Districts) is probably a bit different now. Issa is gone, for ex.

xp

That is not several decades.

Goes back to the National Health Act of 1939.

IIRC, there was a vote among the Democratic House caucus in 1993, in which a majority of Dems favored single-payer. Not enough to win over Blue Dogs or certainly bill passage, but single-payer has been in discussion a very long time.

Goes back to the National Health Act of 1939

Medicare was created in 1966

Dem bills encouraging universal coverage extend back to the New Deal. Great Society, some 27 years later, is when they finally got partial coverage for the olds.

I was referencing a specific post that specifically called out Medicare for All, not single payer or universal health coverage. words mean things.

Thought this was a great graphic, that should be shared widely (especially to any rube who suggests there isn't a difference between the parties):

https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/640-width/20190727_WOC449.png

If you want to talk the history of government funded healthcare that's fine, but let's not pretend that the reasons the National Health Act didn't even make it to a floor vote in 1939 are the same as the reasons Medicare only applied to the olds in 1966 or the reasons single payer didn't make it into Obamacare or the reasons Medicare-for-All took this long to get majority support in the House.

xp

hi Shakey, let me put it another way, though I'm really just echoing OneStepBefore, who you were incredibly rude to: The Democratic Party has, with a handful of honourable exceptions, acquiesced to the notion that the principles of an unregulated finance industry are essentially the principles that should rule us all, and has been complicit in selling out the interests of the working class who have now unsurprisingly abandoned them in droves. do you reckon that's a "deluded" point of view?

words mean things.

― Οὖτις

can't believe you still think this at this late date

do you reckon that's a "deluded" point of view?

considering the Democrats are the only party to consistently pass legislation regulating the finance industry, yep. also don't think it's accurate to say the working class has abandoned them in droves.

poor white people have abandoned them in droves, because they aren't as racist as they used to be, is more or less how I break it down.

As the party of bland neoliberal technocracy, the Democratic Party is obviously better at throwing sops to the working class than the bloodthirsty, reactionary, fascist Republican Party. But our entire government has steadily ratcheted ever to the right since the New Deal era.

Calling the working class racist is a terribly classist way to try and apologize for the Democrats' complicity in this rightward shift.

Obama the neoliberal who did a whole bunch of things neoliberals hate like a stimulus package, the ACA, environmental regulations, financial regulations, raising taxes, and all sorts of neo-keynesian stuff that the Chicago school has tried to dismantle for decades.

Calling the working class racist is a terribly classist way

lol read a book

I mean I see the frame you're fitting everything into and it's ahistorical and innacurate, sorry to be a dick about it.

no u read a book

Why do I even bother

Calling the working class racist is a terribly classist way to try and apologize for the Democrats' complicity in this rightward shift.

Defining the working class as the angry white people who think Sharia Law is coming to take the country away from them is also racist.

Didn't mean to imply those were the only working class voters who have abandoned the Democrats!

loads of the working class are still hardcore Democrats - Richard Trumka isn't a Republican, large majorities of non-white low-wage workers are a core Democratic constituency etc. The constituency that has abandoned the Democratic party are non-college educated white males. This is a demographic fact. If you want to argue that those people represent the "working class" in this country I think you are sadly mistaken and also maybe a little racist.

I have a hard time reconciling the argument Sanders has lost to Clinton/is losing to Biden because of 'name recognition' and their association with popular Obama and the other argument that democrats have been left in droves, that they can't help themselves but enact or promote unpopular policy proposals. Which one is it?

Didn't mean to imply those were the only working class voters who have abandoned the Democrats!

so non-racist non-college educated, white, low-wage workers have abandoned Democrats for the Republicans? huh. show me the data.

xp

Trumka might have more to work with if he had a Democratic Party as a full partner

thinking maybe I should step away from this convo tho

The thing that bums me out about these never-ending arguments is that I think at bottom it's perfectly reasonable to be disappointed in the Democratic party as a whole and their failure to stop/willingness to capitulate to right-wing demogoguery and nonsense, especially during the Clinton-Bush years when this dynamic was really at it's worst. I just hate seeing things sloppily argued, with no grounding in reality about how the party actually functions and what it has (or hasn't) done.

Wow, Mr. (or Ms.) "^^^deluded" and "read a book" just hates sloppy argumentation. Apologies, oh high minded one. I guess my rhetoric was just too sloppy, that's why you had to step in.

But our entire government has steadily ratcheted ever to the right since the New Deal era.

I mean here's some more ahistorical nonsense. LBJ passed shit FDR *would never* have passed (why because must appeal to poor white racists in the South) - namely the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. And then he gets Medicare and Medicaid and the Clean Air Act passed, creates the Federal Transit Administration, creates the NEA and PBS, the Higher Education Act etc. Richard Nixon (Nixon!) creates the EPA. Obama passes the ACA, ARRA, etc. These are huge liberal tools and policies still in place and with huge ramifications for our country. It hasn't all been a "steadily ratcheted" drift to the right. The one Democratic president that really drifted to the right was Clinton - deregulating the financial, pharmaceutical, and telecom industries (which we are also all still reeling from the shitty effects of).

But he bailed out the benks!

Regan's overwhelming victories and successes in the 80s traumatized the party, resulting in all the "triangulation" crap from the Clinton years that were essentially an effort in re-branding. And then all the old Dixiecrats died off. And then 9/11 was another trauma - no one could criticize Dubya/oppose the war for fear of being labelled as disloyal etc (fucking John Kerry ugh). The party couldn't figure out how to maintain it's old coalitions and bases of power, so it floundered (should we be corporatists or pro-labor? how racist/"tough on crime" do we need to be to keep poor white people voting for us? etc.) Obama was a course-correction to a generally more liberal, more inclusive Democratic party than prior eras, and it looks like whoever wins the nomination this time around (unless it's Biden, which I doubt) will further that transformation.

xp

I generally agree with Barney Frank about the bank bailout. I didn't like it (and a whole shitload of people should have gone to jail) but the alternative was pretty grim.

Economist/YouGov Poll, July 21 - 23. "Very + somewhat favorable" and "somewhat + very unfavorable"

Biden        69%  22%
Warren       66%  11%
Sanders      66%  23%
Harris       61%  13%
Booker       55%  13%
O'Rourke     53%  17%
Buttigieg    52%  11%
Castro       52%  11%
Klobuchar    43%  13%
Gillibrand   41%  20%
Yang         33%  19%
Inslee       32%  12%
de Blasio    31%  28%
Hickenlooper 29%  14%
Gabbard      26%  24%
Steyer       25%  16%
Ryan         24%  18%
Bullock      23%  11%
Delaney      21%  16%
Williamson   21%  26%
Moulton      19%  11%
Sestak       17%  11%
Weld         17%  12%
Gravel       16%  10%
Schultz      15%  26%
Messam       13%  10%

^ among those who identify as Democrats

Who is Messam?

wait, Weld is not a Democrat

neither is Bernie lol