2020 Democratic presidential primary

kind of impossible to do w/ 10 ppl on the fuckin stage

finally a climate change question... for Tulsi Gabbard!

She’ll get to the bottom of it!

oh boy someone is about to get a lot of twitter comments

I was thrown for a minute when Biden mentioned a million wiggers in concentration camps in China.

Oh cool is warren about to bring back the draft? Wtf w this nonsense question

Oh god the AI thing again?!? I’m out

I was thrown for a minute when Biden mentioned a million wiggers in concentration camps in China.

Oh cool is warren about to bring back the draft? Wtf w this nonsense question

I guess that is basically the right pronunciation. I'd been saying something more like "Ooh-ger" in my head. xp
Actually Biden is pretty strong when talking about foreign policy, esp. in comparison to e.g. Yang.

lol Booker on Biden's wanting weed illegal

"I thought you were high when you said it."

booker has had some good energy tonight imo

Lol Biden fucking this up

it's been a good debate for Booker & Harris I think

Yah

Can’t believe anyone can stand to listen to these freaks talk

it's how i quietly deal with my trump derangement syndrome

Fair enough

Booker apparently got a donation bump, not sure about Harris

also

"Biden. I wouldn't say he was a house of fire in any of the debates that we've been to," Axelrod said of the top-tier Democratic hopeful's debate performances.

"And yet he comes, kind of bumps along, kind of Mr. Magooing his way through this," he added, referring to the popular cartoon character known for being nearly blind.

A little shocked no one really went in on Pete for endorsement-gate.

The McKinsey stuff and his spotty record as mayor are a little harder to condense into an ADHD media-sized bite but this one seems like an easy mark.

a little surprised cable news hasn’t made more hay of it

lol j/k not really

I wouldn't say he was a house of fire

A mistranscription by someone who doesn't know it's "house afire", since afire is such an archaic word now.

without a direct question about it I'm not sure how any of his opponents could've worked it in

xp

i suspect pete is very hard to run against because a lot of the people who like him, like the general idea that he is very nice and smiley and "above politics" and "not divisive," and these same people interpret any kind of critique or challenge as "being divisive."

he's only hard to run against because apparently no one in the mainstream media cares to hold him accountable for stuff like his dumbass college tweet or the endorsement thing

probably discussed upthread, but the Quinnipiac poll from Monday found 0% support for buttigieg among african-american voters in South Carolina.

xp what's the endorsement thing? just how he doesn't have any?

here's the first line of the story from NYT today:

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has 154 endorsements from current or former black or Hispanic elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris has 93. Senator Bernie Sanders has 91. Senator Cory Booker has 50. Senator Elizabeth Warren has 43.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has six.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-black-voters.html

i suspect pete is very hard to run against because a lot of the people who like him, like the general idea that he is very nice and smiley and "above politics" and "not divisive," and these same people interpret any kind of critique or challenge as "being divisive."

yes, these are the nice friendly smiley democratic voters who live in an area that is almost entirely white and don't support the idea of reparations

There is only two real candidates

what's the endorsement thing

google "Mayor Pete Douglass Plan"

yikes, i see what simon means about mainstream media not picking this up. the most reputable news source on the google results is newsweek (yikes), which leads with a paragraph highlighting what the Black Voters for Trump organization thinks about the situation....

but yeah, that seems bad! hopefully that'll bring him down a bit. i also noticed, in last night's debate, an exchange between harris and buttigieg regarding something buttigieg did that recently required an apology to harris, but she kind of talked around it. seems like SC is a bit of a problem for him

yeah the news trail is interesting - afaict Intercept first picked up that it was a lot of non-endorsements, and then the right-wing mediasphere picked that up and ran with it while most mainstream outlets buried it.

(full disclosure, this is the first time I've ever seen the Intercept break any actual information)

an exchange between harris and buttigieg regarding something buttigieg did that recently required an apology to harris

this was the Kenyan stock photo thing that Ilhan Omar called Mayor Pete out on

the general gist of both "stories" is Pete does not know any black people

except for the police chief that he fired because the chief was outing racists on his own force

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/18/pete-buttigieg-black-american-douglass-plan-kenyan-photo/

(full disclosure, this is the first time I've ever seen the Intercept break any actual information)

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 21, 2019 12:53 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

what lol

it's so annoying that that's the detail WaPo chose to hone in on tbh

Pete definitely seems like a candidate from a movie who turns out to be the antichrist

^^
this is basically Left Behind, the documentary unfolding in real time

Intercept’s steez is to repeat other ppl’s reporting but w added overheated lefty rhetoric afaict

Xos

that’s a patently preposterous statement, but just for some education their brazil reporting has been genuinely heroic

https://theintercept.com/series/iran-cables/

from this week

lula is free in part due to their reporting on corruption and election rigging

MSNBC asked Kamala Harris about the Kenyan stock photo thing during the debate and she got hella uncomfortable & said he’d already apologized for that before transitioning into the broader issue of how Democrats take black voters for granted. I think it was the right move though obviously disappointing for those of us who want o see Mayor Pete get slammed

Here's how I break it down atm.

If the nomination race comes down to Buttigeig, Sanders, Warren and Biden after Iowa, NH and SC, then it seems like the race will eventually need to settle even further, down to either Buttigeig or Biden repping for the old middle, and either Sanders or Warren repping for the progressives. Once that's sorted it will more closely resemble HRC vs. Sanders in 2016.

If Biden's going to have a chance, he needs to clean up big in SC, otherwise Pete's going to sweep him aside. Neither one has a well-defined agenda or policy goals, so it will all come down to which one makes a better emotional connection to the voters who share their lack of ideas and definite goals.

On the other side of the card, Sanders and Warren both have similarly strong policy goals and differ only moderately on substance. Both have a strong ground game and motivated activist supporters. I don't think either one can claim a definitive advantage going into the first three contests and it will be interesting to see how they hone their campaigns against changing circumstances. Sanders has the more visceral appeal to marginalized voters. Warren's sweet spot is among the college-educated liberals and women. I have no idea who's going to emerge in front, but I have a hunch Warren will take the edge over Sanders, just because marginalized voters are so much harder to get to the polls or caucuses.

I'm not worried if both Sanders and Warren stay in it, nearly even with one another, clear until May, if their combined voting base is greater than the two status quo guys. If the progressive vote tops out under 45%, then the status quo's gonna status quo again.

The dynamics of the rest of the race would be very different in each of the combinations of head-to-head that could emerge between these four contenders, so I won't even try to sort it out that far ahead. Just posting this much is pretty self-indulgent, but hey I'm retired!

username checks out