Your next 2020 Democratic presidential primary thread: Now we're serious

what the FUCK, how is this not immediately disqualifying

timely reminder that Pete isn’t eating chicken wings in this photo. it’s a Cinnabon that he’s torn up into little pieces to hold in his paws and nibble on, like a rat would do pic.twitter.com/6rkkmhT9Tz

— illy bocean (@IllyBocean) February 5, 2020

maybe he just had a dental appointment

I think Buttigieg is a lot easier than Biden to beat. Especially for Sanders. Then it could all end at sc and super tuesday

LOLZ @ 538

https://i.imgur.com/6xgPH2y.jpg

#no-one2020

We were slightly surprised, however, at how much emphasis the media put on SDEs as opposed to the popular vote metrics.

HMMMMM

What proportion of Facebook campaign ads do others living in the US get? I'd say I get about four from Sanders to every two from Steyer and one from Bloomberg. I never get anything from Warren or any of the others.

I saw one from Bloomberg last week but other than that, zero on social media. I already follow Warren and Bernie.

I just get ads for some weird reclining-desk-chair that costs $7000

Just wanna remind everybody that I was here first on the very first day of the first 2020 primary thread

And Buttigieg! What about my man Buttigieg?!

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, February 1, 2017 4:11 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I agree with Nate Silver that he's very unlikely to be the nominee but I saw something there dammit

oh there's something there alright, but none of it's good

i saw a mealymouthed corpo careerist

Bernie and Booty now essentially tied in Iowa

Pete is the only candidate whose appeal totally eludes me.

huge support from the zero-carb caucus for his efforts to price bread out of the hands of the general public

Folks are grousing about twitter embeds but I like jokes so

Iowa caucus
1.02 patch notes

- fixed issue where Bernie would clip through floor causing crash
- fixed audio issue that replaced Mayor Pete speech with rat hiss
- reloading save file no longer triggers Biden t-pose
- added the ability to remove door from caucus room at capacity

— brian feldman (@bafeldman) February 5, 2020

I'm still having issues with the textures on Andrew Yang not loading, and for some reason Hillary keeps spawning even though she's not supposed to be in the game anymore.

— Matthew Hall (@bittermang) February 6, 2020

Mayor Butt's appeal:
self-recognition from other semi-woke MBAs
people with disappointing children/grandchildren who think "he's such a smart young man, why couldn't Tommy have turned out like that"
boring 'you can't have good things' centrism without Biden's age but with a different hook than Klobuchar

The hook is his penis

uh

-John Popper

history will always remember fondly the Democrats' first Presidential candidate with a weiner

Oh, so like Clinton then. Cool.

xp to jimmy

https://i.ibb.co/KxT7SYY/tumblr-lgc0p0zh-QK1qgb5c3o1-500.jpg

Looks like my favorite uncle is tied for first in iowa!

im so off the path i legit dont know which clinton youre demdunking there

Jeb Clinton is the one that’s running this time

Pete's appeal to the average voter who isn't glued to Twitter isn't hard to fathom. he's the only legit candidate under 800 years old, for one thing. he's Obama Lite. he espouses a desire to heal America that everyone on this board knows is absolutely foolish given the state of the Republican party but time and again you see surveyed and interviewed voters reiterate this longing for unity and and an end to partisan divisiveness.

I wonder how much it burns Beto's ass that Pete outmanuevered him so effortlessly.

yeah that's the scary thing about Pete to me is that he seems to have that Biden thing where the more you know about him the less you like him, I feel like the Republicans would just be sitting on a ton of stuff, small time mayor local politics stuff that's going to look terrible in the open

Pete has appeal as long as you don't know anything about him; he becomes a blank for you to project your hopes onto. In other words, a standard politician.

jinx

xxpost FWIW, the GOP doesn't really seem to be into sitting on stuff these days. If President Turd is aware, it's going out in a tweet five minutes later.

I'm just assuming they keep stuff from dad

An interesting article.

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?

To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”

...

The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.

Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”

“And it is just not true.”

I guess the block for me is that I find him too unpleasant to blankly project anything onto, especially hope xps

The Dems I know who like him really like him yet can't explain why. Which goes to show how little policy positions matter to many.

as much as it would seem that Bloomberg's candidacy represents a very concerted effort to prevent a potential Bernie nomination, this does feel correct:

It’s amazing to me how much Bloomberg’s presence in the race is hurting Biden and helping Sanders. Bloomberg exists as this theoretical white knight for a certain group of Dem donors/moderates that gives them an escape valve from do-or-die Biden support.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 6, 2020

which of course would mean Bloomberg's primary objective is stroking his own ego, which couldn't possibly be the case.

I mean, yeah, that's the impression I get. In a sense, Bloomberg is the Trump of the 'left' this time around, someone simply looking to boost their profile and who doesn't have any real intention of winning.

"Pete has appeal as long as you don't know anything about him; he becomes a blank for you to project your hopes onto. In other words, a standard politician." this was my experience. When he entered I was like, "yeah! he's smart! he talks well!" but then as time went on I cooled significantly. I don't hate him nearly as much as you all do but he slipped to my third or fourth choice.

You know who else had a hooked penis? Bill Clinton.

Mayor Pete is clearly a lock.

Uh-oh

Many Errors Are Evident in Iowa Caucus Results Released Wednesday

fucking morons

If this isn't the last Iowa caucus...

Trumpists ratfucked Iowa precinct reporting hotline

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-06/trump-fans-flooded-iowa-caucus-hotline-top-democrat-says

In light of all the questionable electoral bullshit in 2016, the single most important goddamn thing the people in charge of this thing should've spent the last several years doing is ensuring that the results would be unimpeachable (no pun intended). I mean just what the fuck.

Iowa results, very unimpeachable and very cool

These discrepancies have not gone unnoticed in Bernie circles over the last few days, and have not helped tamp down conspiratorial thinking.

There’s no legal obligation for any of this to work well, right? The Democratic Party (whatever that is, exactly) could decide its nominee based on who can hit the most layups in a minute, or who name the most signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Right?

Pretty much, afaik. One of the bigger concerns, I feel, is utilizing methods of selecting a presidential candidate that don't make your party look like a bunch of hapless clowns.

It's not like these caucus results haven't been shady in the past
There's just been an extra million sets of eyes on the process this time thanks to the app fuckup

Has it ever taken them 5+ days to confirm Iowa caucus results before?