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

This article on Trump and black voters deserves a read.

an endorsement from warren would certainly help sanders, idk how much, but i also don't expect it to happen, unfortunately for her agenda.

sanders has said his vp will be a younger progressive, probably a woman, who supports his policy agenda including m4a. options include warren, tammy baldwin, a close ally like nina turner, a labour leader like sara nelson, etc.

biden will probably choose a moderate women and/or poc. kamala harris or stacy abrams would probably be likely considering how much the dem establishment likes them.

I was one of the big Bernie supporters last election who is pretty cynical about him now. I would think this phenomenom is documented to death at this point.

Mentioned, yes. Documented? idk, and certainly not in the context of this one-on-one contest.

Sorry I didn't mean to do a toxicity and erase Tulsi Gabbard there

Oh, i would've assumed there were articles and blog posts and tweets about it. I don't know this contest. You guys were all really in your feelings last night it seems.

warren endorse tulsi challenge

oh the one on one about Biden/Bernie.

whatever ceiling exists for sanders has very little to do with extremely online shit like "mean bernie bros" and more about the perception the media has pushed that he's too risky in the general election compared to biden which appears to be the main factor behind biden's surge.

I agree with this. Someone I follow on Twitter posted "People are going to die in camps and from lack of healthcare because of SNAKE EMOJIS," but I'd be surprised if 10% of Warren voters even knew what that meant.

That said, her staff and campaign workers definitely know what it means and have had to deal with it, which I suppose may not make them enthusiastic about peace-building.

Hi, it's me, the woman who had to read @ewarren's replies and mentions for the past year, having a lot of feelings about this last segment on Maddow.

— Alyssa Franke (@AlyssaFranke) March 6, 2020

If you know a better way, absent ringing Biden's bell at the next debate (which I really hope he'll do, but that's too far away), to change the perception/narrative that a Sanders run is too big a risk in The Age Of Trump, I'm all ears. ("He does better in head-to-head polling! Even Nate Silver says so!" ain't gonna cut it.) xps

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), 6. marts 2020 14:30 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I do fear it's too late, and that Sanders basically lost it after Nevada. But he could do what struggling campaigns normally do. He could change his messaging (he kinda already has), he could make changes in personnel, getting rid of Sirota for instance. Do something to signal his is pivoting, and is actually trying to unite the party. Focusing on wanting Warren to rescue him kinda only makes him seem more lost and ineffectual.

What the fuck is it with those snake emojis?

my LORD what is with the Sirota fixation around here?

Calm down Simon, it's just one of the names I know. You need a scapegoat, is what I'm saying

anyway there's no amount of "pivoting" that will ever make it seem like Sanders is capable of or even wants to "unite" the Democratic party. they've already united behind Biden. that lane is taken up and it doesn't suit him anyway. what he has to do is convince the electorate that they've badly miscalculated if they think Biden is a safe or wise choice. that's *easier* to do when you have allies people respect. it's not about "rescue".

What the fuck is it with those snake emojis?

misogyny + Warren's sudden position as biggest threat to Bernie's candidacy when she could have been the biggest boon

by "they" I didn't mean voters, I meant The Establishment. that was unclear lol xp

xpost it's a strange thing. I am not a very emotional person and have probably less problem with face to face confrontations or threats than an average person. But I definitely know I would not be able to handle twitter (which is why I am not on it) or personalized emails or phone calls threatening me en masse. I don't know what it is. Not really being able to fully see the threat? I really admire the women who deal with that as public figures. Like, I don't know how the squad does it without fully melting down daily.

the snake emoji thing first started when Warren started talking about how Sanders supposedly told her a woman couldn't get elected

ugh i hate xxxxxxposting whatever. That was after jaymc;s thing.

idk why sirota is so loathed by some but that still wouldn't get any positive attention from the media or stop the media complaining about mean bernie bros. the establishment doesn't want to unite with him. most voters have no idea who sirota is anyway

the main reason why sanders isn't a likely lost cause at this point is biden is such a terrible candidate that he could absolutely manage to throw away the great position he's in with an abysmal debate performance (even as unfortunately late as the next debate is) or something similar

simon otm

Like, I don't know how the squad does it without fully melting down daily.

I know ppl have qualms with Ilhan Omar but her ability to even go to work every day fucking astounds me.

Bernie’s a great candidate who left and right is being painted as some sort of firebrand. It’s completely against the spirit of his campaign which is oriented toward elevating the voices of struggling americans

― treeship., Friday, March 6, 2020 6:36 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Liz Bruenig's latest column proposes that Sanders win over "normies" by talking more about his plans for child care and paid parental leave:

Americans already support these programs; Mr. Sanders needs to make the case that funding them federally and making them available to all parents is wise, possible and not at all unusual. Here his pitch becomes somewhat paradoxical. While these are workaday government services in many places, America lags our peers here, meaning that introducing them will require a kind of revolutionary politics. But that revolution need not mean what voters fear in the word: chaos and strife. Instead it can be as simple as this: Go to the voting booth for Mr. Sanders, because he wants all kids — your kids, my kids — to be safe and happy. He wants to give all parents time to nurse, cuddle and bond with their newborns without sinking into debt or poverty.

Did the Warren camp complain about snake emojis? Or did the Bernie crew coordinate sending snake emojis, and now they think that's the only thing that happened? I really don't get what happened here, why all of a sudden everyone is pretending Warren is mad about snake emojis

the warren camp complained about snake emojis from bernie supporters for a while back in january, and warren did an interview yesterday complaining about mean bernie supporters online and proposed some sort of nonsensical system for candidates to denounce individual mean tweets made by their supporters?

I'm not saying she's wrong - it could be a winning talking point - but it's almost painfully on-brand that Liz Bruenig thinks Bernie needs to talk about children more

I think it's just a glib way of brushing off the abuse and assholism. SNAKE EMOJIS. FUN! xpost

I honestly haven't paid much attention to the Sanders campaign, mostly because it feels like he's been campaigning for seven years. Sanders fatigue? But I do know a couple of people who, as of several weeks ago, said they had supported and voted for him the last time around but not this time, so I have no idea what changed.

what changed is one of the worst and dumbest human beings in American history wound up becoming the country's most powerful man and broke everyone's brains making every Dem voter's #1 priority become this nebulous thing called "electability"

I don't know what "snake emojis" means either and I haven't bothered to google it, and of the (many) Sanders-skeptic progressives I know or follow online I haven't seen a single person mention it. That it is some kind of default dismissal by Sanders people of concerns raised about his and his supporters' messaging just feels like more denialism to me. But at this point, some of this stuff is just starting to feel like pre-emptive ammo for a defeat. "We lost because a lot of fucking liberals were scared by snake emojis." Maybe that will make some people feel better to say, but it still wouldn't feel as good as actually winning.

so one of my friends is a pastor of a really progressive church. He actually got defrocked in the 80s for marrying same sex couples and although I am not religious at all I listen to his sermons sometimes because they are rooted in science and modernity and reality and acknowledging other faiths. And holy shit, during the snake emoji period he was going to town on Warren's public fb pages in a really juvenile, entitled way. I was shocked. It was really depressing.

"We lost because a lot of fucking liberals were scared by snake emojis."

no one thinks this is why, this is just people expressing frustration with some also obviously too online warren supporters who have directly said "i supported warren and am way closer politically to sanders, but his supporters are Just Too Mean so i'm backing biden."

I have to think that at least a few people who aren't up on The Discourse but do know a thing or two about policy must be wondering why there isn't already a loud and proud Warren/Sanders alliance.

https://i.redd.it/87u4cg0852l41.jpg

Here is a snake emoji explainer: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryancbrooks/warren-bernie-snake-twitter-2020

So, the snake emojis as far as I understood it was after it leaked that Bernie had told Warren that a woman could never be president and the entire rashomon of those events, snake emojis flooded twitter all around the warren campaign as a stand in for her "betrayal" and then add in all the other cesspool types of tweets about her throwing bernie under the bus. xpost

ugh, yeah jaymc's thing is probably better.

I have to think that at least a few people who aren't up on The Discourse but do know a thing or two about policy must be wondering why there isn't already a loud and proud Warren/Sanders alliance.

Because the obsession with "policy" over "politics" is a pretty big blind spot for a lot of Sanders supporters. The two are related but not the same.

xpost lol I had typed out an explanation, too, and then there were so many x-posts that I decided to just post a link.

it was a breakdown of the existing non-aggression pact between their campaigns and seemed like a bizarre, bad faith attempt at a smear so i understand why people were angry with her even if i don't think the way they expressed that was helpful. that's the internet though.

This goes back many xps, but it's funny to me for anyone complaining about Sanders being painted as a firebrand when his entire campaign and presence for the last five years has been REVOLUTION REVOLUTION REVOLUTION.

I have argued to many people, both Sanders supporters and detractors, that his actual record isn't revolutionary at all and he's much less of a radical than people on either the left or right tend to paint him. But you can't blame people for taking the campaign's own marketing at face value.

A better message would've been that US is literally generations behind in development.

Anything’s revolutionary when people are going on about incremental change being the only way forward (and I cbf scrolling back to see if anyone answered the question of how incremental change is going to deal with climate change).

I have argued to many people, both Sanders supporters and detractors, that his actual record isn't revolutionary at all and he's much less of a radical than people on either the left or right tend to paint him

the argument I make a lot is that his goals re: healthcare, education, and taxes are arguably less radical than what we were doing during America's "prosperity" period in the 60s, conditions which a lot of old Trump supporters have directly benefitted from

They only look radical because we've moved rightward since 1966.

sanders has repeatedly made the "my policies aren't radical compared to the rest of the world and america's past" point

And he's right. But he's also running on REVOLUTION.

I saw a good post on a friend's FB page the other day by someone saying that it seems like a fundamental difference between Sanders' base and the rest of the Democratic primary electorate is that his base thinks this is a change election -- this is where we finally start to take apart the late capitalist machine, throw all the bourgeois pigs against the wall, etc. And for the rest of the electorate, who probably have a range of feelings about that machine, from rage to affection, it's not a change election, it's three-alarm fire response to get this fucking guy and his whole terrible party out of the White House. Those aren't necessarily conflicting impulses, you can want to do both of them, but they come from different directions and are ultimately headed different places.

I hate to speculate on what he should or should not say, but imo it's not hard to make the case that any attempt to retreat to a bygone era or "restore norms" without serious structural change is doomed to usher in bigger fires later. (In the case of climate change, quite literally.)

Anything’s revolutionary when people are going on about incremental change being the only way forward

Given the gradual rightward drift over the last half century, incremental change has its work cut out to stand still

Well yeah. Be nice to see people drop the ReVOlUtIoN argument in that context...

@tipsy: Yep, I think that's right. It's also the difference between the Democratic and Republican electorates. Dems have more affection for their establishment, so it's hard to make a REVOLUTION message appeal broadly.

Maybe part of the problem is that most liberals can:t imagine anything worse than Trump.

I hate to speculate on what he should or should not say, but imo it's not hard to make the case that any attempt to retreat to a bygone era or "restore norms" without serious structural change is doomed to usher in bigger fires later. (In the case of climate change, quite literally.

The key is to put it in a framework that people feel is consistent with American values and traditions. More New Deal, less Denmark.