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

Unfortunately many of the reasons Biden would be a shit nominee (i.e. corruption, bad brain) are considered uncouth or unwise for a Dem opponent to bring up.

It's not rocket science

I've always wondered what rocket scientists say, because for rocket scientists, rocket science is relatively easy.

Brain surgery

Politics.

personal hygiene

It's nonsensical to say that you can get more votes in November if you can't first get more votes in March and April.

true, but isn't the calculation about November a factor in March?

i hope bernie attacks biden on his senility bc either it'll work and we'll be spared trump beating biden with the same argument or it'll fail and at least it'll have been a little played out before trump can use it. i don't really believe such a line of attack will help bernie but at this pt he probably has to try everything.

(Which cuts both ways - Bernie running up the numbers in California, which is an automatic win, is as meaningless as Biden running up the numbers in South Carolina, an automatic loss.)

lol washing your hands all the fucking time and not touching anything is kind of hard!

I don't think anyone needs to overtly attack Biden's cognitive decline (though Republicans will - and already are), it's going to be on display for months to come.

xp In this respect I think Wisconsin will be especially interesting; a state that Dems almost have to win to win the election, where Sanders did a lot better than Clinton in 2016, where Trump won narrowly in 2016 and African-American turnout/enthusiasm was low. Though I guess Michigan is sooner and will be informative in much the same way.

For all the kvetching I and others have done itt, maybe there's nothing Bernie can feasibly do that he isn't already doing to some extent - it makes sense to bring up Biden's record on trade and social security, for instance - substantive issues people purport to care about. Toxic bros? Denounced. Plans? Costed out. Diverse supporter base? Secured. More individual donations than maybe any candidate ever. (Citation needed, just a guess.) With all that, if a surplus of Dem voters' ideas about what constitutes "safety" doesn't budge even against a candidate as problematic as Biden, then maybe none of his or our bright ideas matter.

I'm expecting him to get stomped in Michigan.

It's unfortunate that we don't elect the President via popular vote!

I don't know, what I keep seeing about Hillary is that "the Democrats nominated the least popular candidate in history" or whatever, but she was actually more popular than the guy she ran against. Popularity wasn't the problem. And yeah, I said 6 of the last 7 because the electorate has shifted demographically in Democrats' favor over the last 30 years. I just think the narrative that "they keep doing this and failing" is at odds with the facts.

The Electoral College is its own challenge, because you have to be not only popular but also strategic. Hillary failed that test and ran a bad campaign. She could have won and should have, and she didn't, and that was on her.

I mean, the two best cases for the "the Democratic primary selects candidates that the majority of people don't like" are Mondale and McGovern -- one the safe establishment choice, the other the insurgent who was going to sweep in on the youth vote. Both also ran in much different demographics than the current voting-age population, against incumbents who were much more popular than Trump is, and are probably of limited use as models.

maybe there's nothing Bernie can feasibly do that he isn't already doing

At this point it's not really about what Bernie himself does in public. He's kind of a fixed figure. It's about what his campaign is or isn't doing on the ground, which is often kind of invisible until an election. I hope he has good people out there running a great ground game and racking up supporters. That's what's going to do it or not do it for him, much more than what he says to or about Biden or the bros.

It's more meaningless than pins on the head of a pin but Clinton had the highest negatives, however you define that in terms of popularity - countless people who actively disliked her voted for her in the general election (like me, a person who would happily send the entire Clinton family to a gulag in Siberia) because of the alternative. Trump got fewer overall votes but, given in-party approval, more from people who actually liked him.

So bright side, both Sanders and Biden have much higher likability polling than Clinton. Fewer people will be holding their nose for either in November than they did for Clinton.

it's kinda funny, my current round of dissertation research concerns the history of sewage treatment and so i'm regularly encountering passages like:

Physical pollution in New York Harbor consists of putrefying deposits of sewage solids on the bottom and shores of the bay and of floating matters of sewage origin. Discharges of oil, refuse and other waste from industrial plants and harbor craft augment the effect of pollution from sewage. Black and unsightly water out of which odorous gases are bubbling is further evidence of sewage pollution

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/atheists.png

I was hoping that excerpt was going to be about the Sewer Socialists.

This is a disingenuous question but I'll answer it anyway.

Democrats backing Biden believe they will suffer less. It's not rocket science; they think Sanders is alienating and not drawing a large enough coalition to sell his progressive message and they are concerned that the apparatus Sanders wants to put in place is untested, more fragile, and unlikely to materialize. They are voting for what they believe is a tangible, achievable goal rather than a dream.

I disagree with them but I get it.

― totally unnecessary bewbz of exploitation (DJP)

boom -- thanks

yah excellent summary DJP. i've spent some time in recent days trying to summarize yours and alfred's comments on this topic to other bernie stans in my circle who are all "wtf WHO is voting for biden?".

sheesh I need to change my display name

i do think the Biden wild card is how well he performs in states that Clinton lost in 2016, but was expected to win (based on election history favoring the Democratic Party). This isn't an endorsement but as said above (and said about Sanders as well), Biden is markedly more likable than Clinton to many of the voters who probably didn't like her at all. He seems more human and i think for whatever reason people connect w/him on a more personal level, especially maybe voters of a certain age and specific demographic. These may be voters who aren't as much into Bernie. I don't doubt establishment Dems might prefer Biden strategically for this reason. Trump didn't beat Clinton by a massive amount in a lot of these key states, it was a close call.

Of course if Biden accidentally starts making out with his sister during a rally, that might also turn off that key demo.

No one has to read this, but I wrote a piece yesterday wondering what the hell it would've cost Sanders or his surrogates to associate himself/themselves more tightly with Obama or to do away with the silly "Democratic socialist" label which I've spent a hundred hours explaining to POC in this county who've fled totalitarian systems; in politics when you're explaining broad strokes in microscopic detail, you've lost people.

But many of the younger Sanders supporters I know, even the POC, think Obama was as terrible as Bush and Trump.

Any Democratic nominee in Florida running in the era of Trump and Ron DeSantis is fucked, but if Biden's on the ticket Florida has a small chance of emerging blue *shrug*

Of course if Biden accidentally starts making out with his sister during a rally, that might also turn off that key demo.

But it might gain him support in the south! #easyjoke

The South Florida experience of "POC who've fled totalitarian systems" bears almost no relation to the rest of the country for obvious reasons. Again, Sanders has won nationally with Latinx and Asian-American voters (the demographics most likely to have personal or family experience with 'totalitarian regimes').

Nor can he "do away with" the label that he's defined himself with for 60 years, whether you like it or not. That's just not possible, and makes the attacks that would come even worse because now he looks shady.

I'm not even touching on the fact that some people do genuinely like Biden and think he would be a good President, for a myriad of reasons:

- years of Senate experience cultivating relationships with both Democrats and Republicans
- years of national government experience
- 8 years as Vice President

Even given the obstructionist remit of the modern Republican party, there is an argument that Biden is positioned to circumnavigate that in a manner Clinton (woman, most hated person in the universe), Obama (black), Warren (woman), Buttigieg (gay, infant), Harris (black, woman), Sanders (not a relationship builder), Bloomberg (no national experience), Klobuchar (woman, mean as a weasel), Booker (black, affable to the point of buffoonery), Castro (Hispanic), O'Roarke (c'mon), Gabbard (I mean seriously, c'mon), etc are not: he's the old white man who has been operating in these corridors of power for the past 50 years. It's not just that he's familiar to voters; he's intimately familiar with the system. If you don't want to smash the system, you turn to someone who knows the most about it and say "please fix this".

Alfred, did you mean to link this post?

And, on top of that, he matches the identity of people who have been allowed to use/manipulate the system.

brb, changing my display name to "Buttigieg (gay, infant)"

The South Florida experience of "POC who've fled totalitarian systems" bears almost no relation to the rest of the country for obvious reasons. Again, Sanders has won nationally with Latinx and Asian-American voters (the demographics most likely to have personal or family experience with 'totalitarian regimes').

what the hell does this mean?

Buttigieg (gay, infant)

thank you for the lol, djp

lol

well, Biden does have a reputation in Washington as being not too bright, so I'm sure a lot of people like dealing with him as the mark

what the hell does this mean?

more cherrypicked nonsense afaict

milo, I've repeatedly written that Sanders has or had the vote of young Hispanic voters here.

I for one love being told what is a legitimate totalitarian experience

Pete Buttigieg was the drummer for Gay Infant

what the hell does this mean?

That South Florida is not the rest of the country, demographically speaking.

That's a different answer at least than your first response.

milo, I've repeatedly written that Sanders has or had the vote of young Hispanic voters here.

I didn't say anything about young Hispanic voters or Sanders. You're "explaining to POC in this county" - a county that is not representative and shouldn't be read as indicative of anything deeper.

I mean, this fire sale of a thread exists:

Fidel Castro RIP

I didn't say anything about young Hispanic voters or Sanders. You're "explaining to POC in this county" - a county that is not representative and shouldn't be read as indicative of anything deeper.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z),

uh you realize there are native born black Americans in MDC and Broward who have the same impressions of Sanders, right? Miami-Dade County isn't all Latin Americans.

uh you realize there are native born black Americans in MDC and Broward who have the same impressions of Sanders, right? Miami-Dade County isn't all Latin Americans.

No, it's not, but the demographics (and overall environment built by those demographics) are still very, very different from the rest of the country.

A tactical problem (I think) with what seems to be the main Sanders attack against Biden — his actual record — is that most people already have a fairly set notion of "Joe Biden" in their heads. He's pretty well defined. As kind of a doofus, granted, but he's a known quantity. If people already don't like him, then attacking his record reaffirms that dislike, which is fine but probably doesn't change many votes. If they already like him, or are at least fine with him, and think of him as kind of harmless dude, dragging out 40 years' worth of votes and Anita Hill shaming and everything else he's done may have limited impact. People either know that and have written it off, or they don't know it and it sounds like homework, and either way it may not change much how they see him.

Which of course gets to the whole idea of him being a "safe" candidate — it's not just his centrist positions that give him that appearance, it's that no matter how much Sanders or Trump beats on him, he will have something of a shield in that he's already defined for people.

You obviously weren't talking about native born black Americans though, given "POC in this county who've fled totalitarian systems."

That's true, those of us still here haven't fled yet

The "totalitarian system" under which they lived was the United States of America through the 1960s and only partially mitigated.