2020 Democratic presidential primary thread, pt 3: life is very long

"are you saying I can't...I can't....uh....are you saying it's illegal for me to CAMPAIGN?"

"I'm not saying that, lots of people though, they're saying it. Lots of people."

You all really should read the article in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-2020.html

Posting that article on this thread is borderline trolling

Eh. I could think of another thread where it would be worse...

Yup

You all really should read the article in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-2020.html

― Frederik B, Saturday, 21 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Try and wake yourself up, then poke sleepy Joe.

I posted an excerpt this morning.

this is so embarrassing

.@JoeBiden popped into @djdnice Instagram party tonight to show a little love. The party is now over 100k strong 💪🏾🙌🏾 Congrats D! pic.twitter.com/PnIszQPrOV

— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) March 22, 2020

joe biden does not exist

not more embarrassing than kissing stranger's babies and cramming various handheld foods into your mouth during campaign stops at local shops

Absolutely no: this is the equivalent of an intern wearing a cardboard mask with a photo of your face on it pretending to kiss a baby that is part of a corporation’s national advertising campaign, and waving the various handheld foods near the mouth bit of the photo of your face, before putting them down and walking backwards out of the room.

I posted an excerpt this morning.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 22 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Joe starts this and now everybody is sleeping!

This is good on going-on. Very little value in looking back.

https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/156982/bernie?

Can't wait for the Biden ad that features bulldozers and mass graves.

Donald Trump has failed the American people. pic.twitter.com/HsNl9M4h4r

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 21, 2020

Osita nails throughout that piece why I didn't particularly care to read the rest of the NYT one: for all the 20/20 hindsight, I don't think there's a strategic pivot they could have made that would have made much more of a dent than they did.

I think there was room for a pivot to acting as though he was the frontronner and doing outreach for endorsements. Whether there was really time for that post-Nevada is another matter. Post-Iowa would have been a better time but possibly complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there.

Centrist media was softening on him a bit and coming to terms with the possibility, and I think he could have toned down the outsider packaging its just whether there was enough time to do it. In any race there's a significant number of people who will vote for the winner and he could have moved more into that presumptive kind of role.

It may be that this was just beyond his ability to pull off convincingly. I'm not really sure who could manage that successfully. Ro Khanna springs to mind but difficult to see who else

I wonder what would have happened if they had gone really negative on biden. hard to go negative as a frontrunner however

I think there was room for a pivot to acting as though he was the frontronner and doing outreach for endorsements. Whether there was really time for that post-Nevada is another matter. Post-Iowa would have been a better time but possibly complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there.

Who of note would ever get his endorsement outside of the people who already had? And that's even without Bloomberg (lol) buying up a ton of them.

complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there

I don't know if a normally-reported Iowa would have made a difference--lots of people in both parties have won Iowa and not gone on to the nomination--but that was one giant mess, and Sanders didn't get the big moment that, say, Obama got in 2008. (Or maybe Buttigieg didn't get it--who knows?) Seems like a million years ago.

Eh, he was widely perceived as the frontrunner after Nevada in any case, was leading the 538 prediction list, was inspiring an MSNBC freakout.

Sanders also didn't really win in Iowa...

I agree the Osita article is more helpful, btw. But also a bit more harsh, like the way it implies the constant focus on M4A was a mistake. He sounds a bit like he thinks Warren would have done better...

I didn't get that from it?

article never mentioned her, I think

personally after a loss I find it more useful to err on the side of harshness

No it never mentions her. But the campaign he describes sounds quite a bit like what she tried to do.

She clearly didn't do better, though? So what would it mean for someone to think that she 'could have'?

If Bernie hadn't run, if the left had supported her instead, etc

That is a weird take imo.

Someone could have done better (the question is who that might be in future).

The idea that Warren could have done is fanciful

what are we arguing about today

How so? Bernie got his shot, failed. Quite spectacularly so. Are we supposed to say 'then nobody can'? Or are we supposed to work to get another one in position for a shot next time?

And the Warren campaign did second best out of the left campaigns. Yang and Gabbard far behind.

I mean, you can argue it is wrong. It probably is, just because of sexism. But it would be completely normal to say 'okay, Bernie couldn't do it, who's next in line?' and then move towards Warren

Like, there is zero evidence that she had more pull with any of the communities that Sanders struggled with and plenty of evidence that she had substantially less with minority voters. What basis is there for thinking that e.g. Clyburn might have backed her? If we're inventing parallel universes, I'm sure she would have done even better if neither Biden nor Sanders ran.xps

I think she got more endorsements than Bernie, no? So if we're saying an endorsement made the difference, isn't that a very good argument for Warren?

this is a confusing argument

Fred just stop ffs

Yes, 538 gave Warren 103 endorsement points, and Sanders 74. So she is clearly better than him at getting endorsements, if that is important

"endorsement points"

what is the fucking point of this conversation

I think she could have won if the other candidates all pulled out

You can find out what 538 endorsement points are, Hadrian, if you search for it instead of acting offended. It's neither weird nor complicated.

I would rather type this sentence

That sentence just lost the left the primary in 2028. Hope you're happy now!

fred...

I don't think that article is explicitly or implicitly saying anything about Warren's campaign at all, but even if it was IDK why it and people on here are framing the discussion in hypothetical terms like she abstained from running a la 2016. Because she didn't; she ran just the same as Bernie and Biden are now and she got thoroughly and embarrassingly thrashed. If she or her campaign was capable of doing better than Bernie or anyone else against Joe Biden then she wouldn't have come in 3rd place in her home state of all places (a state that Hillary Clinton won back in 2016!) to both of them.

She appealed to and garnered basically no minority support ANYWHERE (for people who nebulously drag Bernie for this while deliberately ignoring the overwhelming share of the Latino vote he won), wasn't more appealing to centrist moderates compared to the depressingly large amount of other milquetoast options available, and undermined her standing with the more progressive wing of the party waffling on things like the popular vote determining the primary winner and most importantly M4A. And as everyone who dogmatically went to bat for her lack of endorsement after she dropped out endlessly pointed out earlier... her supporters 2nd choice options were split between a variety of different candidates, so the insinuation that she would've suddenly eclipsed everyone including Biden if only that blasted Bernie hadn't butted in and taken all her young progressive support is nonsense. If she hadn't devoted all of her air and debate time to attacking her closest, most progressive ideological match among the other candidates (for those who keep insisting Bernie coulda done it if he'd just yelled at Biden more!) and flaking on something as crucial as M4A (which looks REALLY bad now of all times) maybe that wouldn't have been the case...

See, here's the thing: Bernie got his shot. It's really hard to see how conditions could have been better for him, he won 2,5 of the first three contests, he had a divided field, he was being called the frontrunner. And he blew it. None of us saw it coming, but that's not the point. He did it his way, it didn't work.

With Warren, of course there's a whole lot of 'what ifs?' because she clearly didn't get to run the campaign she wanted to. So yeah, it's all a whole bunch of silly speculation about what could have happened, if only... But that seems far more productive to me than just blanket dismissal, to the point of being laughably off-base. Warren spent all her time attacking Bernie? Uh no, she took down Bloomberg, didn't she? She lost Massachusetts, yeah, but at a point where her campaign was fading anyway. And as the NYT article points out, Bernie campaigning there and making a play for the state was a major fuck up, which took time away from South Carolina, alienated an ally, and he didn't even win there anyway.

The work should be about finding ways to do it better next time, no? And so this is where the scorched earth tactics of the Bernie-sphere is really harming, because everything that a rival did just had to be completely awful and irredeemable. What's going to come out of that camp in four years? It didn't work! So let's try finding something promising elsewhere!

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but a public option would be just as good as M4A in this crisis, right?

oh good fred vs trevor

clearly didn’t get to run the campaign she wanted to

happy sunday. pic.twitter.com/6hBhZtGVox

— mike casca (@cascamike) March 22, 2020