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

Cue the switch from arguing about whether he should drop out to arguing about why he shouldn't have, I can't wait.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AjarDaringAsiaticmouflon-size_restricted.gif

Bernie Sanders is a fucking hero. Let’s come together and beat this guy.

— Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) April 8, 2020

good luck usa, congrats to the Tories, etc

violently angry at being asked to vote for the lesser of two rapists

It’s offensive

Quite a lot of people able to overlook that. Sorry Bernie.

hardly the first time two rapists were running against each other for President

(although I don't think the rape accusation against Biden is remotely credible tbh)

We all think things

Some do have more trouble, it's true.

In this economy???

This thread should be awesome for the next several hours

I'd been slowly moving towards Biden stepping aside the past few weeks. Basically, I hope someone takes him aside this morning and says, "Okay, fuckhead--you're the nominee, now get it together."

Suspension of Disbelief 2020

he's not gonna step aside

sometimes I think he's taking Trump as a model, ie "I can be rambling and incomprehensible too! Americans seem to love that! Makes me just like them, just an ordinary Joe, now look folks, that's number one"

"You want a doddering grandpa? I'VE DONE IT, I GOT IT DONE"

He doesn’t have any more of an inner life than Trump does at this point, he’s a malfunctioning automaton

Happy All Your Christmases Come At Once to the 15%+ of Berners who are now free to admit they were going to vote Trump all along.

— 💥💥🔊BASS, MIDS, TOPS OUT NOW🔊💥💥 (@joemuggs) April 8, 2020

thought this roundup from perry bacon yesterday was pretty fair and worth reading: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-sanders-blow-it-for-the-democratic-left-or-was-the-nomination-always-out-of-reach/

Also, a lot of campaign tactics seem clearly misguided in hindsight but were entirely defensible in the moment. And looking at Warren and Sanders’s campaigns combined is helpful in illustrating this point. For example, it’s hard to claim that Sanders lost because he didn’t court the party establishment enough if you consider how much Warren pursued party elites to little avail. Perhaps Warren should have talked about electability more when she was surging in the polls, but Sanders emphasized his ability to build support among people who backed Trump in 2016 from the beginning of his campaign and Democratic voters still thought Biden was the safest choice.

Finally, some of the more campaign-centric narratives seem clearly contradicted by the structural case I laid out above. Biden’s support among black voters was strong before he formally started his campaign, and none of the other candidates — including two prominent black ones (Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) — ever really dented it, so it’s hard to say that flawed black outreach was a particular failing of Sanders or Warren.

But the full-scale push for Medicare for All by Sanders, Warren and the broader left — even after it was clear that they were losing the primary debate on that issue — seems like it was a mistake electorally, even if it was a righteous cause. (The massive numbers of people losing their jobs as businesses shut down to slow the spread the coronavirus has probably bolstered the case that Americans’ health insurance should not be tied to their jobs, as Sanders aides are now arguing.) Once Biden entered the race and started pushing back against Medicare for All, Buttigieg and Harris, who are fairly savvy about seeing shifts in the political winds, started backtracking from the idea. Warren and Sanders could have done the same. Some Democrats doubted Warren’s electability for reasons that were somewhat unfair to her (she is a woman and lives in Massachusetts), but her embrace of Medicare for All freed her critics to argue that they were worried her policies made her unelectable, not her gender.

After all, basically no one thinks Medicare for All has any chance of passing Congress anytime soon. Warren, after months of criticism, eventually started pushing for a phased-in Medicare for All plan that would start with a Medicare-style public option, along the lines of what Biden and Buttigieg were proposing. Sanders never backtracked from Medicare for All, but one of his top surrogates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conceded in February that a Medicare buy-in might be all that could get passed in Congress, at least in the short term.

Medicare for All “has taken a lot of the oxygen out of the room for more popular health care ideas,” said Julian NoiseCat, vice president for policy and strategy at Data for Progress, a think tank allied with the party’s left wing.

And the Medicare for All issue can be tied to a broader narrative of the left failing that goes something like this: In an environment where it was fairly predictable that a candidate backed by black voters and electability-minded voters would do well, the party’s left wing championed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, neither of whom had history of connecting with black voters or running based on electability. Both ran campaigns that emphasized their leftism, particularly on Medicare for All. Neither campaign seemed well prepared for the backlash against leftism from the party’s center-left elites, nor did they seem to have any plan to convince voters who aren’t very liberal that they could get elected on these liberal ideas and then implement them as president.

(TW: because he is an honest person with a functioning brain, his description of what happened just prior to super tuesday avoids the bizarre doublespeak this thread has produced and favored over the past couple of months)

Needless to say those people are scum

it's one thing to ask a guy "to get it together" "form coherent thoughts" "don't have a podcast"

it's another to ask a guy to gaf abt poor people

I'd been slowly moving towards Biden stepping aside the past few weeks

Now Bernie is out of the picture this starts to become a possibility, if Biden's numbers vs Trump were to look bad for any reason, or in the event he loses any of his physical or mental capabilities due to illness.

Rent strikes > Supporting Biden's presidential campaign

— libcom.org (@libcomorg) April 8, 2020

i've said it before and i'll say it again: weighing in on the credibility of people's sexual assault survival stories should be a bannable offense

great, I can de-register as a Dem even sooner now

"hardly the first time two rapists were running against each other for President"

you're right, why was i so stupid to be feeling bad about this???? it's actually fine!

After all, basically no one thinks Medicare for All has any chance of passing Congress anytime soon.

not sure about that anymore

i've said it before and i'll say it again: weighing in on the credibility of people's sexual assault survival stories should be a bannable offense

pic.twitter.com/tmnitCIwdG

— ted cruz is antisemitic✡️🏳️‍🌈🌹🔥 (@koshersemite) April 8, 2020

All other arguments and reservations aside: is there anyone on planet earth who believes that Biden, if he's elected and if he survives for another four years, will even (be fit to) run for a second term?

no

I wouldn't rule it out

didn't he say in one of the debates that he only planned on serving one term?

he doesn't make sense as a candidate. the fact that he was the "las centrist standing" was always bizarre, especially because he has a more right wing record than hillary clinton did

at a time when the party is moving left

I see you've learned a lot from these primaries

if kamala or someone won i would have been disappointed but i would understand. this is atrocious.

ie, the party isn't actually moving left (or not as far left as you think/would like)

he can't speak meaningfully to the concerns of the moment. so he is entirely unlike obama as a candidate.

under-40s are moving left

too bad they don't vote

right/left doesn't make too much sense right now anyway when the economy has been placed on government life support. the real advantage of bernie and warren over the other candidates was that they faced the issues honestly and proposed solutions. even if they weren't "politically feasible"--what policy is when republicans control a chamber of the legislature?--they were honest attempts to fix problems such as people receiving $100,000 medical bills. not so, the other candidates.

i get why he did it at the time but one of Obama’s biggest mistakes out of the gate was tapping this soft-brained perennial loser, opening up the possibility for... this

Claire McCaskill was right there

from k3vin's article:

The left embraced two Northeastern liberals with entirely predictable weaknesses with older black voters, and neither Sanders nor Warren did much to connect with those voters.

Sanders and Warren did not focus enough on convincing voters that they were as electable as Biden, even as polls showed Democratic voters were obsessed with picking a candidate who could beat Trump.

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

Neither Sanders nor Warren had effective strategies for defending themselves from attacks from the party’s center left after they surged in the polls.

After his win in Nevada, Sanders did little to engage Democrats who didn’t already support him; in fact, he antagonized them.
Warren was unwilling to drop out and endorse Sanders before Super Tuesday, even as the weaker center-left candidates consolidated around Biden.
Sanders’s campaign apparently planned to win the nomination by getting a plurality of the vote (30 to 35 percent) in a crowded field and it didn’t appear to have a real plan for a one-on-one contest against Biden.

Hence why we're left with Mushmouth as the nominee.

ie, the party isn't actually moving left (or not as far left as you think/would like)

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, April 8, 2020 12:15 PM (two minutes ago)

huh? the platform of the party is clearly moving left (though of course not as quickly as many of us would like). and sanders deserves a lot of the credit for that for his work over the last 5 years, as that 538 article suggests

lol finish the article, alfred

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

medicare for all is a moral imperative

the party that's moving left nominated what many of you believe is a right-wing rapist? how do you reconcile those two positions?

xps

lol finish the article, alfred

― k3vin k., Wednesday, April 8, 2020

I did. I posted the relevant points.