The Dems Want to Lose

[Circe]

lol@all u dembags ne1 not businessparty culd easily epicwin nd u all pretnd to be on sportscenter talking bout the corporate sponsored tv shwtime liek ur on sportscenter lulzzzzzzzzzacoasterrrrrrrr

[NAB]

[John Galt]

hey stop it, marianne was doing quite well for someone obvious digesting several edibles

i'd like to go all in on Yang, but i doubt he will make it out of the early rounds

btw Des Moines is one of the two centers of healthcare insurance in this country. not showing much in iowa has doomed many campaigns so they need to be careful discussing their plans to cause iowa to lose a lot of jobs


what's interesting is Trump took the voters that the Bernie wing are fighting over (disillusioned and disaffected whites in rustville america), while he abandoned a bunch that the Biden wing could pick up (suburban republicans, esp suburban republican women)

[spacemonkey]

My 2020 prediction = the Dem's went so far left, they were left out.

[Kane]

[John Galt]

both yang and williamson have said their mics were cut out at certain points and they were not allowed to speak

still according to entirely accurate online polling by the drudgereport, yang was the winner of the debate, with williamson in second place

[Kane]

Oh I'll leave that to drugereport then

[NAB]

[Philly]

Biden shoots himself in the dick every time he opens his mouth. By simply announcing his candidacy, he was given a big lead in the polls, tons of establishment backing and a huge war chest on a silver platter. And despite all this, he refuses to put an ounce of effort into developing any message discipline or adjusting his political pitch for the present day. He's running a campaign to bring back Bill Clinton 90's centrism in a primary for a party whose base is veering significantly to the left and is allowed to be the heads and shoulder front-runner anyway. And yet he can't avoid finding other ways to f**k it up. Pissing off the pro-choicers, fondly recalling his friendship with segregationist senators, and obviously not even preparing a little bit for the first debate. He can probably beat Trump, but every day he continues to piss away his advantage to get the nomination - not to mention that if you have any concern about party disunity, he's quickly distinguishing himself as the most intolerable option for the progressive wing.

Harris was inevitably going to become a major contender and it appears that it's happening now. With the party base very concerned about the state of criminal justice these days, she's going to have to answer some tough questions about her prosecutorial record, but if she can get through that unscathed, she has a lot going for her - perhaps most of all that she doesn't have much of a record outside of the prosecutorial one, having only served in Congress since 2017. Booker appears to be dead in the water, which will effectively make her the only black candidate in a crowded Democratic field, which one would expect to be a big advantage in the southern primary states. I think she's a kind of lousy general election candidate who, as Kane said, is rather Hillary-ish. But she's younger, a bit sharper on reading the room, and doesn't have the decades of baggage that created such disdain for HRC.

Despite her rise in the polls, I do not think Warren can win this thing. She manages to walk to the line of offering policies that are lauded by the party's left flank while avoiding much of the establishment ire that Bernie Sanders receives, so one might think she's a perfect compromise candidate. But that forgets the inconvenient detail that while the far left has always been the nucleus of the Sanders base, his appeal went beyond that. Warren is a progressive candidate for the kind of people who would explicitly refer to themselves as "progressive". That's good for getting your poll numbers up to the mid-high teens in this election cycle, but where do you go from there? Warren's support comes almost entirely from college-educated suburban Democrats, which doesn't bode well. The rest of the country might not be so enthused about an overachieving Ivy League technocrat whose image is premised on churning out policy papers with lots of wonky details. And I'd be very concerned about her demeanor and political instincts vs. Trump in the general should she get there.

Buttigieg is like Warren - supported only by highly educated affluent white people - but he doesn't even have Warren's passion for the issues that allow her to make a credible case for why she wants to rise to the top of this massive field. Even though he never had any black support to begin with, his image with black voters is surely getting a lot worse as the problems in his administration become national news. I don't think his poll numbers sustain. If the Dems want to take the novel step of nominating a mayor of a 100k population city to be president, at least choose a mayor whose administration isn't roiled in so much controversy.

Bernie theoretically can still be a contender for the nomination, but the obstacles are stacking up. Warren, encouraged by her rising poll numbers, is going to be staying in the race, and while I said that I don't think she can win, she certainly does muddy the water about who to choose for bold economic justice and siphon off support from Sanders. While Warren would say that she has refrained from going negative on Sanders, her constant messaging about "having a plan" is 100% aimed at implying Sanders is lacking in having the strategy and ability to deliver (this is ironic to me because Sanders *does* have a strategy, albeit a tall order of a plan, while Warren's only strategy is to propose policies so smart and detail oriented that Congress will just have a change of heart and support things like Medicare for All). But Sanders still has a lot of popularity among certain parts of the Dem base and hardcore enthusiasm from his supporters. If he can flip that into a win in Iowa and ride the momentum to another win in New Hampshire, his 2016 shine is sure to be restored. I think everyone knows that I believe Sanders would be a very strong candidate to run against Trump.

Kane - Tulsi Gabbard is a f**k crank. She's really good on some foreign policy issues, but has a really nasty record on anti-gay activism (not talking about just not supporting gay marriage, but like hardcore conservative gay bashing) and is generally just weirder and less likable the more you learn about her. Also even her foreign policy is iffy in a lot of places. I agreed with her opposition to US attacks in Syria, however, she went about 10 steps further and pretty much became a full on Assad apologist. And her anti-interventionism is a lot less appealing when you find out that she basically only wants to keep US troops out of harms way and would be fine with significantly increasing drone strikes all over the world to avoid deploying troops. She's a crazy surfer lady from Hawaii who will embarrass the whole party if she becomes a prominent contender.

Marianne Williamson could be the greatest president ever, but ya'll just ain't ready for her level of thinking so forget it.

[NAB]