2020 Election

[909]

I think he's much worse than a neoliberal, he's a conservative. The vast majority of his views align with the Republican party of 11 years ago.

 

[909]

https://twitter.com/bobgibsoncville/status/1119343720585940993

This guy is fucking scum. Launching a campaign on the site of people's trauma? Scum. End of discussion.

WTF? Going to one the site where America needs healing and where he can point to Trump's divisive comments and behavior is a bad thing? This seems like messaging 101 to me.

If Bush went to Ground Zero to launch his 2004 campaign, what would you think? It's a scum move.

 

[BUTT]

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something-truly-transformational-universal-free-public-college-and-cancellation-of-a246cd0f910f

Fuck yes my decision to defer my loans for years and accumulate hundreds if not thousands of dollars in interest finally pays off

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1120484639922110464

better and better

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

Going after big business has been her strong point for a long time. She's gotten much better as public speaking, too.

 

[Cackling Co Pilot Kamala]

Elizabeth Warren IMO is the most qualified candidate and has by far most detailed campaign platform. It is too bad that she has almost 0% chance of being nominated because she reminds people too much of Hilary. And it is really too bad her platform is getting a tenth of the attention of lightweights like Mayor Pete and Beto.

Also Biden is GD awful at running for President. I wouldn't be surprised to see him drop out by Labor Day once he inevitably starts slipping hard down the polls. He is gonna get hard by the left and the right. It's funny people bring up him announcing in Charlottesville being akin to someone showing up at Ground Zero in '04 cause I imagine his campaign will go a lot like Rudy Giuliani's campaign in 2008.

 

[909]

I'm going to vote for Warren and failing that I'll vote for Bernie. I don't want to vote for any primary candidate who wants to merely return back to how things were or play by the rules.

 

[Cackling Co Pilot Kamala]

My fave five candidates right now
1. Warren
2. Jay Inslee (deserves to break out of the forgettable white guy back of the pack. Love the focus on climate change and he is nearly as progressive as Bernie and Warren without having the scary socialist label)
3. Bernie (still like him but I'm worried about too much bitter lingering bad blood from 2016)
4. MIKE GRAVEL'S COMEBACK
5. Ah ya know Mayor Pete's social media presence is kind of fun.

 

[vivisectvi]

https://twitter.com/TheBradShepard/status/1120476668613857280

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/04/24/elizabeth-warren-keeps-offering-detailed-policy-proposals-why-few-democrats-seem-care/PSbJu4WsYsIQZrFFCQjVzJ/story.html

I don't think it's a bad thing to not be the front runner this early but I do think its a bit funny/odd that the candidate with the most policies and actual ideas is so far doing so poorly.

 

[BruiserBrody]

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something-truly-transformational-universal-free-public-college-and-cancellation-of-a246cd0f910f

Fuck yes my decision to defer my loans for years and accumulate hundreds if not thousands of dollars in interest finally pays off

If you go by her own numbers (and I assume the government is paying these off) the loan forgiveness adds an over an instant Trillion to the debt

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

And she also has a tax plan to help deal with that.

 

[KingPK]

At least she actually has plans to go along with her ideas. They probably won't go exactly as she plans if elected but at least she's providing a starting point with actual numbers instead of "we're gonna do all this great stuff, just get back to us when we figure out how".

 

[Master Thrasher]

People don't want thought out policies; they want soundbites.

 

[CookieMueller]

It kills me that she won't even get a sniff of the nomination, I will vote for her in the primary if she's still involved regardless. She's easily the most qualified of this batch but the most qualified nominee of our lifetime lost 3 years ago so that doesn't really matter these days. Oh, and of course they had one big thing in common *eyeroll*

Warren's best bet is to hook up with one of the favourites and get them on board with her plans, which she has clearly put a ton of time into, and run a strong ticket when the time comes for that.

 

[BorneAgain]

Its a weird perception is reality thing with Warren where the idea that she's a policy wonk with limited charisma has spread so much that its basically become accepted, regardless of how true it actually is.

Plus in terms of demographics, the more progressive wing rallied around Sanders early, the Obama nostalgia crowd wants Biden, and centrist adjacent/moderates are keen on Buttigieg's image or inoffensive talking points (and isn't quite as outwardly hollow as Beto). There's a hypothetical section of the party for Warren to appeal to but its gonna be a while before the number's significant.

 

[KOAB]

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1121974279602569217

sweet

 

[Brocklock]

You can drop out anytime plz

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

Fuck this guy

 

[Mickey Massuco]

lirl the pic they used.

I wouldn't be surprised if all those billionaire asses he just kissed reward him with the most expensive primary campaign in dem history.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

Happy to see Jacobin being cited here.

 

[BruiserBrody]

https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1123013698296135685

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

The level of skullduggery and inhumanity during this incoming election as the damned try and ensure their false messiah is re-elected will be on an 1800 election level.

 

[Brooklyn Zoo]

Biden is prob gonna win cause he’s a dude. Biggest reason why Hilary lost.

 

[BorneAgain]

A Biden victory certainly wouldn't surprise.

The bigger x factor is if the primary season pushes him leftwards and how much he'll stick to it in the general and beyond. Safely moderate Uncle Joe doesn't play as well if there's loads of genuinely progressive senate/house candidates running in 2020 to be compared with.

 

[BUTT]

https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1123180726113980416

Glad to see a Real Democrat as the clear front-runner

 

[BruiserBrody]

Biden is prob gonna win cause he’s a dude. Biggest reason why Hilary lost.

My best friend is apolitical. His comment on the election was "I am glad Trump won so I don't have to see Hillary's ugly ass face for 4 years."

 

[Fall of Epic]

(Completely incompetent) NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is throwing his name in the race. I say he fizzles by December.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/28/biden-energy-crisis-1345359

Joe Biden is the front-runner by every measure — except big crowds
The former veep is leading the Democratic field in all the important categories except one.

He’s dominating in the polls, his fundraising is going gangbusters and he’s showing broad support from key political players in the early presidential states.

So where are the big energetic crowds, the lines around the block to get into Joe Biden’s events?

The question is no small matter in a party still recovering from a bitter 2016 defeat — a loss marked by a lack of enthusiasm for an establishment nominee in several critical states.

Attendance at the former vice president’s launch rally paled next to some of his rivals. In his first Iowa visit, he didn’t match the crowds that greeted Elizabeth Warren or even the less well-known Pete Buttigieg in their initial visits. So far, he’s kept his events to smaller venues where there’s little danger of empty seats.

In the eyes of Biden’s progressive critics — as well as President Donald Trump, who has publicly mocked him for it — the seeming lack of excitement or teeming masses at his events is a leading indicator of a lack of passion for his candidacy.

“I started to think the polls were wrong about Biden because it’s not what we’re seeing on the ground,” said Aimee Allison, founder and president of She the People, a national network devoted to promoting women of color.

“Inspiration is the X-factor and we’re waiting for the inspiration from Biden,” she said. “When the inspiration isn’t there, the turnout from the core of the Democratic base — women of color — isn’t there. And then we lose.”

To Biden’s campaign, attendance figures are a meaningless metric. Focusing on crowd size is Trump’s game, they say, an emphasis on style over substance that attempts to turn audience engagement into an argument about the 76-year-old Biden’s energy level.

Crowd size, after all, is an imperfect metric to measure a campaign’s vitality. While it can be a revealing indicator, it still lacks the scientific underpinning of polling or the fixed-dollar figures associated with fundraising. Nor does it account for the judgment of elected and influential Democrats across the country.

Just as critics doubted Biden’s popularity before he got in the race, his campaign is confident he’ll have the crowds when he needs them.

"We're seeing enormous enthusiasm for Joe Biden's candidacy across the country, beginning the very first day of the campaign when he got over 100,000 contributions — 65,000 of which were brand new to our lists — from all 50 states,” said Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo.

Even so, since announcing his candidacy more than a month ago, Biden has yet to draw anything near the 20,000 people who showed in Oakland to cheer on Kamala Harris when she announced, or the 13,000 who turned out in Brooklyn for Bernie Sanders’ launch.

Last Saturday, when Biden held a rally for his headquarters’ opening in Philadelphia, his campaign estimated the crowd size was 6,000 — a count that some local observers thought might be generous. One local elected Democrat who supports Biden privately told POLITICO the rally was smaller and less energetic than expected.

The event fell far short of the size his surrogates predicted in one of the nation’s largest Democratic cities. Just before Biden formally announced his candidacy last month, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped organize a fundraiser for Biden, had loftier expectations.

“He’s enormously popular here,” Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, said in a late April interview. “We could get tens and tens of thousands of people … For one rally, I think we could do that.”

The crowd size was similar to what former President Barack Obama drew at a 2016 rally for Hillary Clinton at the same venue. As a candidate, however, in April 2008, some 35,000 people flooded Independence Mall to see Obama — before he was the nominee.

President Trump — for whom crowd size borders on obsession — seized on Biden’s Philadelphia launch, mocking the former vice president two days later at a rival Pennsylvania speech where he exaggerated the smallness of the crowd.

“We have thousands of people … look at the thousands and thousands of people we have,” Trump said at a Montoursville rally, for which his campaign declined to release an estimated crowd count. “They said [Biden] had 600 people ... I’d say 150.”

It’s not the first time Trump has needled Biden over crowd sizes. In 2018, when the president and Biden held dueling Nevada rallies in the homestretch of the midterm campaign — and Trump’s Elko rally had more attendees than Biden’s Las Vegas rally — Trump used the occasion to point to Biden’s prior presidential race defeat and joked that Biden “was thrilled that’s one of the biggest crowds he’s ever had.”

It’s not just the size of Biden’s events that are modest, he’s also holding far fewer of them than his primary competitors. Since his launch, he’s only visited Iowa once. And while Democrats criss-crossed early presidential primary states during the long Memorial Day weekend, Biden took it off. (On Tuesday, he travels to Houston where he and his wife, Jill, will join an American Federation of Teachers town hall.)

There are signs that the theme could become more prominent as the campaign progresses. One of the president’s top surrogates, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, said Biden won’t have the energy to campaign full time once he gets off “the French work week campaign schedule” that the Democrat is currently on.

“He wants to make America bored again. It’s like he wants to put his audience to sleep,” Gaetz said.

“Trump’s rallies are big and raucous and enthusiastic. And the reason that matters is that in today’s politics, people want to be part of something,” Gaetz said. “Joe Biden’s rallies looks like an event where you would give a gold watch to the Democrat for a lifetime of service.”

James Carville, one of the masterminds behind Bill Clinton’s campaigns for president, said those criticisms miss an essential point about the kind of no-frills-no-thrills campaign he is running.

“He’s never been a candidate who has run on excitement. He has run on ‘you can trust me. I’m a good guy. My heart is in the right place. I’m human. You know me. I’m well-liked,’” Carville said. “Their theory of the case is people are tired of the circus. And it takes an experienced hand to settle everything down to get us back to some era of sanity.”

To that end, some Democrats say Biden’s sometimes listless crowds aren’t cause for concern, but merely reflective of the part of the electorate backing him: older, middle-of-the-road Democrats who are more likely to turn out to the polls than to boisterous mega-rallies.

Polk County Democratic Chair Sean Bagniewski said there weren’t lines around the block for Biden during his Iowa visit, but that at a local Democratic party dinner, the former vice president’s campaign dominated local chatter.

“The polls are picking up the people who might not be going to the rallies, might not be going to the meetings. But the polls can still be right,” Bagniewski said. “The rank-and-file can be reliable Democrats. They’re the people who have been around for awhile.”

Brian Fallon, former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, said that the Biden campaign isn’t going for big crowds and passion and is instead underpinned by “a very pragmatic argument. It’s not an argument designed to electrify. It revolves around electability ... It’s not the type of message that inspires a movement. It’s very practical.”

There’s also the matter of Biden’s long tenure in politics. Crowds that flooded to Buttigieg or Beto O’Rourke in this cycle did so in part because they’ve never seen the candidates before.

Tad Devine, who part of Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign against Clinton, added that Biden doesn’t need the big crowds the way Sanders did in the last race because the former vice president doesn’t need to show he’s a legitimate candidate — he’s the frontrunner.

“Biden’s not a crowd candidate. He’s not Obama. He’s not Bernie,” Devine said. “Drawing big crowds is more important for Beto [O’Rourke] or Mayor Pete to get into the mix.”

Holly Otterbein, Daniel Lippman, Christopher Cadelago and Anita Kumar contributed to this report.

Biden will be like Muskie in '72. Polls are shit to me until I see some genuine enthusiasm from his crowds.

 

[ViciousFish]

That’ll get young people to the polls. I presidential nominee older than some of their grandparents.