The 2020 Presidential Election - Convention & General Election

[RedDenver]

 

[Danny Bateman]

1 minute ago, RedDenver said:

And whether there are enough votes in the Senate now, doesn't mean there won't be at some point. Politics is changing.

 

Are they?

 

I've seen scant evidence Sanders' revolution is fundamentally changing much. They got roundly rejected in the midterms outside of moderately to deeply blue House districts.

 

Until his movement figures out how to accrue political power within the system they detest, they can manufacture as much righteous anger as they want. It won't make amount to a lick of meaningful change for people.

[BIGREDIOWAN]

2 hours ago, RedDenver said:

Buttigieg drops out. I thought he'd at least make it to Super Tuesday, but maybe he's struck a deal to be Biden's VP.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-drops-out.html

That's an interesting turn of events if that's what ends up happening. 

[Danny Bateman]

6 hours ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

Say what you will about Bernie and socialism, but if the message is proving what the American majority can do in the face of a powerful entrenched minority (and it is), those $27 average donations speak volumes.  

 

What they've proven is that Bernie's got an extremely committed base who will send him seemingly endless amounts of money. Good. They passionately believe his message. I can dig that.

 

But they haven't proven a damn thing about breaking the current Republican stranglehold on our political system. For all the flak Biden caught for saying he'd have to work with Republicans to get things done, Bernie's belief that somehow using the bully pulpit and massive rallies to flip votes his supporters claim would never work with Dems anyway has always been far more naive.

 

Republican Senators don't care about rally size. They care about only one thing: power. Unless Sanders can find a way to help win the 4+ seats it's likely to take to win back to the Senate, he's not taking their power from them. And his quest against that minority is DOA.

 

This will be a good test for him, though. He's long been terrible at getting his ideas passed into law. And we've got a lot more ambitious things to get done than naming post offices.

[teachercd]

35 minutes ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

You won't see it if you don't want to see it.

 

There's plenty of evidence out there that young people are far more open to Bernie's type of politics.  The guard is changing...the younger generation is ushering it in.

 

As I said, you can stick your head in the sand and say "I don't see any evidence" and you can look left and right with head in the sand and you WON'T see it.  You have to actually pay attention a bit and the evidence is there.

I always think this as well but then I always get confused on what age the "younger" generation is...

 

Like...50 and under?

[RedDenver]

1 hour ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

Are they?

 

I've seen scant evidence Sanders' revolution is fundamentally changing much. They got roundly rejected in the midterms outside of moderately to deeply blue House districts.

 

Until his movement figures out how to accrue political power within the system they detest, they can manufacture as much righteous anger as they want. It won't make amount to a lick of meaningful change for people.

Moderate Dems doing well in 2018 isn't "roundly rejecting" Sanders revolution. I suspect the impotence of the moderate Dems to oppose Trump and instead pass his trade deal and military budget will shift the balance of power even more.

 

As for evidence that Sanders is gaining ground among Dem voters:

 

[Ratt Mhule]

3 hours ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

And Sweden, and every other Nordic country he points to as models for his programs, have wildly different government structures and much smaller populations who are purposely kept much less diverse through stricter immigration rules than we have here.

 

Pointing to these countries because they've implemented programs he would like has always been suspect. Enacting and maintaining such programs here is wildly different than doing so over there.

 

It's why I've never been satisfied with his answer on how we actually get M4A done. "We're the richest country ever and somehow everyone else has done it" completely ignores the political reality of having essentially no votes in the Senate for the current iteration of his bill.

 

 

Well maybe the senate dems should start listening to their base and not their donors as it has polled in the majority in all four states so far including ruby red SC. 

[Ratt Mhule]

3 hours ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

Ahhh yes, dropping out of a race you clearly aren't going to win is some nefarious conspiracy.

It's no surprise you're such a big Trump fan.

 

 

[Danny Bateman]

1 hour ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

You won't see it if you don't want to see it.

 

There's plenty of evidence out there that young people are far more open to Bernie's type of politics.  The guard is changing...the younger generation is ushering it in.

 

As I said, you can stick your head in the sand and say "I don't see any evidence" and you can look left and right with head in the sand and you WON'T see it.  You have to actually pay attention a bit and the evidence is there.

 

And as I have expressed several times, I do not believe the evidence that is out there is very rigorous.

 

Remember, there was a point in time where polls predicted Hillary Clinton mopping the floor with Trump, too. Then we got treated to six months of Clinton vs. Trump on a daily basis. Endless stories about emails. Republicans came home, independents decided they liked Trump better than Clinton and here we are.

 

The crux of my argument is that polls this far out do not mean much because polls can and will change. So the strength of a candidate depends on one's assessment of the fundamental appeal of their candidacy. We can and obviously do have different opinions in that regard, and that's fine.

 

Regardless, what I'm telling you is this: The kid gloves are about to come off. He's about to have real scrutiny applied to him continually on a national scale for the first time in his entire career. No one will be taking it easy on him for fear of alienating his base. The character assassination is coming. And people will have to finally consider him and his ideas in a concrete, real way instead of an abstract,  hypothetical one.

 

It will be a good test. We will find out whether his revolution is real or he is mistaken about the limits of his appeal.

[Danny Bateman]

15 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:

Well maybe the senate dems should start listening to their base and not their donors as it has polled in the majority in all four states so far including ruby red SC. 

 

You are badly mistaken about the Dem base in the areas you are talking about.

 

There's a reason Manchin and Sinema and the like want nothing to do with Sanders' agenda. And it isn't donors.

[Danny Bateman]

1 hour ago, RedDenver said:

Moderate Dems doing well in 2018 isn't "roundly rejecting" Sanders revolution. I suspect the impotence of the moderate Dems to oppose Trump and instead pass his trade deal and military budget will shift the balance of power even more.

 

As for evidence that Sanders is gaining ground among Dem voters:

 

 

It's the one data point we have since the Revolution ™  began in earnest. Moderate, blue dog Democrats - the ones Sanders and his most fervent supporters love to talk down on as corporatist ghouls - delivered the seats that won that House, not Sanders acolytes. And, when forced to choose between doing something they believed would help people living in their districts or blanket obstruction, they chose the former. At least as far as the trade deal goes. No one wants to walk the plank on a vote to reduce bloated military spending if they know it would actually pass.

 

My argument has never been that Sanders is not popular amongst the Dem base. He decidedly is, being one of the most popular people in America by that metric.

 

The question is whether or not Dems are about to get suckerpunched back into reality when they realize that popularity does not translate into votes from the broader American voting public.

[Ratt Mhule]

17 minutes ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

You are badly mistaken about the Dem base in the areas you are talking about.

 

There's a reason Manchin and Sinema and the like want nothing to do with Sanders' agenda. And it isn't donors.

The data speaks for itself. This isnt opinion, its fact backed up by lots of data. 
 

Manchin is a republican. I dont know who Sinema is but im sure he/she is a republican also. 
 

Sanders won the WV primary in 2016.

 

 

[Danny Bateman]

13 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:

The data speaks for itself. This isnt opinion, its fact backed up by lots of data. 
 

Manchin is a republican. I dont know who Sinema is but im sure he/she is a republican also. 
 

Sanders won the WV primary in 2016.

 

 

 

And what I'm telling you is that I am skeptical what happens to that data once attack ads start rolling in and we start getting forced to talk about price tags and banning private insurance every day.

 

Winning a primary does not equate to winning a general.

 

The bolded is why this particular progressive movement will never accomplish anything meaningful. You're happy to eat your own. You cannot have addition by subtraction. You can feel as correct as you want but it does not change the math. You delude yourself thinking that instead of building bridges to others somehow burning it all down is the means to your ends.

[Ratt Mhule]

14 minutes ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

And what I'm telling you is that I am skeptical what happens to that data once attack ads start rolling in and we start getting forced to talk about price tags and banning private insurance every day.

 

Winning a primary does not equate to winning a general.

 

The bolded is why this particular progressive movement will never accomplish anything meaningful. You're happy to eat your own. You cannot have addition by subtraction. You can feel as correct as you want but it does not change the math. You delude yourself thinking that instead of building bridges to others somehow burning it all down is the means to your ends.

Manchin is a DINO. Its no secret. He votes with Trump all the time. Idk why Im the bad guy who points it out. And Im also apparently the bad guy who points out that he ALWAYS takes the side of the coal barons and not the coal workers. I wonder why that is?

 

Youre right, winning the primary is diff than the general. Most dems dont even bother to campaign in WV bc of past history. Sanders is diff and has said he would use a 50 state strategy and if you actually watch the video I posted he got a room full of Trump supporters to applaud his agenda.

 

Were you born yesterday? The health insurance industry and pharma industry spent 60 million dollars over the past couple months attacking MFA and it still polls at 60%. Jesus christ man you think they havent been using attack ads. Every debate there is an attack ad during commercial break. Its not working. People are tired of being f#&%ed over!

 

Btw the exact question theyve been asking in these exit polls is framed in a right wing way and it still polls in the majority. 
 

 

[Landlord]

If Bernie gets elected and can, before anything else, make some real progress in the areas of campaign finance law, gerrymandering and lobbyists,  I think you'll start to see a cascading effect of the country becoming more and more blue/progressive/"socialist" in terms of actual representatives. 

 

Congress is not accurately representative. If it was, a lot of areas of government would start to cede ground to Bernie's approach and policies imo.