The 2020 Presidential Election - Convention & General Election

[TGHusker]

23 minutes ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

 There is chatter on the internet that Michigan exit polls do not match what happened in the ballot box.  There are people (activists) signing a petition for the UN to come in like they do in 3rd world countries to audit the vote.

 

Honestly, it feels iffy how far Michigan swung for Biden when it was full Sanders over Hillary in 2016. 

 

Likeability factor was a huge difference.  Uncle Joe vs Hillary the Witch.  I'd vote for Bernie all day long over Hillary but I'd vote for Joe all day long over Bernie.

[BigRedBuster]

31 minutes ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

 There is chatter on the internet that Michigan exit polls do not match what happened in the ballot box.  There are people (activists) signing a petition for the UN to come in like they do in 3rd world countries to audit the vote.

 

Honestly, it feels iffy how far Michigan swung for Biden when it was full Sanders over Hillary in 2016. 

 

That has one hell of a lot more to do with Hillary vs. Joe than anything to do with Sanders.

[TGHusker]

 

 

[Landlord]

3 hours ago, RedDenver said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the biggest alarm bell for me right now, and I might even say, the most likely scenario.

[RedDenver]

1 minute ago, Landlord said:

This is the biggest alarm bell for me right now, and I might even say, the most likely scenario.

I think Biden losing is still the most likely scenario. But even if he wins, I don't think a follow-on fascist is the most likely scenario - just a plausible scenario.

[Notre Dame Joe]

23 hours ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

That would still benefit Sanders...because all the old people would stay home and the health, young, fearless people would come out to vote.

 

Maybe. The olds have absentee ballot experience while both processes are new to the youngs. 

 

While Sanders may be getting the obstructed by the D establishment (again) ultimately he has himself to blame.  Sanders sees himself as a Socialist Evangelist more than a Chieftain of the Americans.  He would not take steps to expand his base but rather kept focus on people open to socialism.  But even greater he refused to go for the throat against his opponents.   He unilaterally disarmed himself of Hilary's Emails, Fauxcahontas and Quid Pro Joe.  That's good for Party solidarity and bad for proving oneself a fearless leader.  

[teachercd]

Wait...people think that Biden might win (he will) but fail (who knows) and that in 4.5 years Sanders will win?

 

Ha!

 

He will be 90 years old!

Even the super morons are not going to vote for someone 105 years old.  

 

Sanders should have won it last time but the D's took it away from him...he should win it this time but the D's are taking it away from him...

 

He is done...The D's hate him even though he is one of them...They can't stand him.

 

 

[Danny Bateman]

8 hours ago, Notre Dame Joe said:

 

Maybe. The olds have absentee ballot experience while both processes are new to the youngs. 

 

While Sanders may be getting the obstructed by the D establishment (again) ultimately he has himself to blame.  Sanders sees himself as a Socialist Evangelist more than a Chieftain of the Americans.  He would not take steps to expand his base but rather kept focus on people open to socialism.  But even greater he refused to go for the throat against his opponents.   He unilaterally disarmed himself of Hilary's Emails, Fauxcahontas and Quid Pro Joe.  That's good for Party solidarity and bad for proving oneself a fearless leader.  

 

That Trump supporters like yourself take pride in accusing Joe Biden of all people of quid pro anything betrays how little you give a s#!t about ideological consistency. 

 

Do you think America does not realize Trump's lead the most shamelessly corrupt and self-serving administration we've ever seen?

 

It really doesn't matter. Diamond Joe will be putting an end to this malarkey soon enough.

[Danny Bateman]

12 hours ago, RedDenver said:

 

 

Counterpoint: Joe Biden, if he becomes the nominee, will run on the most progressive platform Democrats have ever offered. No, it's not Bernie's platform, but it will likely include some concessions to Sanders' to appease him and try to appeal to progressives.

 

I don't buy the Kerry comparisons. Biden is a much better candidate than Kerry on account of his much more solid appeal to key voting blocs for Dems to be successful: black voters, suburban voters, Catholics, blue-collar workers and college-educated voters.

 

I do find this excerpt odd:

 

Quote

Headed into 2020, Sanders has a robust movement behind him, and Republicans I talk to in Washington believe he’s one of the few Democrats who could give Trump fits in the key states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. His organizing operation would be able to register and turn out far more black voters in crucial cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit, while he can also appeal to aggrieved working-class voters of all races who want someone to, well, drain the swamp. But the pundit-voter who thinks of Joe Biden knows one thing for sure: That man is electable.

 

Ironic, because Biden is cleaning Bernie's clock with both of those groups in this primary. That's not magically going to get better int he general, unless we just accept simply not being Trump really is enough for these voters, which is something progressives have long claimed is not the case. Ironically, Biden is also stealing Sanders key argument: that he can benefit by increasing voter turnout.

 

I find it funny they worry Biden will "fail to deliver" when Bernie's passed a total of 3 bills into law and two of them have been renaming post offices. I'm not talking amendments, I'm talking his ability to actually deliver on his big plans. If anything I'd be a lot more worried about Bernie's ability to deliver. But it's the Intercept, so Bernie has a monopoly on real change and he's definitely not offering unworkable and in some cases counterproductive solutions to the problems he seeks to solve. 

[Danny Bateman]

And I don't know if I'd be so worried about Biden beating Trump. Right now it looks like a pure tossup. Look at the evidence.

 

[RedDenver]

10 hours ago, Danny Bateman said:

Counterpoint: Joe Biden, if he becomes the nominee, will run on the most progressive platform Democrats have ever offered.

Thanks for the rest of your post, it was informative. But this statement is clearly false. Every Dem president (let alone nominees) over about 50 years from FDR to Carter was more progressive than Biden.

 

I've already shown (and I think everyone understands already) that Biden isn't as progressive as Bernie. Biden might be more progressive than Hillary, Obama, Kerry, Gore, and Bill, but I've yet to seen anything to convince me Biden is more progressive than any of them. (Although I'd be surprised if Hillary was more progressive. I'm pretty sure Hillary and Biden are running on the same platform.) I'd be interested if you can make the case.

[Danny Bateman]

5 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

Thanks for the rest of your post, it was informative. But this statement is clearly false. Every Dem president (let alone nominees) over about 50 years from FDR to Carter was more progressive than Biden.

 

I've already shown (and I think everyone understands already) that Biden isn't as progressive as Bernie. Biden might be more progressive than Hillary, Obama, Kerry, Gore, and Bill, but I've yet to seen anything to convince me Biden is more progressive than any of them. (Although I'd be surprised if Hillary was more progressive. I'm pretty sure Hillary and Biden are running on the same platform.) I'd be interested if you can make the case.

 

 

Biden definitely isn't as progressive as Bernie. In American politics he's the outlier; very few people can claim to be as progressive as he is.  But the platform Biden is running on is what matters, moreso than what he did as a senator. 

 

This article makes a good case for his agenda:

 

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There is plenty more liberal meat on the bones of Biden’s program. He is proposing more generous subsidies and medicaid funding along with a public option in order to achieve universal health care; a combination of $17 trillion in clean energy investment and a suite of tighter regulation to bring emissions to zero by 2050; a combined $2 trillion in new spending on early education, post-secondary education, and housing, a $1.3 trillion infrastructure plan, and a $15 minimum wage.

 

As does this one.

 

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The former vice president’s embrace of an unabashedly liberal agenda cuts against some perceptions of him, both from progressives who criticize Biden as insufficiently bold and center-left allies who argue he can appeal to voters in the middle against in an election against Donald Trump.

 

But for a candidate who has generally kept within his party’s mainstream during his five-decade career, it also underlines just how much — and how rapidly — the Democratic Party has changed in the three years since Clinton was its standard bearer.

 

“There’s no doubt people like Joe Biden are moving with the times in our party, and our party has moved to the left,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. “You’d have to be insane to deny it.”

--------

Still, Biden’s current set of policy prescriptions would likely be considered radical if they had been proposed in any previous Democratic presidential primary. That’s especially clear in comparison to Clinton’s 2016 platform.

 

On health care, Clinton proposed offering a public insurance plan for Americans enrolled in the health care exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. She also wanted to let adults older than 55 buy into Medicare.

 

Biden’s plan goes much further: He wants to allow all Americans — including those receiving insurance through their employer — to buy into a government-backed insurance plan, a shift some progressives have said would represent an enormous change to Obamacare. (Biden also proposed significantly increasing the subsidies available to those who enroll in the public option.)

 

There’s also a wide disparity between Biden and Clinton’s climate change plans. Clinton proposed spending $60 billion on clean-energy fund as part of an attempt to make the U.S. 80% carbon-free by 2050; Biden wants to spend $1.7 trillion in federal money to make the country emit a net of zero carbon emissions by 2050.

 

“Joe Biden’s climate plan — I’m going to get canceled for this — is quite ambitious,” said Sean McElwee, co-founder of the liberal group Data for Progress.

 

Biden is also pushing to triple Title I funding for schools that educate low-income students, and to abolish the federal death penalty while encouraging states to do the same. Clinton wanted to preserve capital punishment in certain situations.

 

One of Biden’s most prominent criminal justice reform proposals — a $20 billion initiative that encourages states to reduce their prison populations in part by removing mandatory minimums for non-violent crimes — also represents a new kind of plan from a major presidential candidate, according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen, acting director and senior fellow for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

 

“The candidates are all realizing they need to focus on ending mass incarceration, reducing racial disparities, ensuring more dollars are used on prevention and education than incarceration,” Eisen said. “There’s a wholesale recognition among leading Democratic candidates that incarceration has not made us safer; it ruins lives.”

 

Liberal policy experts say Biden’s robust agenda is a reflection of a Democratic Party that has shifted decisively to the left since Trump’s election. Policies that would have been widely considered radical at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency are now commonplace, forcing even veteran politicians like Biden to recalibrate.

 

But experts are also quick to add that they think Biden’s agenda is also reflective of a recent shift in the policy community about the scope and severity of the problems facing both the U.S. and the world. On the environment, for example, they note that proposals naturally become more aggressive after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report in 2018 that warned the effects of a rapidly warming earth would be worse than expected.

 

And this one.

 

Quote

Yet on issue after issue, Biden has veered sharply from Obama’s path.

 

On health insurance, for example, Obama rejected a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act and repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining private coverage. But Biden favors a public option open to everyone, including the majority of Americans with employer-sponsored health coverage.

 

Biden supports government-funded health care even for unauthoritzed immigrants, something Obama never came close to proposing. He supports a sharp increase in US refugee admissions and a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. When Obama ran for the White House in 2008, by contrast, it was as an enforcement-first hard-liner. He cracked down so hard on those who crossed the border illegally, he was known for much of his presidency as the “deporter-in-chief.”

 

No Democratic presidential nominee ever endorsed anything like the radical Green New Deal, with its price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars and its goal of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels. But Biden does. No Democratic nominee ever called for a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. But Biden does. The former vice president has moved emphatically leftward on abortion, on the death penalty, on free trade. By any understanding of “moderate,” as that term was used when Obama or Bill Clinton was president, Biden is no moderate.

What Biden is today is what he has always been: a liberal Democrat. But as his party has shifted left in a hyperpolarized era, Biden has shifted with it. Many of the positions he takes that are described as centrist today, observed Axios in January, “would have been liberal dreams during the Bill Clinton years and still out of reach in the Obama era.” On policy, Biden is a moderate primarily in the sense that he embraces positions that most Democrats no longer fight over.

 

And it appears he just announced his endorsement of Warren's bankruptcy plan, which would undo a 2005 bill which Biden previously fought her on when she was advocating against the bill as an expert on bankruptcy law. This moves him significantly in a pro-consumer direction.

 

 

I believe more of these concessions will come in order to build a bigger tent and get progressives onboard with more things to believe in. But I believe one of the strengths of Biden's campaign is that his platform is significantly more progressive than he himself is perceived. A bit of a stealth progressive ally that can help get more moderate people on board with an agenda they otherwise might oppose.

[Landlord]

I mean, who the hell cares? If he gets elected, there's no incentive for him to follow through on the most progressive and aggressive parts of his platform, and there's no compelling reason to think he will. He's trying to get votes. He's spent 50 years toeing the line. 

[RedDenver]

8 minutes ago, Landlord said:

I mean, who the hell cares? If he gets elected, there's no incentive for him to follow through on the most progressive and aggressive parts of his platform, and there's no compelling reason to think he will. He's trying to get votes. He's spent 50 years toeing the line. 

This is my problem with Biden's campaign promises. He's spent a lifetime in politics doing the opposite of progressive policies, so color me extremely skeptical he'll even try to get anything passed. And he's spent his campaign talking about reaching out to Republicans and how progressive policy can't get passed into law.

[Danny Bateman]

I can't control if you don't trust Biden. That's your decision to make. I'm just out here trying to make the best of things and make a positive case for his potential presidency.