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2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker

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RecoveringYuppy said:
Haven't followed thread too closely, but what do you make of the fact that Bernie polled better across the board than Hillary did?
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The GOP media made a point to never attack Bernie calculating he wouldn't win the nomination but could be very effective at hurting Hillary. Hillary also didn't attack him because she calculated she needed his voters after she won the nomination.



Trust me the second the GOP attack machine needed to go after him there would have been nonstop attack ads promising gulags, mandatory atheism, economic collapse, etc.


a_unique_person said:
Hillary was the perfect centrist. Look where it got her.
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How was Hillary the perfect centrist? Her platform was the most left of any Democratic nominee in history.
 
No guarantee Yang will be in:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/14/dnc-fundraising-polling-early-debates-1170182

If more than 20 candidates qualify for a debate, the field will be winnowed using a methodology that gives preference to candidates meeting both the polling and fundraising thresholds, followed by candidates with the highest polling average.
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Also, note the broadcasts of the debates will not be as a single event:

The first debate will be broadcast on NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo on consecutive weekday nights in June, the official said. The second debate will be broadcast by CNN on consecutive weekday nights in July. The DNC and those networks will use random selection to arrange the candidate lineups for each night.
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"On consecutive weekday nights" so there's still plenty of shenanigans to play around with there. There will almost certainly be one night where all "the serious candidates" will be present. If not because of party interference, because the networks don't want several nights of ho-hum, but they'll willingly slap a few hours of debate "taped earlier this evening" on at 11:00 pm in exchange for a couple of hours of quality prime time.
 
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acbytesla said:
The problem of course with your analysis is that you think policy positions mean a lot more than they do. The "divide" between conservative and liberal isn't what led to Trump being elected. Hell, Trump never ran as a conservative. He ran as a populist xenophobic racist.
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The divide has been created since the election.

Delvo said:
This obsession is doing none of you any good. She lost, it's over, get over it; other things can be allowed to matter now. There's a lot of world out there that isn't Hillary.
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I'm so not obsessed with Hillary that I asked many times before long before the election why the Dems were determined to go with a person almost universally hated.

There is no doubt in my mind that any other candidate for the Dems would have beaten Trump.

That same situation isn't true this time around. Will the Dems see that? Tome will tell, but it appears no lessons have been learned looking at the field of has-beens and no-names on the card so far.

I said to a Yank mate the other day he should change his name to "None of the above". I reckon he'd win the Dem nomination in a landslide.
 
The Atheist said:
The divide has been created since the election.<snip>
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Oh, how fantastically myopic.

Even if it were true within America alone (which it most completely and absolutely is not), that would still be ignoring the global trends in this regard.

Trump is not a catalyst. Trump is a symptom.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
No guarantee Yang will be in:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/14/dnc-fundraising-polling-early-debates-1170182



Also, note the broadcasts of the debates will not be as a single event:



"On consecutive weekday nights" so there's still plenty of shenanigans to play around with there. There will almost certainly be one night where all "the serious candidates" will be present. If not because of party interference, because the networks don't want several nights of ho-hum, but they'll willingly slap a few hours of debate "taped earlier this evening" on at 11:00 pm in exchange for a couple of hours of quality prime time.
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Somehow I doubt there will be more than 20 candidates meeting the threshold come debate time.

And it would be pretty stupid of the DNC to say they'll make it a random selection as to who debates each night only to interfere and have all the serious candidates together. So I give it 50/50 odds of happening :D
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Even if it were true within America alone (which it most completely and absolutely is not), that would still be ignoring the global trends in this regard.
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I haven't ignored other countries; they're not relevant to the discussion, plus, plenty of countries aren't showing the same trend.

Delphic Oracle said:
Trump is not a catalyst. Trump is a symptom.
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So, division within USA hasn't increased since his election?
 
angrysoba said:
Elizabeth Warren has proposed breaking up tech giants such as Facebook, Google and maybe Twitter, as well as mergers such as Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, and maybe Amazon’s buy up of Wholefoods. It’s considered one policy that makes her stand out from the others. How do you think this will play? For me, this is also an idea that is worth airing at the debates. I wonder if we will see Google, Facebook and Twitter and Amazon will use their platforms to downplay her influence as a result.
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I don't have a way to calculate when a giant company should be broken or blocked from becoming even gianter, so I can't say it's bad, but I can't be enthusiastic about it either. But even if it is good in this case, it's thinking small... not quite "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" small, but at least "trying to bail out the Titanic with bilge pumps" small. If we don't do something about more fundamental problems like a health care "system" that's based on giving an unnecessary middle-man his profit, poverty wages, the same rich people legally bribing both parties to help them keep getting richer at everybody else's expense, trade wars at the whim of an obvious madman, pointless bombing & drone-attacking in several countries & helping a country run by other obvious madmen commit genocide against a neighbor (not just watching, but helping), and election systems predominantly rigged in favor of the less popular & more harmful party, then splitting giganto-companies into slightly-less-giganto-companies really wouldn't be an accomplishment of much substance. It might be nifty to do that too, but Warren hasn't maintained a strong enough stand on the bigger issues to move on to step 2 yet. (She's one of the recent round of back-pedallers on Medicare For All and/or de-corruption of the political process, for example.)
 
Delvo said:
I don't have a way to calculate when a giant company should be broken or blocked from becoming even gianter, so I can't say it's bad, but I can't be enthusiastic about it either. But even if it is good in this case, it's thinking small... not quite "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" small, but at least "trying to bail out the Titanic with bilge pumps" small. If we don't do something about more fundamental problems like a health care "system" that's based on giving an unnecessary middle-man his profit, poverty wages, the same rich people legally bribing both parties to help them keep getting richer at everybody else's expense, trade wars at the whim of an obvious madman, pointless bombing & drone-attacking in several countries & helping a country run by other obvious madmen commit genocide against a neighbor (not just watching, but helping), and election systems predominantly rigged in favor of the less popular & more harmful party, then splitting giganto-companies into slightly-less-giganto-companies really wouldn't be an accomplishment of much substance. It might be nifty to do that too, but Warren hasn't maintained a strong enough stand on the bigger issues to move on to step 2 yet. (She's one of the recent round of back-pedallers on Medicare For All and/or de-corruption of the political process, for example.)
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Sure, it isn’t a main priority, just something - as I said - worth putting out there in the debates.
 
Regurgitating Slate's "What Next" podcast about Biden from today:

I expect Biden to be in for one hell of a rough ride once the debating starts. He is remembered best as Vice President to Obama and gets a lot of credit for working under that agenda. But the VP doesn't set the agenda, and Biden really shouldn't get much credit for what happened under Obama's leadership.

Biden's long record is the Senate is one of being a fairly conservative Democrat. He was drug warrior, anti-busing (school desegregation), pump-the-brakes on social issues conservative for his long career. That was a long time ago, but I imagine a trip down memory lane will not go well for Biden when the discussion starts. He seems to me a slightly more likable Hillary Clinton type: fairly conservative democrat that has recently taken up certain token progressive issues to remain viable, but not a leader on these issues and unlikely to animate the base.

Jamelle Bouie's recent opinion piece from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/biden-busing-integration.html
 
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Biden's said too many stupid things over the years for me to like him. He seems bumbling. I disagree with many of Warren's positions but at least she seems serious and dedicated to them, whereas Biden seems to bumble along with whatever strikes him at the moment.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It's a taste test. 'These are the products we're considering selling, which would you, the consumers, most likely purchase?'
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An interesting point was brought up by a guest on 538 saying essentially that Iowa and New Hampshire are terrible as tasters given how unrepresentative the states are compared with the Democratic voter demographic. The most representative states would be Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Florida, with Nevada coming in fifth.

The downsides with using such large states would be that it takes some campaigning which could be costly and involve shaking a lot more hands, but as Nate Silver said even states like Delaware and Indiana would be better bellwethers than Iowa and New Hampshire.

Should then, the Democrats change their primary schedule?
 
angrysoba said:
An interesting point was brought up by a guest on 538 saying essentially that Iowa and New Hampshire are terrible as tasters given how unrepresentative the states are compared with the Democratic voter demographic. The most representative states would be Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Florida, with Nevada coming in fifth.

The downsides with using such large states would be that it takes some campaigning which could be costly and involve shaking a lot more hands, but as Nate Silver said even states like Delaware and Indiana would be better bellwethers than Iowa and New Hampshire.

Should then, the Democrats change their primary schedule?
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I think they should have primaries in all fifty states on the same day, rather than picking just a few. Especially when those few are all Yankee or Midwestern states.
 
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