2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker Part III

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Segnosaur said:
I guess we have different definitions of 'attacked'.

Please, point to me when either the republicans or democrats have pointed out how Sanders went to a "death to America" rally.
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There are several publications that have printed stories about it from the daily beast to the new york times. Some of them use over the top negative framing.

Whether it has specifically been used in an attack ad I don't know. I would guess every candidate has things with publications but not specifically negative attack ads.

Different things get different amounts of coverage. But he has certainly been attacked by both sides for numerous things.
 
Speaking of unpalatable health care policy:

Pete's health care plan hinges on a supercharged individual mandate, the most unpopular part of the ACA. Those that do not have insurance will be automatically enrolled into the government plan and retroactively billed for the premiums. This could amount to thousands of dollars.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/buttigieg-health-plan-hinges-on-supercharged-version-of-unpopular-obamacare-mandate/2019/12/24/415ae876-21bb-11ea-9146-6c3a3ab1be6c_story.html#comments-wrapper
 
Segnosaur said:
Yes because ALL The democratic candidates went to "death to America" rallies, and had honeymoons in Communist Russia where they badmouth the United States.
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Yes because ALL the democratic candidates have numerous creepy videos of interactions with women and young girls, and opposed school integration.

Every candidate has various negatives that can be used as talking points.
 
Segnosaur said:
Good policies? Like his "medicare for all" plan that actually has less supporters than the idea of getting government completely out of health care?

Yeah, sounds like a winning policy to me.
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What's funny is how contradictory people are regarding healthcare in general. 70% support M4A, but that drops to about 40% if the poll asks about M4A without private insurance, which I believe is what Sanders proposed. Yet when asked which candidates is best able to handle healthcare, Sanders comes out on top.

Then there's the famous example of people who like the Affordable Care Act but hate Obamacare.

I think the average person has a pretty poor grasp on the nuances and just feels like our healthcare system sucks and is unaffordable and needs fixing.

But that is something the candidates who support an M4A system which includes private insurance should probably promote more to win over voters who view healthcare as a primary issue.
 
dudalb said:
He better start doing that now.
I think Amereicans want reform, think the country has gone too far to the right,but I don't think they want to go anywhere near as far to the left as the Dem Socs want.
Problem is that Bernie has long proclaimed himself to be a Dem Soc, and I am not sure he can pivot more to the center,like he has to to win in November.
The Danger is that a lot of people might find Sanders and Trump equally scary, and just stay home.
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I guess I have become as cynical as the Republicans seem to be at this point.
I see our chances to defeat Trump coming more from depressing right-leaning turnout than energizing left leaning turnout.

I think that Trump himself has done as much as can be done to motivate my fellow Democrats, and left-leaners to vote. All we can hope for is that we manage to not make those few right-leaners who don't really want to vote for Trump feel safe letting us have this one.


ETA: As if on cue, I look at my Facebook feed and there is an ad for Bloomberg with the tag line:
"Vote Boring, Vote Bloomberg"
 
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The_Animus said:
Yes because ALL the democratic candidates have numerous creepy videos of interactions with women and young girls, and opposed school integration.

Every candidate has various negatives that can be used as talking points.
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Which set of negatives (Bidens' or Sanders') do you suppose is more likely to resonate with undecided voters in PA, MI, WI, and OH ?

Because they are (almost literally) the only people who's opinion counts this year.
 
Progressives have been told to hold their nose and vote party unity for decades, and they have.

It's pretty funny the tantrums that are being thrown at just the suggestion that Bernie might win.
 
Belz... said:
"I've made my position clear [to me]". Besides, why would you continue Turkey's strawman? I've never said or implied anything about a socialist revolution.

It seems to me like you are just reacting to some perceived slight as if it were personal.
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JoeMorgue said:
And that's the difference. I "like" to varying degrees all of the Democratic candidates currently on the table and any likely to (now that Williamson is out of the race, the only one who I actually disliked because she was such a Woo Slinger)

But I don't have like a personal, vested, emotional interest in any of them. I'm not... fan, I'm just a supporter of some varying degree.

I don't have to defend any candidate's honor here.
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:hb:

Gawd, you people are reading far too much into my replies, as usual.

When someone makes a claim or holds a suspicion like "Bernie won't be popular with non-progressives because of X" and we reply to that claim, how does that make us any more emotionally invested in our candidate than any other posters?

Where there's smoke there's fire right? So instead of speculating about how hard the S-word will hit, let's check the polls, which give us a broad picture of support. Cabbage has provided those polls and they show Sanders is indeed competitive in most areas, including the battleground states, with Trump. Nationwide polls also show he's got the biggest appeal over Trump. Are they Gospel? of course not but if we're going to talk about electibility we have to go there.

Do you want us to scream VoteBlueNoMatterWho! until we are blue in the face?
 
That's my be why we're having the same argument with other candidates supporters, since we're just "reading into stuff."

Why, pray tell, are we "reading into stuff" only at you?
 
Fivethirtyeight has Bernie today at 49% to lock up the required delegates to win in the first round of balloting. Look down below at the individual states; they have Bernie as the most likely to win New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina (Biden's firewall turned out to be flammable), California, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and basically everywhere else.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Gosh, all this Bernie talk sure is making people crabby. I have a compromise! All those who think Bernie can't win, and all those who think Bernie can win, should support Warren. That way we're completely safe from both the success and failure of Bernie! I literally see no downside to this elegant compromise!
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I think you're onto something there.
 
Distracted1 said:
Which set of negatives (Bidens' or Sanders') do you suppose is more likely to resonate with undecided voters in PA, MI, WI, and OH ?

Because they are (almost literally) the only people who's opinion counts this year.
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I'm not sure if they've done polling that specific.

The closest thing I'm aware of is general election Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Sanders polling for those states and both Biden and Sanders beat Trump. You can find the breakdowns on realclearpolitics.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Polling for NH remains very favorable towards Sanders. He may win the primary with a double digit lead over the second place finisher.

The more interesting story may be who among the weaker candidates decides to remain in the race. Another Biden flop may send his supporters scattering, and Warren and Yang may decide to leave if they haven't gained any ground.
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Yang, maybe, but it would be decidedly premature for Warren. She had a strong showing in Iowa - stronger than expected, even - and that fairly certainly wasn't an accident, I think.

theprestige said:
It seems to me that caucuses aren't the problem here. The people who screwed up in Iowa would probably have screwed up a primary just as badly, if they'd been in charge of one.
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Maybe. Looking at Iowa, though, caucuses seem to get screwed up a lot more than more normal voting, though, on top of the rest of the issues with them.

Incidentally, looks like there was outside interference. Not the source of the problems, but certainly an additional disruption.

The_Animus said:
I guess I look at it a little differently. Sanders has now been in two presidential campaigns where he has been attacked from both the left and the right. The term socialist has been applied to him consistently throughout.
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Bernie, so far, has proven to be incredibly resilient to negative attacks.
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Err... this is misleading. From what I've seen, Sanders has never been seriously attacked in either campaign. Hillary did send some light jabs his way, but, as can be seen from the oppo research she had on him (and that the Republicans and everyone else gained easy access to), she could have hit a LOT harder. She had no need to, though, given comparative name recognition and the largely pro-establishment MSM. As for the right, Russia, for example, was actually *pro-Bernie* as part of their overarching anti-Hillary push. In general, the right was focusing on Hillary, regardless, and pretty clearly going easy on Sanders while stirring up Sanders supporters to try to hurt Hillary more. That's not Sanders weathering serious attacks and it's deeply problematic to try to claim that it is.

As for the current campaign season, the Democrats have kept things so relatively clean and easy on him that *Warren* has taken more actual fire in regards to M4A. Speaking of Warren, it's probably worth poking that that recent dispute about whether Bernie told Warren that a woman couldn't win the Presidency this time around. If you happened to think that *that* would even remotely count as a serious attack on Bernie from the left, you would be deeply, deeply mistaken (especially when the way it was handled kept Warren pretty firmly in the crosshairs as the party far more in the wrong). The right has been attacking all of the candidates, of course, but if you delve deeper, they've been overwhelmingly focusing on hurting Biden and very little effort's been spent on Bernie. Given that Bernie's been one of the frontrunners for a while now, that's pretty telling.

Plenty more can be said, but please, stop with the Bernie resilience BS. He hasn't been seriously attacked - and there's a whole lot of angles that are easily available that haven't been pushed. If he wins the nomination, *then* we might see how resilient he actually is and you might be able to validly make that claim (and if he wins, I very much hope that we will find him to be very resilient). Until then, it will fairly certainly remain a self-serving and baseless claim.


Distracted1 said:
You forget, the Republicans will be tarring any Democrat with the "death to America" brush, so it doesn't matter who we run WRT that particular smear. ;)
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To treat this with what's probably undue seriousness.... No? That's true of the "socialist" claim, with the different candidates having varying vulnerability to that. Bernie's the most vulnerable by far, of course. Warren's more than Biden/Buttigieg.

SuburbanTurkey said:
No one has attacked him with that particular one yet. How do you know it will be effective?

The Dems absolutely have attacked him and he has prevailed. He's been attacked as being a "not real Democrat". He's been attacked as a 2016 spoiler that gave us Trump. He's been attacked as a Socialist dreamer with no sense of reality. He's been attacked as being a closet misogynist. And yet his support grows.
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And all of those attacks are rather weak, honestly. When it comes to Party Loyalty, Democrats aren't even remotely Republicans, to put it nicely, and DINO has never even remotely held the same negative weight as RINO (in modern times, at least - hard to say when the parties were less polarized and the group alignments were significantly different). As for the 2016 spoiler, the evidence for that was always pretty weak - and I suspect that that line was being pushed more by Republican strategists and supporters in their attempts to cause fractures in the Democratic Party. The Socialist scare line largely doesn't work on Democrats, regardless. As for the closet misogynist thing, I poked at that a bit earlier in this post. To go a bit further, though, if you consider *that* to be a serious attack on Bernie by the Democrats, your opinion on this subject can simply and safely be dismissed, I think.
 
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