2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker Part III

[angrysoba]

https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1228391041985916928?s=19

Rep. Meeks, having endorsed Bloomberg, picks up the "Bernie not a Democrat" torch.

"I wouldn't allow a Republican to run as a Democrat."

Irony lost.

Ha ha! It’s ridiculous. I think Bloomberg fans will have to bury their “but Sanders is not a real Democrat!” argument. Preferably next to the “Biden is way more electable than Bernie” argument.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Surely the reasons for becoming unemployed are relatively unimportant. The fact that once you become unemployed your ability to pay for your health care is compromised is what's at issue here.

You're missing the point: we have to know enough to judge whether the person deserves healthcare and/or life, or if they deserve to go untreated and die. The point of healthcare isn't to provide health, it's to act as an elaborate tool for punishing the undeserving and maintaining the social order with the richest on top, the middle grateful not to be/terrified of becoming the poor, and the poor on bottom. It's a wonderful system that's kept the powerful powerful and made the rich rich (and getting richer every year), who are you to question it?

 

[Matthew Best]

Oops! Silly me.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Darn, got to cross Klobuchar off my list after her disastrous showing in a Telemundo interview. It wasn't so much as her not knowing the Mexican president's name, Steyer didn't either. But Steyer moved right past the deficit discussing policy and relations. Klobuchar looked like a kid trying to answer the test questions when she hadn't studied.

Listen to the difference.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...klobuchar-tom-steyer-mexico-president-953694/

Steyer's video is first, scroll down for Klobuchar's.

But honestly, both should have known the name of the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Darn, got to cross Klobuchar off my list after her disastrous showing in a Telemundo interview. It wasn't so much as her not knowing the Mexican president's name, Steyer didn't either. But Steyer moved right past the deficit discussing policy and relations. Klobuchar looked like a kid trying to answer the test questions when she hadn't studied.

Listen to the difference.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...klobuchar-tom-steyer-mexico-president-953694/

Steyer's video is first, scroll down for Klobuchar's.

But honestly, both should have known the name of the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

I see shades of "What is Aleppo?" there.

Someone should make a cheat sheet to be distributed to all Presidential candidates. Maybe listing the names of significant leaders, current political theaters, the number of US States, the location of Kansas City, etc.

 

[SezMe]

From your link:

The bill, which was introduced by 13 Republicans and advanced to the full House Education Committee on Monday, would require that lessons touching on the topic of sexual orientation or gender identity first be approved by parents, who would then have the option of sending a note to the principal excusing their children from class.

The scene: An Iowa classroom.
The setting: A class:Current Events in Political Science
Teacher: OK, today we're going to talk about the Democratic race in 2020.
<teacher summarizes all the candidates except Pete>
Teacher: Now let's cover Mayor Pete. Does anyone need to leave the room.
The scene: A mad dash as every student heads for the door.
Teacher: ...who is gay. <Waits for 30 seconds to make sure there are no more echoes.>
Teacher: (at class room door): OK, all you snowflakes are safe now.

 

[SezMe]

Surely the reasons for becoming unemployed are relatively unimportant. The fact that once you become unemployed your ability to pay for your health care is compromised is what's at issue here.

No, the post you're responding to contained implied that cancer was the causal factor to the unemployment. Thus, theprestige's question are quite relevant.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

From your link:

The scene: An Iowa classroom.
The setting: A class:Current Events in Political Science
Teacher: OK, today we're going to talk about the Democratic race in 2020.
<teacher summarizes all the candidates except Pete>
Teacher: Now let's cover Mayor Pete. Does anyone need to leave the room.
The scene: A mad dash as every student heads for the door.
Teacher: ...who is gay. <Waits for 30 seconds to make sure there are no more echoes.>
Teacher: (at class room door): OK, all you snowflakes are safe now.

It's the same freak-out we're having here in our state because of drag queen story time at the libraries. The kids love having a flashy, exotic, and impeccably dressed princess tell them stories.

The lawmakers are Worrying™ furiously about "exposing" (no, I'm not making a pun, that's the word they keep using over and over and over!) children to "themes not appropriate to their age."

I'm like...

What do they think is going on at these story hours that would need to be explained?

It's kind of a self-made reality thing, really. The kids who don't know thats a drag queen don't know thats a drag queen, so there's nothing to explain. The ones who do know that's a drag queen apparently already know what a drag queen is, so there's nothing to explain.

What is there to explain about Mayor Pete being gay in the context of a political class? Probably how his being gay is perceived and creates expectations upon him and other esoteric musings.

I don't think it's going to involve a classroom observation of how gay sex works or anything.

 

[Aridas]

Study from Yale School of Public Health concerning medicare for all. The major findings:

- 68,000 more deaths per year would be prevented compared to current system.
- would save the US $458 billion every year

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext

With figures this promising, every other candidate but Bernie should be explaining why they oppose this obvious solution.

Edit: That's 22 9/11 bodycounts a year so that the private insurance industry can turn a profit.

Every other candidate other than Bernie and Warren. Going a bit further, for this, you should also be pointedly focusing on Congress. Warren's stated delay is almost certainly because there just aren't enough reasonably obtainable votes for it in Congress at present and likely won't be in 2020.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that could potentially require parental permission before a politics class could mention Pete Buttigieg and his husband.

...Reminds me of -

Missouri Republican proposes legislation that would make it legal to lock up librarians

There is a move underway in Missouri to not just ban certain books and library activities, but to jail the librarians who permit them. The Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act, HB 2044, would establish a five-person parental review board for each of Missouri’s public libraries. The (semi-literate) bill summary is full of typos and terrifying new rules.

<snip>

The original impetus for this bill appears to be the representative’s discovery that the immensely popular Drag Queen Story Hour has been presented in libraries and bookstores around Missouri. The Kansas City Star reported,

“In some places -- St. Louis, Kansas City and I think St. (Joseph) -- they’ve had these drag queen story hours and that’s something that I take objection to and I think a lot of parents do,” Baker, R-Neosho, said. “That’s where in a public space, our kids could be exposed to something that’s age-inappropriate. That’s what I’m trying to tackle.”

ETA: And... I think that Delphic Oracle ended up talking a bit about it first.

 

[rdwight]

What do they think is going on at these story hours that would need to be explained?

It's kind of a self-made reality thing, really. The kids who don't know thats a drag queen don't know thats a drag queen, so there's nothing to explain. The ones who do know that's a drag queen apparently already know what a drag queen is, so there's nothing to explain.

Going to be honest, my 5 year old saw a performer/singer on one of those shows on TV and asked either why does that woman have a beard or why is that man in a dress and makeup and I didn't have a readily available thought to explain that situation to my liking.

It's not really something that I care to discourage at all because I didn't have anything fleshed out for such a question, but I don't think everyone realizes that parents don't plan for every inevitability their children will see and at which age. For some instances I still haven't fully committed myself to a specific position beyond live and let live, to which my children are not satisfied and will remain so through 'look at that cloud' misdirection for the mean time on my part.

Same sex relationships were easier for me to speak on and yet my children, having grown up next to gay neighbors they've known since they were born, were unaware of their relationship dynamics even though they've been explained how some people have that orientation and it's fine. They just thought they were brothers/friends, not thinking more on the subject.

To be sympathetic and not judgmental, it's not simple to explain every aspect of this stuff for every age range to every parents satisfaction. I don't think the initial 'BIGOTS!!!' reaction is always fair. Just food for thought.

 

[Venom]

I don't think the "bigot!" reaction is always fair either, but bringing it back to the subject in question, it's a breathtakingly stupid issue in the context of a politics course for upperclassmen high schoolers.

 

[PhantomWolf]

It's cute how you've turned someone spending their way to political power into a positive like that.

Except that there is a problem with your argument, well actually two.

Firstly, if you believe that spending money on a campaign buys you political power, then spending anyone's money on a campaign is clearly buying political power, and so all politicians are buying political power. As such, why is it more wrong to spend your own money buying it than to spend that of a bunch of poor people?

The second problem is that to get political power you have to convince people to vote for you. Money doesn't buy votes, and advertising doesn't either, as I'll show below.

False choice.

It's not a False choice unless you can twiddle your nose and change the way US Politics works.

I prefer that money in politics be minimized to the extent possible. There are a myriad of possible ways to do this, some good, some probably pretty bad. But I support the intent.

As noted either in this thread of one of the others, my preferred system is for all candidates to be give a certain amount of money for advertising, with any money from donors only being allowed to be used for non-advertising purposes such as the production of ads, transport for the campaign, and paying staffers

Bloomberg buying a place on the debate stage moves us in the wrong direction.

Except that he didn't buy his way onto the debate stage, quite the opposite. That he was the sole donor to his campaign is what has kept him off the debate stage, and that was only changed because he made a case that the rule of having to have 200,000 unique donors was unfair due to his current polling.

No!!! This is missing the point! Is this deliberate?

The point is that when some people are extremely wealthy, they can have a massively unfair advantage in getting elected by outspending all rivals. That's the issue!

Right here is where I deal with point 2 above. being able to spend a heap of money is only an unfair advantage is spending a whole lot of money actually gives an advantage. Studies show that Election Advertising, well it simply doesn't work.

And here's the problem you have have. You can only buy an election is spending loads of money actually buys you votes, and it simply doesn't do that. Yes it might give some name recognition, but beyond that it's generally useless because people don't decide their votes based on a political ad.

Now yes, the evidence is that those that spend the most money tend to win, about 85-90% of the time, however, this is not because spending money causes the money, studies say that it seems to be the other way around. Candidates that are seen as likely to win attract much more money and so can outspend their opponents, and due to a more and more partisan electorate it becomes easier to guess the likely winners, and thus back them.

So the while Bernie and his Bernie Bro's "Bloomberg is buying the election" thing falls down because the science just isn't there to support the claim, in fact all the science is saying that it doesn't matter how much you spend on advertising, if people aren't interested in voting for you, they won't, and all that money is therefore a waste.

As noted above, the one place that it could help a candidate is with name recognition, where a candidate is a retaliative unknown, like Bernie was in 2016. However, again, this isn't a lot of use to Bloomberg because he is relatively well known. The best his spending would do is give him a small bump in the polls due to name recognition, and that's it. He could have achieved the same by getting suckers donors to part with their money and back him.

 

[Brainster]

Except that there is a problem with your argument, well actually two.

Firstly, if you believe that spending money on a campaign buys you political power, then spending anyone's money on a campaign is clearly buying political power, and so all politicians are buying political power. As such, why is it more wrong to spend your own money buying it than to spend that of a bunch of poor people?

The second problem is that to get political power you have to convince people to vote for you. Money doesn't buy votes, and advertising doesn't either, as I'll show below.



It's not a False choice unless you can twiddle your nose and change the way US Politics works.



As noted either in this thread of one of the others, my preferred system is for all candidates to be give a certain amount of money for advertising, with any money from donors only being allowed to be used for non-advertising purposes such as the production of ads, transport for the campaign, and paying staffers



Except that he didn't buy his way onto the debate stage, quite the opposite. That he was the sole donor to his campaign is what has kept him off the debate stage, and that was only changed because he made a case that the rule of having to have 200,000 unique donors was unfair due to his current polling.



Right here is where I deal with point 2 above. being able to spend a heap of money is only an unfair advantage is spending a whole lot of money actually gives an advantage. Studies show that Election Advertising, well it simply doesn't work.

And here's the problem you have have. You can only buy an election is spending loads of money actually buys you votes, and it simply doesn't do that. Yes it might give some name recognition, but beyond that it's generally useless because people don't decide their votes based on a political ad.

Tom Steyer is currently running in 3rd in several polls of South Carolina with support in the mid-high teens. Explain that some other way than that he has been carpet-bombing the state with ads.

 

[Venom]

Sanders with a comfortable 19 point lead in Nevada so far.

Sounds good.

 

[Aridas]

Going to be honest, my 5 year old saw a performer/singer on one of those shows on TV and asked either why does that woman have a beard or why is that man in a dress and makeup and I didn't have a readily available thought to explain that situation to my liking.

Personally, I would have said something along the lines of "Because they want to." I suspect that you honestly don't need to delve much deeper into it than that, in a case like that. It's not really a live and let live case so much as a people are diverse (and weird!) and both like and feel more comfortable doing different things than many other people case.

To be sympathetic and not judgmental, it's not simple to explain every aspect of this stuff for every age range to every parents satisfaction. I don't think the initial 'BIGOTS!!!' reaction is always fair. Just food for thought.

Of course. However, there's reasonable and unreasonable. I'm not going to knock anyone for being uncomfortable about something or not having an immediate answer. I am going to knock people for trying to, say, get librarians arrested for putting on educational events where lots of people have wholesome fun and no one is harmed.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Going to be honest, my 5 year old saw a performer/singer on one of those shows on TV and asked either why does that woman have a beard or why is that man in a dress and makeup and I didn't have a readily available thought to explain that situation to my liking.



It's not really something that I care to discourage at all because I didn't have anything fleshed out for such a question, but I don't think everyone realizes that parents don't plan for every inevitability their children will see and at which age. For some instances I still haven't fully committed myself to a specific position beyond live and let live, to which my children are not satisfied and will remain so through 'look at that cloud' misdirection for the mean time on my part.



Same sex relationships were easier for me to speak on and yet my children, having grown up next to gay neighbors they've known since they were born, were unaware of their relationship dynamics even though they've been explained how some people have that orientation and it's fine. They just thought they were brothers/friends, not thinking more on the subject.



To be sympathetic and not judgmental, it's not simple to explain every aspect of this stuff for every age range to every parents satisfaction. I don't think the initial 'BIGOTS!!!' reaction is always fair. Just food for thought.

"They're playing a dress-up game. Like on Halloween!

Isn't that fun?"

You don't have to explain "every aspect."

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Except that there is a problem with your argument, well actually two.

Firstly, if you believe that spending money on a campaign buys you political power, then spending anyone's money on a campaign is clearly buying political power, and so all politicians are buying political power. As such, why is it more wrong to spend your own money buying it than to spend that of a bunch of poor people?

No, there's a clear difference between the "power" a warchest signifies when it can rise or fall on the political fortunes of the candidate versus when that candidate has several billion more where that came from.

Also, if we're going to go the "this is poor people's money!" in some paean to the emotions, then realize that most of Bloomberg's money also, ultimately came from a bunch of poor people (or other rich people who got that money from the poor people they were allowed to rip off by making the right contributions). Only they didn't realize they were engaging in political speech, they thought they were buying products and services. Everyone who donates to a campaign knows they are doing so to support something they believe in.

Except that he didn't buy his way onto the debate stage, quite the opposite. That he was the sole donor to his campaign is what has kept him off the debate stage, and that was only changed because he made a case that the rule of having to have 200,000 unique donors was unfair due to his current polling.

The rules that everyone who is running had to play by are unfair to Mike Bloomberg.

Okay.

Also, I checked a few times around when this decision was made and it seemed to me he wasn't yet meeting the polling thresholds either!

Right here is where I deal with point 2 above. being able to spend a heap of money is only an unfair advantage is spending a whole lot of money actually gives an advantage. Studies show that Election Advertising, well it simply doesn't work.

Seems he's concluded that spending on advertising by the campaigns doesn't correlate to outcomes. Well, first I don't have the time to delve into how he accounts for neigh-incalculable social variables from race to race, but I don't even need to dig that far. Even if this figure includes party and "connected committees" and other FEC-tracked stuff, that pales into insignificance to what SuperPACs pour in with "issue advocacy" that clearly pushes a candidate while dancing around all the magic word rules, so I'm rather unconvinced that money=influence has been ruled out to the degree that seems to indicate.

And here's the problem you have have. You can only buy an election is spending loads of money actually buys you votes, and it simply doesn't do that. Yes it might give some name recognition, but beyond that it's generally useless because people don't decide their votes based on a political ad.

I'll only go as far as saying I don't think a single ad provides anyone with a conscious "Eureka!" moment. But the totality of it absolutely can push the needle one way or the other.

Now yes, the evidence is that those that spend the most money tend to win, about 85-90% of the time, however, this is not because spending money causes the money, studies say that it seems to be the other way around. Candidates that are seen as likely to win attract much more money and so can outspend their opponents, and due to a more and more partisan electorate it becomes easier to guess the likely winners, and thus back them.

I was kinda hoping you'd loop around to boxing yourself in.

So what can we say about Bloomberg's support given he's got...uh, let me see here...oh, zero donors?

Also, care to revise your thoughts on how "unfair" it is that Bloomberg can't qualify for a debate with zero donors? Seems like a totally fair thing to use as a qualifying metric. I hear it's a major indicator of actual support.

So the while Bernie and his Bernie Bro's "Bloomberg is buying the election" thing falls down because the science just isn't there to support the claim, in fact all the science is saying that it doesn't matter how much you spend on advertising, if people aren't interested in voting for you, they won't, and all that money is therefore a waste.

In fact here's another post full of using the word "fact" and "science" a whole bunch without really meaning it.

How about you're not talking to "Bernie and his Bernie Bros." It's just me you're talking to. I have my own opinions and everything.

Or, if you insist on using hasty generalization labels, I'll start referring to your thoughts as "the nonsense Bloomberg Ballsuckers come up with."

As noted above, the one place that it could help a candidate is with name recognition, where a candidate is a retaliative unknown, like Bernie was in 2016. However, again, this isn't a lot of use to Bloomberg because he is relatively well known. The best his spending would do is give him a small bump in the polls due to name recognition, and that's it. He could have achieved the same by getting suckers donors to part with their money and back him.

Right, again, people who knowingly gave contributions of their own free will are "suckers" which suggests those accepting the contributions are duping and deceiving (even though the FEC literally makes you put statements all over the place spelling out they receive nothing for their contribution).

Work on your internal consistency.

Better suggestion: work on not having "Bloomberg is right" as the predetermined outcome of your reasoning.

 

[PhantomWolf]

Tom Steyer is currently running in 3rd in several polls of South Carolina with support in the mid-high teens. Explain that some other way than that he has been carpet-bombing the state with ads.

As I noted, and the article I linked to stated, it does gives name recognition, which gives a boost in polling, however some things to note. He has over 200,000 donors, so he does seem to have some support, and for all the advertising he is doing, he only got those results in two FOX polls, none of the others are showing him that high, and even in those polls he ran 3rd, so that's not a winning position.

However, having said all that, it should be noted that Steyer has been targeting SC in that he has been going and meetings with the black communities there, hiring black staffers and making it his #1 priority.

Steyer’s work to make in-roads with South Carolina’s African American community, including visiting areas with large black populations and hiring black staffers, appear to be paying off. He received backing from 24 percent of black voters. Sanders follows at 16 percent with Warren at 10 percent.

And this is where he has gotten his gains, with those black communities (who are 75% of Dem voters in SC.)

With the amount of work he has been doing in targeting those communities and getting among them, is it more likely that his face-to-face time with them, or TV ads are driving his numbers there?

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Except that there is a problem with your argument, well actually two.

Firstly, if you believe that spending money on a campaign buys you political power, then spending anyone's money on a campaign is clearly buying political power, and so all politicians are buying political power. As such, why is it more wrong to spend your own money buying it than to spend that of a bunch of poor people?

Because now one person is having an out-sized political power compared to a mass of poor people. Seems undemocratic.

The second problem is that to get political power you have to convince people to vote for you. Money doesn't buy votes, and advertising doesn't either, as I'll show below.

...

Except that he didn't buy his way onto the debate stage, quite the opposite. That he was the sole donor to his campaign is what has kept him off the debate stage, and that was only changed because he made a case that the rule of having to have 200,000 unique donors was unfair due to his current polling.
...

And here's the problem you have have. You can only buy an election is spending loads of money actually buys you votes, and it simply doesn't do that. Yes it might give some name recognition, but beyond that it's generally useless because people don't decide their votes based on a political ad.

Now yes, the evidence is that those that spend the most money tend to win, about 85-90% of the time, however, this is not because spending money causes the money, studies say that it seems to be the other way around. Candidates that are seen as likely to win attract much more money and so can outspend their opponents, and due to a more and more partisan electorate it becomes easier to guess the likely winners, and thus back them.

So the while Bernie and his Bernie Bro's "Bloomberg is buying the election" thing falls down because the science just isn't there to support the claim, in fact all the science is saying that it doesn't matter how much you spend on advertising, if people aren't interested in voting for you, they won't, and all that money is therefore a waste.

As noted above, the one place that it could help a candidate is with name recognition, where a candidate is a retaliative unknown, like Bernie was in 2016. However, again, this isn't a lot of use to Bloomberg because he is relatively well known. The best his spending would do is give him a small bump in the polls due to name recognition, and that's it. He could have achieved the same by getting suckers donors to part with their money and back him.

Just looking at Bloomberg's national and Super Tuesday polling seems to contradict this. The rules were changed because of his current polling... because of his massive ad campaign because of his massive personal wealth. I can't scientifically prove this to be the case, but I highly doubt he would be in second place in the recent national poll without any of that.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

As I noted, and the article I linked to stated, it does gives name recognition, which gives a boost in polling, however some things to note. He has over 200,000 donors, so he does seem to have some support, and for all the advertising he is doing, he only got those results in two FOX polls, none of the others are showing him that high, and even in those polls he ran 3rd, so that's not a winning position.

However, having said all that, it should be noted that Steyer has been targeting SC in that he has been going and meetings with the black communities there, hiring black staffers and making it his #1 priority.



And this is where he has gotten his gains, with those black communities (who are 75% of Dem voters in SC.)

With the amount of work he has been doing in targeting those communities and getting among them, is it more likely that his face-to-face time with them, or TV ads are driving his numbers there?

I think its the giving money to the right organizations in this case. African-American democratic groups are, given their reliance on the party as a whole to keep them from all but being put back in chains, still very much in a patronage-driven "machine politics" frame of operation.

But what good does a mention from a prominent black leader do if you nobody heard about it?

This is where "ads didn't sway me" self-reporting doesn't convince me. They'll say "it was his support of this or that bill" or "I like his position on this one issue." They don't report it as "I was watching the game the other night and this ad came on where he laid out his position on that issue I care about." There's a gap between "what about them convinced you" and "how did you find out about the thing that convinced you?"