Ready The Clown Car: The First Batch of Democrats Are Ready To Announce Their 2020 Bids

Joe joe be slippin....

 

Except for the fact you said voters would coalesce around the progressive candidate.

Harris is the one gaining the most voters.

 

Interesting data.

14% of folks who voted for Trump in 2016 but plan to flip on him choose to go with Sanders. Followed by Yang at 10%.

Makes you think about who can turn those former Obama districts back to blue.

 

If you stick to the most superficial and stop reading after the headline, you're right that it positions Harris at a very progressive spot by allying with AOC. But, you didn't quote the most important paragraph, the one that tells you what the bill would do:

My first observation is that this is a pretty tiny foray into GND politics -- this doesn't actually aim to make energy any greener. My second observation is that this proposal can help coal country. If a new environmental bill would have the effect of closing a coal plant or a coal mine, this measure could compel the government to find some economic offset to make the impacted town whole. My third observation is that it could undermine the rest of the GND. Having more rules to follow and impact studies to conduct will mean that environmental bills will be harder and slower to enact, and gives opponents more material for lawsuits to stop them. I appreciate the idealism in trying to ensure that low-income communities can share in the benefits, but it's probably too idealistic to be successful. Maybe this is too jaded, but if you really thought that time was of the essence for climate change, you wouldn't hang social justice mandates on it.

 

I'm sure it will be completely forgotten by the time we get to the general election. But, it strikes me, as a primary voter, to not be as virtuous as you seem to think it should appear to me.

 

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpu...s-back-big-lead-12-points-month-harris-fades/

 

Quinnipiac: Biden bounces back out to a big lead, up 12 points in a month, as Harris fades


AllahpunditPosted at 10:11 pm on July 29, 2019


FiveThirtyEight noticed last week that, very quietly, Biden was recovering from the polling hit he took after the busing exchange with Kamala Harris at the last debate. Harris had zoomed up after that in some polls, even touching 20 percent in Quinnipiac’s June survey, but the trend didn’t continue. It was Biden who was once again on the rise while Harris dipped a bit.

Now here comes Quinnipiac’s July poll with even clearer evidence of the trend.



Look back to the numbers from June. After a long slide in early July after the first debate, with Harris nearly passing him, Biden’s regained 12 points and now enjoys a bigger lead than he did before. And most of that 12-point surge has come at Harris’s expense. Check this out (“AA” is “African-American”):

A huge number of black voters migrated from Biden to Harris after the busing exchange … and now they appear to have come home to Joe. It’s not just happening in the Quinnipiac poll either. Over at RCP’s poll of polls, Biden has regained nearly all of the lead he enjoyed shortly before the first Democratic debate. In mid-June he stood at 32 percent with Bernie second at 15. Today Biden’s at 31.3 with Elizabeth Warren second at 14.8. Harris, the supposed breakout star of the last debate, is in fourth place at 11 percent — still several points higher than where she was before the busing attack on Biden but by no means threatening Uncle Joe for the lead.

Again, what happened?

Nate Silver speculated last week that the post-debate polls were affected by a burst of enthusiasm from Harris supporters. As that enthusiasm cooled a bit, the polling equilibrium was restored:

[O]ne contributing factor may be nonresponse bias — after a good debate for Harris and a poor one for Biden, for instance, Harris supporters may be more likely to respond to polls and Biden ones less so. I tend to think this phenomenon is a little overstated and that an easier answer is simply that a lot of voters don’t have deep convictions about the race until much later, and so bounce around among whichever candidates have gotten favorable press coverage recently.

The latter explanation about the lack of deep convictions makes more sense to me. Voters liked what they saw of Harris at the debate but they haven’t seen or heard much lately unless they’re so attuned to daily political news that they’re following the rollout of her Medicare for All plans, so they’re back in default mode. If I had to float a theory for why they’re reverting to Biden it’d be pure, clean, simple electability: Uncle Joe blows the field away when Dems are asked who stands the best chance of beating Trump, taking 51 percent of the vote when no one else does better than 10. Every day that Democratic voters are focused on the latest Trump outburst instead of the daily squabbling among Dem candidates is probably a good day for Biden inasmuch as Trump’s antics remind liberals that winning next fall is all that matters, which naturally leads them back to the safest, supposedly most electable choice.

The most frequently recurring narrative about the primary in political media this past week is Biden vowing to get his game face on for the upcoming debate. Literally every four hours or so, some media outlet regurgitates another “no more mister nice guy” piece about Uncle Joe. He’s been taking shots at Harris and Cory Booker too, partly to preview the battle to come on Wednesday night and partly to reassure nervous Biden fans who thought he looked a bit … frail at the first debate that he’s up to the challenge. I hope for his sake that that’s true. Because Philip Klein’s right that he’s staring down the barrel of a “Pawlenty moment” if he wimps out again when he’s face to face with Harris:

For those who need a reminder, Pawlenty was a governor of Minnesota who ran a failed bid for the 2012 Republican nomination. From the get-go, he was hindered by the perception that he was too boring and too much of a nice Midwesterner to survive the brutal world of presidential politics. Seeking to disabuse people of this perception, he used the run up to a summer 2011 debate as an opportunity to attack Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare law that provided the model for Obamacare. In interviews leading up to the debate, he deployed the phrase “Obamneycare” and talked about his sharp elbows from playing hockey. Everything was teed up for Pawlenty to swing at Romney’s biggest vulnerability. Yet when he was given the opportunity to challenge Romney on the debate stage, he totally bungled it. He didn’t merely wiff, he backed off his attack altogether. Pawlenty wouldn’t formally drop out of the race until August, but effectively, his chances were doomed once he blew his chance in the June debate.

Romney analogies usually aren’t good for Harris but she’ll take that one. Exit question: Will Biden wimp out? I think he’ll wimp out.

 

More moderate than Biden or Bullock or Delaney? But still somehow a Democrat? I don't think so.

I don't really see the grave danger though. Of course in a field of 20 candidates, there will be different perspectives. We actually want the primary to draw out these differences so the voters can pick what and who they want. That's the whole point of the primary. It would be dangerous if you had 20 candidates all with the same idea about what to do with a high-profile and thorny problem. That would leave the Democratic voter with no options and no agency and no reason to support the nominee.

 

If you think there is a demand out there for some champion for moderate Democrats, why do you suppose guys like Delaney and Bullock aren't better known? Is it that they themselves are just not very interesting dynamic personalities that can command any attention? Or are they still not hitting the target of Democratic moderatism? Or something else? Resident Democratic moderate @Os Trigonum might also have some insight here (Os, I'm joshing a bit, but since you do say you're a moderate democrat I am actually genuinely interested in your opinion on this too).

 

I feel ya. But, Mayor Pete was just a mayor. Yang never had any seat at all. They made names for themselves, either through their personal magnetism or by creating excitement with their ideas. Maybe it's easier to create buzz with fringe ideas like UBI, but it's still true that Yang has gotten more people excited by being progressive than Delaney has by being moderate. So, I'm not totally convinced there is a market there. Maybe many voters are more moderate than these candidates are, but that doesn't mean necessarily that they want to vote for a candidate that's moderate. Look at me -- I think Warren's idea of what to do about college tuition is stupid, but she's still a leading contender for my vote. I think Biden is right that we should protect and improve Obamacare, but I'm not likely to vote for him.