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Bernie Sanders 2020 Watch


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The better Sanders’s polls look, the more grave, even dour, he seems to grow. “Our infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our border systems, wastewater plants are crumbling,” he said, morosely, in Ames. His ballooning prospects were enough to excite his crowds; Sanders himself could deflate into a more familiar tone. Americans have to endure the “international embarrassment” of failing to guarantee health care. Did you want to “talk about vulgarity?” Consider the pharmaceutical executives, “a bunch of crooks.” Dispassionately, he went on to climate change. “They have underestimated the kinds of forest fires and wildfires that we will be seeing. All of you are aware that Australia, a beautiful country, is now burning.” The average American worker “is not making a nickel more” than he or she did fifty years ago, he said, and “you got three people on top owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society. You got that? Three people, a hundred and sixty million people.” Why, you wondered, would a person invest himself in such a sick place? The answer, carried by his young crowds and surrogates: for the kids.

It’s common to describe the present split within the Democratic Party as pitting its left against its center. A different way to put it is that the Party is split between its likely future and its current reality. An Emerson poll of Iowa this week found that forty-four per cent of Democrats under fifty support Sanders; ten per cent favor Elizabeth Warren, and no other candidate reached double digits. You’d think that a growing coalition of this size would be enticing to other Democrats, but Sanders has been endorsed by just one of his Senate colleagues, Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, and by seven members of the House. On Friday, he had the support of only one Iowa state legislator, while Amy Klobuchar had been endorsed by eighteen. “Nobody likes him,” Hillary Clinton says, of Sanders, in a new documentary just shown at Sundance, which seems true in a certain sense but beside the point. His voters no longer look quite so much like outsiders to the Party. They are beginning to seem like the future base.

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1223943087191416833

 

Edited by washparkhorn
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The Troops love Bernie

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No other 2020 candidate for president, including Donald Trump, can come close to matching Bernie Sanders’ level of support among members of the U.S. military, to go by the most recent campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have donated a total of $185,625 to Sen. Sanders’ 2020 campaign. By comparison, they have given $113,012 to Trump, $80,250 to Pete Buttigieg, $64,604 to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a relatively paltry $33,045 to former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Doug Weber, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

For every candidate in the 2020 race, the CRP maintains a list of the 20 companies or institutions whose employees have given the most money to his or her campaign. Remarkably, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs all separately appear on Sanders’ list, comprising 5 of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army, comes in at number 11, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.

Sanders’ support from employees of Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, and the U.S. Postal Service has been reported, but the strength of his appeal to the armed forces has gone largely unnoticed.

If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from service members translates into votes, it would represent a significant shift from 2016, when active-duty personnel were twice as likely to choose Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2016, the Military Times sent a confidential survey to its 59,000 subscribers in the armed forces. The respondents preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton by a “huge margin,” and were nearly three times more likely to identify as Republican than Democrat.

But Trump’s support appears to have waned, leaving an opening for a Democrat this time around. In October 2018, a follow-up poll found that Trump’s popularity among active-duty personnel had faded noticeably, with half of respondents saying they were “unhappy” with the president. The FEC data suggest that Trump’s standing has deteriorated even further in the past two years, given that the troops are now donating much more to the peacenik senator from Vermont.

 

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19 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Not like anyone gives a shit, but I'm about ready to go full Bernietard.  The establishment Dems quixotic impeachment effort and inability to serve as an effective check against Trumpism leads me to believe there needs to be a deep turnover in the party.  What AOC pulled off on a massive scale.  I am guessing it won't happen until after the election and only if Trump wins, but I'm pretty much resigned to that happening.

I for one will welcome our new socialist opposition overlords.

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3 minutes ago, Goredho said:

Not like anyone gives a shit, but I'm about ready to go full Bernietard.  The establishment Dems quixotic impeachment effort and inability to serve as an effective check against Trumpism leads me to believe there needs to be a deep turnover in the party.  What AOC pulled off on a massive scale.  I am guessing it won't happen until after the election and only if Trump wins, but I'm pretty much resigned to that happening.

I for one will welcome our new socialist opposition overlords.

Welcome brother! I think a lot of people, not just my fellow millennials, are sllllowy starting to come around to this which gives me a lot of hope. It's all anecdotal and I have no idea how the caucuses will really go tonight (given that it's such a stupid process and shitshow) but I've seen tons and tons of stories of Bernie volunteers in Iowa about how they've gotten a lot of older voters to support Bernie. They obviously aren't huge MAGA shitheads, but they're very upset about their material conditions and see both parties as doing very little except on occasion. 

To be blunt, if you bash it into peoples' heads that M4A, a livable minimum wage, a real commitment to getting of fossil fuels is something so many other countries poorer than the US have been able to do. We've, particularly boomers, have been conditioned to think the world is going to collapse if we ask for too much and rock the boat but it won't.

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On 2/1/2020 at 8:00 PM, bad_teammate said:

3 hours of phonebanking done and boy are my ears tired.

A couple people mad that I interrupted dinner. Apologized profusely and expressed hope they enjoyed their meals. One guy apologized for being short with me after that, some people are thoroughly disarmed when I turn up my East Texas accent. One lady told me that she was voting for Bernie since he was Obama's VP; I didn't argue. Another lady told me her son talked her into Andrew Yang but she's probably going to caucus for Amy Klobuchar if he can't go with her (lol owned). 3-4 Peteheads. 1-2 YangGangers.

Most calls are voicemail or hang-ups, of course.

One woman said she saw AOC speak and is "in love" and wants AOC to be president.

"Stop wasting your time and go fuck yourself" from an angry MAGA. Little does he know that I LOVE wasting my time. Joke's on him!

The east Texas accent is one of the best of all to use of you want to disarm most people.  Combines the friendly southern drawl but greatly quickened with the west texas twang so you say what you’re friendly ass is gonna say so much much quicker. I’m from Texas and talking to people from south Alabama drives me crazy because they say it so damn slow.

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Finally got around to talking to one of my good friends that works at a health insurance company (in Pennsylvania) about the Democratic candidates. Had no idea where he stood on it going into the conversation. 

he said he said he doesn’t talk about his support of sanders at work. Says people there pretend like it’s not even a possibility that he makes it to the White House. 

said he’s donated to sanders and would welcome losing his good paying job if it meant Medicare for all. 

plans to start looking for a new job of Bernie gets the dem nod just in case. 

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34 minutes ago, heso said:

Finally got around to talking to one of my good friends that works at a health insurance company (in Pennsylvania) about the Democratic candidates. Had no idea where he stood on it going into the conversation. 

he said he said he doesn’t talk about his support of sanders at work. Says people there pretend like it’s not even a possibility that he makes it to the White House. 

said he’s donated to sanders and would welcome losing his good paying job if it meant Medicare for all. 

plans to start looking for a new job of Bernie gets the dem nod just in case. 

The English National Health Service employs 1.4 million people, many of them in admin. Note, that's England alone, not the UK. 

Extrapolating from population totals, the American National Health System would employee over 8 million people.

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5 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

The English National Health Service employs 1.4 million people, many of them in admin. Note, that's England alone, not the UK. 

Extrapolating from population totals, the American National Health System would employee over 8 million people.

But it’s not like those 8 million would still work in all of the local private insurance companies. 

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State of the Race - post voting, but before long-delayed release of result - 

Biden is a placeholder.

The Democratic Party has one movement, an atomized opposition to that movement with no defined narrative, and one candidate with a narrative consistent with the movement candidate.

Additionally, we have a Republican billionaire buying a spot in the race for who will represent the Party in their fight against Donald Trump.  Why is Bloomberg doing this? He doesn't believe the anti-movement candidates can stop the movement, so he is doing the work of protecting his wealth by himself and for himself.

The billionaires in this post-Trump election moment flex hubris. 

The anti-movement candidates need a narrative.  How about: Bloomberg's ascendancy in the Democratic Party nomination process is ghastly. Hard work poured into campaigns that had to shut down because they lacked funding.  The campaigns that were shuttered drew some voters who finally believed someone spoke for them. Their candidates fell out. They moved on, but it hurt. The ground feels less firm when your voice disappears.

Bloomberg represents an end to the important "personal investment period" of the democratic voting process. That period of time in an election, when the person gets to know the candidate. This period of reflection and consideration by the electorate, is being cancelled by Bloomberg. Bloomberg saw no need for the people's advice. He didn't need it. He had billions. He was welcomed in. That is autocratic behavior. And voters need to stand up to it. 

Autocratic rule is not consistent with democracy. By the People and for the People. We ended autocratic rule over the People in an Armed Revolution against the autocratic British monarchy. Early Americans scarified their lives to free us from autocratic rule. We chose democracy - not a king or an autocrat.

The Republicans must now support a President who engages in autocratic behavior, which will now be sanctified by the Senate - one day after the State of the Union, which will be held - tomorrow. Who benefited from Iowa - Trump and Bloomberg.  They are both using the Trump endless media exposure strategy, which is corrosive to democracy.

There is no reason for the Democratic Party to follow the Republicans' lead and cede power to an autocrat - a modern aristocrat. 

Rightist autocrats adore aristocratic and autocratic rule. The Democratic Party has been pulled rightward in policy by our representatives, but the base is still left to center-left and aspirational - for all of us. No one supporting this Party is far right enough to support a candidate who uses anti-democratic mechanisms. Bloomberg ruled as a Republican. His rule was not without serious credible problems. He decided to get rid of his term limits. Presently, he skipped the democratic process to join this race. The Resistance uncovered the ugliness of Trump. When a person champions his wealth as an indication of his wisdom - and the guard rails are removed - we get Trump. Not need to repeat that mistake in the Democratic Party. 

The birthplace of democracy was Athens. The Athens Democracy only lasted a couple of hundred years - but it set free billions of people over time. It set us free. It erupted from the oppressive rule by a dominating aristocracy - under the logic that "The many were enslaved to few."  200 years infant democracy flickered and died in Athens. The aristocrats seized power again and democracy vanished in Athens. 

We need to get back to the fundamentals of the people's democracy. It is our defense against tyrants, like the one in the White House. We need a functioning election and voting process. Iowa will get it right - eventually. But seriously, whomever is tasked with vetting the app needs to be replaced. Goodness. I hope all the volunteers - assets to democracy - who sacrificed so much for Iowa voting shake off any doubt that this is normal. It's not. Voting used to be so much simpler. Someone made a mistake using this software. Sounds like the software overpromised and underperformed in real world conditions - especially when this is our democracy. 

On to New Hampshire. 

 

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Bernie will set the bar regarding cannabis in the general. Trump will have to talk like he will legalize as well.

Bernie listens to the people and responds like a leader should. No matter the topic what Bernie says carries weight because it’s actually what the majority of people believe. It’s not some idea of a handful of people or companies. He has changed the Democratic platform by simply being a leader of the people and creating relentless pressure for progress. I believe Bernie will continue to extend his influence. This time over Trump and the Rs. At least when it comes to legalization.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomangell/2020/02/01/bernie-sanders-pledges-legal-marijuana-in-all-50-states-on-day-one-as-president/#50b919d51c16

“We will end the destructive war on drugs,” the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said at rally in Cedar Rapids. “On my first day in office through executive order we will legalize marijuana in every state in this country.”

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6 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

Yes - that is game over.

And Putin will get his wish for another American Civil War - his greatest ambition. 

 

I don't think so, I actually think things have calmed down since early 2019. 

That could be bias, and I could be totally wrong. I just don't think that lots of people are gonna shoot each other after this election.

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