General News Thread

[Tobias]

That’s because she dropped out March 5th. However her final total from the month previously was literally her strongest month.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn...lan/index.html

despite being in February which has fewer days I might add.

[Trubo]

Her February month has the 10 million Super PAC bolstering its numbers. Also, as I said in my previous post, show me her fundraising strength now that she's no longer running a campaign versus Sanders' after he suspended his campaign. It's nonexistent at best.

[Tobias]

There are a couple of ways to approach that actually, good question to ask.

now the first thing that has to be addressed is as you yourself correctly noted, sanders and warren, while having similar lanes, have very different bases. Warren’s bass is suburban, female, not senior citizen but older. It’s unlikely that when warren and sanders splint, her base didn’t go with her. This actually has some empirical evidence in the way sanders didn’t gain, a actually losing some of his support as she exited the primary.

secondly it’s to soon to figure out how much warren is helping in fundraising since she only started April 15th and totals haven’t been reported yet.

buuuut I note an interesting dynamic. Early on, warren cut a single fundraising plea for Biden and about a week later suddenly she is right in the mix for VP and Biden adopted a few of her pet cat projects. His team suddenly seems very solicitous of her group and plan.

see I’m just extrapolating but that suggests to me they hit a huge numbers boom and want to keep that gravy train going

[asterism42]

[Trubo]

I think you're vastly overestimating Warren's political leverage here, but hey, maybe the establishment will do this token gesture to the left to make yet another paltry olive branch offering, such as with Biden's previous appeals regarding medicare and student loans.

In other Biden news, more independent witnesses are coming out in support of Tara Reade's claims, one article here since you can find more if you want to.

[Twelveseal]

@Asterism: Yuuuuuup. Same with the Spanish Flu in 1918. Lot of hot takes you can get out of social movements that increase the size of the labor force you can derive from that...

[Tobias]

I do think it may be that certain specialty professions end up getting a pay bump.

like farmers will be told they should be grateful the kind job creators are allowing them to get back to work, ditto for baristas and what not, but welders and surgeons, people that were already in short supply may find their services in more demand

[mAc Chaos]

Democrats turned from "believing women" to "well, if the future of the republic requires some raping here and there then so be it!" faster than you can say "Tara"

[SpoonyViking]

Eh. Kind of a simplistic take.

[asterism42]

what if

biden's veep

is hillary

[Twelveseal]

Keikaku doori

[Mattias]

I still think the galaxy brain move to get Bernie supporters on board is to have Bernie be VP. It would also help the Dem's keep power afterwards too. You know that after all the stuff Trump's gone through, the minute they don't have control the Republicans are going to take those exact same tactics they condemned a year ago and double down on them. But by having the 'crazier' Dem as the first replacement, doing so would only be giving power to someone they hate even more.

[Twelveseal]

Yup. Totally agree.

[I3uster]

I still think the galaxy brain move to get Bernie supporters on board is to have Bernie be VP. It would also help the Dem's keep power afterwards too. You know that after all the stuff Trump's gone through, the minute they don't have control the Republicans are going to take those exact same tactics they condemned a year ago and double down on them. But by having the 'crazier' Dem as the first replacement, doing so would only be giving power to someone they hate even more.

This assumes, as does the Nina Turner pick, that they share an ideological basis. Which, considering the ferocity with which they fought the Bernie campaign, is insane. They'd rather lose than lose their party to people they do not agree with. The reverse would be the case if the Democrats were a left wing party because these are fundamentally different ideologies (socially liberal fiscally conservative classical liberalism vs social democracy or in its extremes democratic socialism)

[Trubo]

I still think the galaxy brain move to get Bernie supporters on board is to have Bernie be VP. It would also help the Dem's keep power afterwards too. You know that after all the stuff Trump's gone through, the minute they don't have control the Republicans are going to take those exact same tactics they condemned a year ago and double down on them. But by having the 'crazier' Dem as the first replacement, doing so would only be giving power to someone they hate even more.

They will never give Bernie or any major Bernie supporter that level of power, as it would bite the DNC establishment in the ass when such a high-ranking Democrat is pushing for policies that the establishment and donors don't want.

To put it in a way that's been stated before here: the DNC would rather lose to Trump with Biden than win with Bernie, because that way they still have the convenient scapegoat of the "toxic Berniebro" that no empirical study shows to exist, in addition to maintaining their hold on power.

[RacingeR]

If the aim was to win vs Trump no matter what, it'd be an excellent move. It is just completely impossible for it to happen due to the reasons I3 pointed out.

Honestly, I think that if this election happened under normal circumstances it'd be very hard for Biden to pull off a win. With the coronavirus fallout and the incoming economic crisis, and Trump's batshit handling of... everything, the actual result is very unpredictable, even more so due to the way voting in the US works and the dumb electoral college or whatever bullshit. More people voting for Biden than for Trump doesn't guarantee a win.

[Twelveseal]

Tbh, last I had heard, Trump was expected to lose the popular election by as much as 5 million votes, and his popularity has slipped since then.

The problem is that he might still win the electoral college by winning enough key votes in the rust belt and midwest. Basically, tge people Toby has argued Biden appeals to.

[Trubo]

The problem with that line of thinking is that Biden is one of the most responsible for devastating the livelihoods of people in the rust belt. Hillary was attacked on this same issue last time around, and Biden's not doing a particularly good job of presenting himself as having changed from the ideas he's held dear to for the past 30 years when it comes to trade.

Trump has plenty of ammunition to tank Biden if Biden ever tries to present himself as trying to revitalize the American economy, which is part of the reason Biden has largely been silent so far. His strategy is mostly praying that Trump fucks up handling the coronavirus and economic crises so badly that Trump will be abandoned by the Republicans. The issue there is that I don't see these things being bad enough unless we hit 1M dead from coronavirus and Trump making pretty much zero effort at revitalizing the economy between now and November.

[Twelveseal]

The problem there is that Bernie also wasn't likely to win those crucial voting blocks, either. Blocks that need to be won to oust the Big Orange. I'm honestly not sure the Democrats had a candidate in the stable that could, short of maybe Buttegieg or Bloomberg, since you need both public appeal and ideological and policy agreement to have a solid shot at those voters.

I feel like Biden has a better shot with them than Bernie did, mostly over the irrational fear of Socialism.

[RacingeR]

The problem with that line of thinking is that Biden is one of the most responsible for devastating the livelihoods of people in the rust belt. Hillary was attacked on this same issue last time around, and Biden's not doing a particularly good job of presenting himself as having changed from the ideas he's held dear to for the past 30 years when it comes to trade.

Trump has plenty of ammunition to tank Biden if Biden ever tries to present himself as trying to revitalize the American economy, which is part of the reason Biden has largely been silent so far. His strategy is mostly praying that Trump fucks up handling the coronavirus and economic crises so badly that Trump will be abandoned by the Republicans. The issue there is that I don't see these things being bad enough unless we hit 1M dead from coronavirus and Trump making pretty much zero effort at revitalizing the economy between now and November.

Well, the number of infected in the US just hit 1M and if I can be sure of one thing is that the economy will be tanking hard the rest of the year...