2020 democratic primaries Archives

Tuesday

March 3, 2020

A night in Elizabeth Warren’s Arlington stronghold

Arlington, Virginia A special type of Democratic voter lives in the suburbs of DC that conservatives heavily caricature whose existence I couldn't confirm until now. Overwhelmingly white, young, progressive, desperately out of touch, and they love Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren fans are hard to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to find one of her last pockets of support at an Arlington Democrats and Arlington Young Democrats election night party. Nearly a hundred of the club's members gathered at William Jeffrey's Tavern, a bar with plenty of craft beers on tap and a projector screen set up to display live Super Tuesday results. Local news crews swarmed the small section of the bar reserved for the group.

Dominic Green

In Massachusetts, Warren fails to pull rabbit from hat

BostonElizabeth Warren has all the answers, a plan for every disaster and the hectoring manner of a professor whose class are dozing off after lunch. Unfortunately, the voters don’t believe any of it.‘I'm in this race because I believe I will make the best president of the United States of America,’ Warren insisted at a rally in Detroit, Michigan on the afternoon of Super Tuesday. Meanwhile the voters of Massachusetts went to the polls and disagreed.How could Warren have seriously believed this? She’d already been immolated in Iowa, handily neutralized in New Hampshire and sourly creamed in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders was always going to win Vermont, but the Vermont exit polls showed Warren being beaten into fourth place and single figures by Michael Bloomberg.

Freddy Gray and Matt McDonald

The center holds: Biden thrives on Super Tuesday

Joe Biden doesn't have the organization that Bernie Sanders has behind him. He doesn't have the money that Michael Bloomberg has. But he does have 'Joementum' and that could be all that matters. It's been more than enough for him on Super Tuesday so far. Having had his campaign written off in almost all media quarters, Biden suddenly finds himself with the kind of 'comeback narrative' energy that wins elections. Bloomberg's expensive experts can only look on jealously: Bloomberg has. Bernie Sanders had invested quite a lot of time and money in Virginia, the first state to announce results. But with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out, it seems Biden has hovered up the vast majority of their support.

Ben Sixsmith

The Democratic civil war has been a long time coming

Bernie Sanders has had an unlikely ally during the 2020 Democratic nomination race: Donald Trump. The president has repeatedly insisted that the Democrats are staging a ‘coup’ against Sanders, who, he has said, is the only Democrat with a real movement behind him. Some would argue that Trump is cynically encouraging the nomination of an unelectable candidate. I think this would be foolish, as Sanders is obviously more electable than the memory of Joe Biden, but it might be how the president thinks. I believe that another explanation for why Trump is vaguely sympathetic towards Sanders, though, is what they have in common. Don't shoot, Trump and Sanders fans. I am not suggesting that they are politically similar.

Daniel McCarthy

Why I’m voting for Tulsi in Virginia

Four years ago I cast a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Virginia Democratic Primary. It was a triple protest: against a Republican party that I was certain would cheat Donald Trump out of the nomination; against Trump’s own waffling on torture and foreign policy; and against Hillary Clinton, the hawkish liberal who at that time seemed the inevitable next president of the United States. I am, obviously, a moderate swing voter. Since turning 18 my presidential votes have included a Republican nominee (Bob Dole), a third-party nominee (Pat Buchanan), a Democratic nominee (John Kerry), two write-ins (Ron Paul and Rand Paul), and another Republican nominee (Trump). Add my 2016 primary vote for Bernie, and you have an obvious pattern: I’m a NeverClinton, NeverBush voter.

Monday

March 2, 2020

Michael Tracey

What could divide the Democrats more than conspiring to stop Bernie?

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?

Charles Lipson

Why did Amy Klobuchar drop out?

Minnesota Nice Wasn’t Enough. Neither were Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s center-left positions and bland presentations. And so, today, she left the race for president. Why?The immediate reason is that her chances of winning anything on Super Tuesday were grim. The only exception was her home state, and it was far from certain. Klobuchar’s failures at the ballot box meant she had no plausible path forward. Her donors would stop giving and her backers would begin blaming her (and other also-rans) for blocking Joe Biden, who they now see as the only center-left candidate with a shot at the nomination. Biden’s huge victory in South Carolina and Bloomberg’s disastrous debates cemented that position. Party insiders are desperate for an alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Taki

What makes Bloomie run?

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short. The characters I’ve just mentioned are, of course, fictitious. Mike Bloomberg is not. Nor are his fifty billion big ones. Bloomie recently wrote that unlike Trump he did not inherit a fortune. That he did not. But nor, really, did The Donald. The latter’s father was a comparatively small-time Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer.

Sunday

March 1, 2020

Matt McDonald

Mayor Pete and the cult of no personality

Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the Democratic primary ahead of Super Tuesday, according to Politico. The 38-year-old had a sorry showing in the South Carolina primary yesterday, a state which allocates more delegates than the previous three. Buttigieg’s failed campaign was, like Kamala Harris’s, punctuated by flip-flopping. First he was for Medicare-for-All, then he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to address AIPAC, then he was. With members of the vocal Democratic fringes, he never shook the image of a candidate who’d been 3D-printed by billionaire boosters in the hopes of blandly coasting to the nomination on a wash of Obama-light platitudes.

Dominic Green

Can we trust Joe Biden with the nuclear codes?

It’s Joe Biden’s turn to be president, so let’s give it to him and see if he can remember where he left the nuclear football and what the codes are. He’s been waiting long enough: he was born in 1903. And he just oozes presidentiality, doesn’t he? I don’t know if it’s Joe’s facelift, his hair implants or his false teeth or the way he walks like he’s on castors, but geriatric Joe looks the picture of youthful vigor, especially in the aviator shades that make him look like he’s waiting for a cataract operation or has advanced macular degeneration. For there’s nothing degenerate about Joe, is there, or the health of a party and political system that would recommend him as the next president of What Remains of the United States? I’m all in favor of old people.

Saturday

February 29, 2020

Michael Tracey

The media’s clueless coverage of the Biden candidacy

At the time of writing, Joe Biden is on course for an approximately 30 point victory in South Carolina. Not that he won with 30 percent of the vote; rather, he is beating his nearest competitor (Bernie Sanders) by approximately 30 percentage points. That's a truly romping win — but ironically, given his many many decades on the political scene, the American elite media has never known quite how to cover the Biden candidacy. First, if you are a consumer of online political news and commentary, you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of virtually any vocal Biden supporters on social media.

Daniel McCarthy

Biden’s Pyrrhic victory

Bernie Sanders just lost his first primary of 2020. He’ll lose a few more on Tuesday. But as of now, in terms of delegates and polling alike, Bernie Sanders remains the Democratic front-runner. And Joe Biden has wound up, ironically, not as the frontrunner but as the 'Stop Bernie!' candidate. South Carolina was Biden’s first primary win in any of the presidential races he’s ever run, which stretch back to 1988. He’s had his eye on the White House for a very long time, and voters have consistently found other Democrats more compelling — other Democrats like Michael Dukakis, not just other Democrats like Barack Obama.

Charles Lipson

Four takeaways from Joe Biden’s South Carolina victory

1) Joe Biden lives to fight another day, bloopers, gaffes, and all. But on Tuesday he needs to win a major state or finish a strong second to seize the spot as Bernie Sanders’s chief competitor.Biden’s poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire meant the South Carolina primary was his last stand. His recent polling showed his lead was small and decreasing. So the stakes were high and the situation dire. But the former VP was right to go all-in for South Carolina, which he always called his firewall. His loyalty to President Obama and his endorsement by Rep. James Clyburn were crucial in a state with a large African American population.

Roger Kimball

Biden wins the South Carolina puppy bowl

The way our politics has shaped up (up? has it shaped up?), the South Carolina primary is a bit like the puppy bowl entertainment that precedes the Big Game with the leatherette ovoid every winter. On Tuesday, the Big Game in politics kicks off with primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Big stakes. Still, people — some people — like the puppy bowl. It’s cute, and though it doesn’t really matter who wins, the contest is good for laughs and does get some people worked up. I was pretty worked up myself in 2012 when Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary and proclaimed himself the 'obvious' Republican nominee.

Wednesday

February 26, 2020

Anonymous

Diary of a Bloomberg staffer

Dear Diary, Another day on Team Mike. Or should I say Team Mic? It’s like a reunion around here. Half of our reporters and literally the entire back office staff are aboard the good ship Bloomberg and we are living LARGE. Free pizza for lunch every day that we don’t have to beg for on GoFundMe. Booze flowing like water. Damn sushi. This morning when I got here (and yes, it was still technically morning) there was an omelet station. I literally haven’t had it so good since prep school. Williams was a dump compared to this.Honestly, I’d have left journalism ages ago if I’d known how great life is when you’re making more than 60 grand a year on top of the old trust fund. I moved to Brooklyn.

Melissa Chen

Why the #NeverBernie efforts fell flat in South Carolina

Last night, as expected, Bernie Sanders’s status as the front-runner invited a pile-on of attacks from the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. The South Carolina debate showed Bernie’s opponents are desperate to stop the anti-establishment juggernaut, which is splitting the party into a #NeverBernie moderate base and a progressivist camp that is increasingly comfortable with embracing the socialist label as a badge of honor. They don’t know how to stop him. The moderators kicked matters off by asking Bernie how a democratic socialist could do better than the incumbent given the strong current economy and record low unemployment.

Tuesday

February 25, 2020

Karol Markowicz

A raucous gameshow in Charleston

At one point in tonight’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, Mike Bloomberg referred to the other candidates as ‘contestants’. The evening certainly felt like a raucous gameshow. The moderators had no control whatsoever. Everybody had a good time. There will be some nice parting gifts, such as nominations to secretary of State or other offices, should there be a Democratic win.Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is dead — it has been for weeks — but she insists on dragging it around and sticking its rotting corpse in the faces of the other candidates. She’s not happening and no ‘selfie line’ (actually just a photo line) is going to change that.

Conrad Black

A bare knuckles fight between Bernie, Bloomberg and Trump

The Nevada caucuses confirm that Sen. Amy Klobuchar has clung to the ledge by her fingernails as long as she could and will almost certainly fall off on Super Tuesday. It also confirms that the end is nigh for the Pete Buttigieg phenomenon, the typecasters’ candidate, a prefabricated person with all the outer ingredients but no relevant governmental or equivalent experience, no fixed beliefs, and nothing but flippant and fluently well-rehearsed answers to all subjects; an articulate facade with nothing tangible behind it. Klobuchar and Buttigieg both have made a valued contribution and if Klobuchar had had more panache, she might have made a strong run for the nomination.

Justin Caruso

MSNBC’s dreamworld Democratic party

Sen. Bernie Sanders is the Democratic frontrunner, and boy, MSNBC is not happy.As the Nevada caucus results rolled in Saturday, commentators on the network, visibly annoyed, compared a Sanders victory to France being invaded by Nazi Germany, warned of his supporters using 'dark arts', said that it might be better for moderate Democrats if Trump won instead of Sanders, and called Sanders voters a 'squeaky, angry minority'.Chris Matthews, who was responsible for the off-color World War Two analogy (and is now facing calls to step down over it), also recently panicked on air about being executed in Central Park by 'Castro and the Reds' when discussing why Sanders calls himself a socialist.

Matt Purple

Global warning: 2020 Dems are floundering on foreign policy

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What would a Michael Bloomberg foreign policy look like? A total smoking ban across the Middle East seems imminent, even if it does risk spawning a new generation of pro-hookah jihadists. Fresh sanctions would likely be imposed on enemies of the West, including Iran and salt. Air superiority would be prioritized, especially as it pertains to illegally landing one’s personal helicopter in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Bloomberg has spent most of his career codifying class snobbery through petty regulations, and, while that’s a potent recipe for being annoying at home, it doesn’t really lend itself to a coherent agenda abroad.