2020 election

Here is the tragedy of the Democratic party in 2019: its partisans are left to hope that personal hatred of Donald Trump will do for them in 2020 what the Iraq War and the Great Recession did in 2006 and 2008. The first time Nancy Pelosi became speaker of House of Representatives, her party was the party of second thoughts about Iraq. The fact that Democrats won control of the Senate with the 2006 election was even more clearly tied to that misbegotten war: the victory of James Webb over George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat. Webb was a former Republican – a Reagan cabinet official – who switched parties and challenged Allen out of disgust with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

The New Jersey State Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill Thursday to require presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns in exchange for a place on the state’s ballot. The measure passed along party lines 23-11. Sitting President Donald Trump famously bucked modern tradition when refusing to release his tax returns, so the NJ measure could effectively keep Donald Trump off the ballot. The Democrat-dominated New Jersey legislature passed the same requirement in 2017, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie refused to sign it.

According to a New York Times report, ‘At the midpoint of his term, Mr Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office. He spends ever more time in front of a television…’ This is too much of a theme of the Trump presidency to be dismissed as more fake news. During his 2016 campaign, the Donald confessed to developing positions on national security and foreign policy by watching retired generals on the Sunday shows. These days, Trump has access to the FBI, CIA and other intelligence organizations – but has repeatedly expressed that he does not trust them.

In the past six months, Democrats have accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape, gone apoplectic over an awkwardly smiling 17-year-old boy, flirted with infanticide, embraced late-term abortion, and fallen all over themselves to endorse an absurd so-called ‘Green New Deal’ that calls for eliminating air travel, remodeling of every building in the United States, and, at long last, confronting the scourge of ‘farting cows.’ Where, in this great, big, moralizing, self-righteous, progressive mess that has become the Democratic party are the non-radical voters? Where are the moderates? The ‘blue dogs?’ Are there even any left? The answer seems to be no and obvious the conclusion is that the Democrats have gone off the rails.

As Donald Trump closed in the Republican nomination in 2016, pundits grasped for explanations. The Republican field was too crowded – but then, why should a crowded field help Trump rather than some other candidate? Trump hogged the limelight, then: he was a celebrity with an unfair advantage right from the start, and the media lavished undue attention on him. Of course, all of that attention was negative, but it’s true that Trump’s name and persona dominated the race almost from the minute he got into it. Trump’s celebrity gave him an opportunity, but he made the most of it, speaking many truths about American life and politics that professional politicians dared not utter.

It will be a delicious irony when the 2020 Democratic nominee ends up being another rich white dude. Picture the scene in July next year, at the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee. After all the talk of a new, rich diversity, after all the noisy women candidates have canceled each other, after Cory Booker’s self-righteousness sets itself on fire, and after the superdelegates figured out another way to block Bernie Sanders, the Democrats have done the dumb thing and plumped for Beto O’Rourke. He gives a tiresome, Obama-lite oration on the need to put history back on track and rediscover a spirit of open-borderness. He gives the second half of the speech in Spanish. The media sings his praises.

Let’s make it clear right off the bat that Tulsi Gabbard will not be the Democratic nominee in 2020. The party’s base is so consumed with hatred for the president that only one criterion matters: which candidate can cast embody the spirit of The Anti-Trump. Do you hate the Orange Menace for his divisiveness, his crudity, his total lack of chill? Then lose yourself in Obama nostalgia with Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden. Or are you looking for an all-out brawl, fascists v. reds, Spanish Civil War-style? Well, Elizabeth Warren is sharpening her tomahawk, and Bernie Sanders has his game face on. Gabbard is not the antithesis of Trump, in either temperament nor ideology. Quite the opposite: more than any of her colleagues, she resembles Trump circa 2016.

Block after block, thousands queued to enter Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza to hear Sen. Kamala Harris announce her campaign for president. As police and security fielded anxious questions – ‘Will we get in? Will we see her?’ – the guard by me repeated: ‘I’m not sure, but don’t lose hope’. Hope was in the air. It was an atmosphere of a home crowd waiting to see a hometown team: here, the junior senator from California, a ‘daughter of Oakland,’ raised by immigrants in the East Bay, who served as District Attorney and California’s Attorney-General before becoming the second black female senator and first Indian American senator. As I spoke to people on the rope line, they told me why they came.

One of the lessons of the Trump era has been that Trump’s establishment critics are incapable of learning anything or reforming their ways. The same political and policy analyses they unsuccessfully applied in 2016 — which told them there was no chance Trump would get the GOP nomination, let alone become president — now lead them them to think Trump will get ‘primaried‘ in 2020. Could they be right for once? Not really, but it’s worth remembering that four of the last five Republican presidents have faced primary challenges during the re-election campaigns. Getting primaried is in fact the norm for Republican presidents over the last half-century, with only George W.

Bernie Sanders will imminently announce a campaign for president in 2020, according to a Yahoo News report last night. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as all indicators have pointed in this direction for months, if not years. But Sanders skeptics and antagonists have expended major energy sowing doubts about his viability – mostly around his age, race, gender, and party registration. Still, none of these cheap talking points have ever detracted from the fundamental reality that Sanders has a large, existing base of supporters, many of whom desperately want him to run and will work on his behalf. Were Sanders to bow out under pressure, it would reasonably be interpreted as a woeful capitulation.

If Kamala Harris, who announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, wins the presidency, she would not only be the first black woman to ascend to the Oval Office but also the first Democrat from California to accomplish that feat. The last two politicians to emerge from the Golden State and prove that they had the right stuff were both Republicans, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Reagan personified the optimism of California Dreamin’; Nixon, a kind of grapes of wrath resentment that he reverse engineered to condemn liberal elites. Like Nixon, a red hunter par excellence, Harris has tried to play the Russia card to rise to prominence. Today it is Democrats who decry Moscow gold, while Republicans play kissy face with the Kremlin.

Six years ago, Julián Castro was a rising star in the national Democratic party. But by the end of 2018, his star had fallen. Last week Castro formally began his climb back toward national prominence, via his 2020 presidential campaign. In 2012, Castro: 1. Gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte 2. Was in his second-term as San Antonio’s mayor having won re-election in 2011 with 81 percent of the vote, more than 74 percentage points ahead of his closest rival 3. Secured the passage by voters of a sales tax increase to fund high quality Pre-K for a group of lower-income children 4. Received an offer to become President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation (which he declined).

Kamala Harris’s memoir, published this week, has reignited speculation that the senator has her eyes on a Presidential run. Harris – a self-made public servant with a solid record on progressive causes – should be a strong candidate for the Democratic ticket. Somehow, however, she isn’t. The former California Attorney General’s biggest problem is that the left has changed: rather than organizing around unions or the party itself, a large chunk of the Democratic base now mobilizes around identity issues. Some of these pet causes make a lot of sense; others less so. Either way, Harris breaches two of the big ones. First of all, she’s a career prosecutor – or as the new left like to put it, ‘a cop’.

The first micro-scandal of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign has already erupted, and he hasn’t even formally declared he’s running yet. Appearing on CNN last week, Sanders was asked about a report in the New York Times that chronicled the ways in which the 2016 version of his campaign allegedly failed to respond to sexist discomforts experienced by female staffers. Pressed if he had been aware of these apparent issues, Sanders reacted curtly: ‘I was a little bit busy.’ One of the allegations detailed in the NYT article was a staff member complaining that she had been saddled with suboptimal lodging arrangements ahead of the Illinois primary.

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.