OT: Democratic Primary Thread

[aq_ua]

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-biden/biden-to-start-considering-running-mates-consulted-obama-idUSL1N2BF0F6

Sounds like Biden will choose another moderate and established politician as a running mate. Kamala Harris would be my bet.

[duetta]

Kamala was originally one of the co-signers of the Single-payer bill but backed away once she realized that it was politically impossible for 2021. She instead introduced a 10-year plan that would transition the nation to what I would describe as "Single-payer lite", by leaving some kind of a role for private insurance.

Her plan always struck me as the most feasible path for the United States. Believe it or not, there are seniors who like their Medicare Advantage (which is Medicare through an HMO) coverage. I have a friend in one of them who loves what she has. Who can account for taste, right?

[bearadonisdna]

From my perspective I would say we are witnessing the final collapse of a dying empire and we now know that new deal reforms aren’t coming to prolong it this time. The fall was already coming, but this virus will accelerate the contradictions and put this failed system under enough stress to where it will soon become apparent to all. We are now on the brink of a 2nd Great Depression and poverty will cripple the lives of most citizens if it hasn’t already. Environmental disasters will ramp up. There will be no “return to normalcy” (maga for neoliberals) regardless of the election results. Things will become increasingly totalitarian as the system continues to rot and the illusion of democracy fades away into ethno-nationalism and christofascism as the dominant ideology. Trump was not an anomaly or a product of foreign interference but a symptom of late stage capitalism-imperialism in decay and rest assured as we continue to kick the can down the road and more and more people turn to right-wing populism worse versions are certainly coming. It ultimately will not matter who wins this election because the trajectory is set. Where do we go from here? Good question but I believe we need mass civil disobedience, general strikes, yellow vest style protests etc. and even then it’s going to be an uphill battle. Y’all probably will laugh or dismiss this and that’s understandable because people have been in a comfort zone for a long time and it’s hard to imagine, but that’s how this situation appears to me.

Agreed, a return to normalcy seems impossible somehow.
A precedent has been set to which society has come to a standstill and people cow-rantined for the cattle that we are to the government.

[Stannis]

With this thread and the cop thread, we are starting to see a divide.

To combat this divide, I thought I share this inspiring music video from our very own James Dolan:

Watch on YouTube

[Fat Kat]

Read on Twitter

[Clyde_Style]

Sanders was the only Senator not under quarantine to be absent for two voting sessions on the relief package

I know the GOP has the majority, but he can run his virtual activities from DC and show up. I think he should be there

[Clyde_Style]

Klobuchar's husband has tested positive

[HarthorneWingo]

Read on Twitter

Watch on YouTube

[j4remi]

Sanders was the only Senator not under quarantine to be absent for two voting sessions on the relief package

I know the GOP has the majority, but he can run his virtual activities from DC and show up. I think he should be there

Aside from it being arbitrary and quite literally a health risk; the money he's raised from his donor base to address the issue and the round tables that include multiple influential members of congress addressing millions of viewers have tangible weight that physical presence ironically does not (the cloture vote they've made drama about required 3/5ths affirmative votes, lack of presence was quite literally the same as a no vote).

[HarthorneWingo]

Bernie won the Americans Living Abroad primary 58% to 23% for 9 delegates. While the delegate count is small, Americans who have the experience of living abroad under the policies/programs, like M4A, voted overwhelmingly for Bernie over Biden. It's certainly something to think about.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/politics/bernie-sanders-wins-democrats-abroad/index.html

[Clyde_Style]

Sanders was the only Senator not under quarantine to be absent for two voting sessions on the relief package

I know the GOP has the majority, but he can run his virtual activities from DC and show up. I think he should be there

Aside from it being arbitrary and quite literally a health risk; the money he's raised from his donor base to address the issue and the round tables that include multiple influential members of congress addressing millions of viewers have tangible weight that physical presence ironically does not (the cloture vote they've made drama about required 3/5ths affirmative votes, lack of presence was quite literally the same as a no vote).

I'm aware of all of the above and acknowledged the GOP majority.

On the other hand, we're dealing with a situation where the negotiations have the Republicans attempting to pull off what could become one of the greatest heists in American political history if legislation were allowed to go forwards in its present form.

While Pelosi is doing her part to block this thievery, I think the presence and voice of the most prominent liberal legislator does help in raising public consciousness about this congressional warfare going down in the midst of this crisis.

I wish he was there, that's all. I'm not accusing him of anything since I'm conscious of the numbers in the Senate.

[aq_ua]

Bernie won the Americans Living Abroad primary 58% to 23% for 9 delegates. While the delegate count is small, Americans who have the experience of living abroad under the policies/programs, like M4A, voted overwhelmingly for Bernie over Biden. It's certainly something to think about.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/politics/bernie-sanders-wins-democrats-abroad/index.html

I wonder what the average profile of Americans living abroad looks like. Other than the obvious "having a passport and experience traveling" aspect, they probably have a more acute awareness of US foreign policy and are less impacted by US specific tax issues (they pay tax in their local jurisdiction on top of US tax obligations and have access to fewer exemptions). As a demographic, they are probably in their prime working age (30s to 50s) and educated. I would guess having a comparative view of the US does guide and effect the choice of candidate. I think mostly Americans living abroad have grown sick of being embarrassed by and having to defend the decisions their country makes to their local neighbors, and as a whole are looking for someone that really willing to make things better for when their children return to the US.

[HarthorneWingo]

Bernie won the Americans Living Abroad primary 58% to 23% for 9 delegates. While the delegate count is small, Americans who have the experience of living abroad under the policies/programs, like M4A, voted overwhelmingly for Bernie over Biden. It's certainly something to think about.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/politics/bernie-sanders-wins-democrats-abroad/index.html

I wonder what the average profile of Americans living abroad looks like. Other than the obvious "having a passport and experience traveling" aspect, they probably have a more acute awareness of US foreign policy and are less impacted by US specific tax issues (they pay tax in their local jurisdiction on top of US tax obligations and have access to fewer exemptions). As a demographic, they are probably in their prime working age (30s to 50s) and educated. I would guess having a comparative view of the US does guide and effect the choice of candidate. I think mostly Americans living abroad have grown sick of being embarrassed by and having to defend the decisions their country makes to their local neighbors, and as a whole are looking for someone that really willing to make things better for when their children return to the US.

Exactly! That's what I meant to say. (aq_ua got my back).

[GONYK]

Rachel Bitecofer (thanks j4remi for introducing her to me) just released her post-Primary forecast. She's a forecaster who has come to prominence because she was the only one who predicted the Blue Wave in the House in 2018 (she almost hit the exact number of Democratic gains on the nose). Her latest forecast predicts a Dem win in November.

Here is her analysis in respect to the Primary result:

But even without a big assist from the looming recession, by avoiding a Sanders nomination, and with it, total party meltdown, Democrats are well-positioned for the fall general election. The changes to my original ratings from July 2019 reflect this reality and are universally positive for Democrats. When the original forecast was released, I said that the party’s nominee did not matter at all unless the nominee ended up being Bernie Sanders, and the reason that a Sanders nomination mattered was that it would be “disruptive.”

To illustrate what I mean by that, under a Sanders nomination, it is my belief that the traditionally nonhierarchical and, shall we say, strategically challenged Democratic Party would easily have been pushed both by their well-meaning consultant class and naturally moderate and well-read candidates and by a shrewd, calculating GOP into turning the 2020 cycle into a referendum on socialism instead of what it needs to be for the negative partisanship model to function at capacity: a referendum on Trump. With Sanders as the nominee, most, if not all, of the Democratic Party’s “frontline” candidates would have ended up with a muddled message- liable to spend as much time contrasting themselves with Sanders (and socialism) as their GOP opponents and Trump.

As GOP strategist Rick Wilson aptly points out in his latest book, and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and I painfully poke fun at in his podcast, Democrats already seem to struggle with the concept of referendum effects and, specifically, the power of tapping into or exploiting them. Due to their deep-rooted (seemingly unshakable) belief in the “median voter theory,” Democratic candidates/consultants/strategists would have fractured into chaos over a Sanders nomination. It would have been an unmitigated disaster the GOP was already positioning themselves to capitalize on. And although the many progressives reading this see Biden’s nomination as an unmitigated disaster, citing his bland moderation, this or that policy from 30 years ago, or general lack of what might be called “stump agility,” I can assure you, Biden fills the role of “generic Democrat” perfectly fine, and that is all that is really required from Democrats to win this election. Because as Sanders supporters are just now coming to learn, while 2016 was about revolution, 2020 is about one thing and one thing only: making the scary, bad man go away.

Dissatisfaction with the party’s nomination process is largely powered by people’s (and the media’s) unrealistic expectations of what these nomination contests can produce, precisely because it is reliant on the voting public. It’s a common mistake — we tend to see the world from our own perspective, and in your perspective, you watched a dozen debates, assessed more than 20 Democratic hopefuls, and tried to select the one you felt best suited to the job vis a vis your own ideological biases. From this perspective, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, even late-stagers like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were closely examined by the electorate and found wanting. But the truth is, only five candidates ever received any real scrutiny through the year-long primary process, and of those, only two were particularly well known by average voters, which you, dear reader, are not one of. It’s not an accident that in presidential nominations, the person or persons leading the Invisible Primary are the same people that come out at the end, cycle after cycle. There are occasional exceptions — a Bill Clinton here and Barack Obama there. And these trend-buckers are the reasons we see 20 candidates throw their hats into the ring.

Biden, though unexciting to many millennials and Gen Z voters, is perceived by party mainstreamers as highly electable. These perceptions carry important implications for the behaviors of donors, volunteers, candidates, and tertiary actors such as the punditocracy, who hold important narrative-setting power in the electoral ecosystem. Biden will likely be pushed towards selecting fellow primary contender Amy Klobuchar as his running mate, and in the two-person debate last Sunday, the candidate shrewdly dominated the news cycle by announcing that he will select a female running mate.

Given her performance in the Democratic primary and status as a popular senator from Minnesota, Klobuchar likely leads Biden’s short list. Klobuchar’s reputation for bipartisanship and moderation will be immensely attractive to traditional Democratic strategists who will likely be looking at the VP slot via a regionalism lens, looking to solve the “Midwest problem.”

But whether this is the right lens depends on how you diagnose that 2016 loss. I don’t want to put words in the party’s mouth, but if media surrogates and candidate statements are any indication, it appears Democrats believe their 2016 losses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, as a reminder, were surprise losses, were due to the failure of Hillary Clinton to win over white, working-class voters. The movement of these Obama-to-Trump voters was the decisive element in Clinton’s loss, and the recovery of them must be the central element of any plan to recapture the Midwest.

This diagnosis, that Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters, is not quantitatively wrong. This is a mathematical fact. Where this diagnosis runs into trouble is misunderstanding why Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters and what, if anything, can be done about it. Because underlying the cycle-specific trends are the realities of the long-term demographic, coalitional realignments of the two parties, where the Republican Party is becoming a rural-based party of whites, particularly working-class whites (but more accurately, non-college-educated whites), and the Democratic Party is becoming an urban/suburban party, racially and ethnically diverse in a society that is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, and where college education is becoming a reliable predictor of Democratic candidate vote choice (so much so that I use it to predict Democratic candidate vote share in my modeling).

What this means, of course, is that every four years, fewer white, non-college-educated voters (especially those in rural areas) vote for Democrats. And this has profound impacts in the Midwest, because the traditional Democratic strongholds were often, in more rural, heavily unionized areas of these states. Which is why Democrats look at these areas as, “I used to win here, and I should be winning here now.” Which brings us back to the Obama-to-Trump voters. Some of these voters are actually “pure” independents. They broke against the Democrats in 2016 because they were the status quo. In data I worked with from Morning Consult, about 30 percent of Obama-to-Trump voters expressed unfavorable views of Trump as of last fall. My belief is that this group is likely the pure independent chunk, voters I call “change voters,” who we might expect to swing away from Trump in 2020 now that he represents the status quo (especially under an economic recession environment).

The whole forecast can be found here: https://www.niskanencenter.org/bitecofer-post-primary-update/

It is a very interesting read.

[Clyde_Style]

Rachel Bitecofer (thanks j4remi for introducing her to me) just released her post-Primary forecast. She's a forecaster who has come to prominence because she was the only one who predicted the Blue Wave in the House in 2018 (she almost hit the exact number of Democratic gains on the nose). Her latest forecast predicts a Dem win in November.

Here is her analysis in respect to the Primary result:

But even without a big assist from the looming recession, by avoiding a Sanders nomination, and with it, total party meltdown, Democrats are well-positioned for the fall general election. The changes to my original ratings from July 2019 reflect this reality and are universally positive for Democrats. When the original forecast was released, I said that the party’s nominee did not matter at all unless the nominee ended up being Bernie Sanders, and the reason that a Sanders nomination mattered was that it would be “disruptive.”

To illustrate what I mean by that, under a Sanders nomination, it is my belief that the traditionally nonhierarchical and, shall we say, strategically challenged Democratic Party would easily have been pushed both by their well-meaning consultant class and naturally moderate and well-read candidates and by a shrewd, calculating GOP into turning the 2020 cycle into a referendum on socialism instead of what it needs to be for the negative partisanship model to function at capacity: a referendum on Trump. With Sanders as the nominee, most, if not all, of the Democratic Party’s “frontline” candidates would have ended up with a muddled message- liable to spend as much time contrasting themselves with Sanders (and socialism) as their GOP opponents and Trump.

As GOP strategist Rick Wilson aptly points out in his latest book, and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and I painfully poke fun at in his podcast, Democrats already seem to struggle with the concept of referendum effects and, specifically, the power of tapping into or exploiting them. Due to their deep-rooted (seemingly unshakable) belief in the “median voter theory,” Democratic candidates/consultants/strategists would have fractured into chaos over a Sanders nomination. It would have been an unmitigated disaster the GOP was already positioning themselves to capitalize on. And although the many progressives reading this see Biden’s nomination as an unmitigated disaster, citing his bland moderation, this or that policy from 30 years ago, or general lack of what might be called “stump agility,” I can assure you, Biden fills the role of “generic Democrat” perfectly fine, and that is all that is really required from Democrats to win this election. Because as Sanders supporters are just now coming to learn, while 2016 was about revolution, 2020 is about one thing and one thing only: making the scary, bad man go away.

Dissatisfaction with the party’s nomination process is largely powered by people’s (and the media’s) unrealistic expectations of what these nomination contests can produce, precisely because it is reliant on the voting public. It’s a common mistake — we tend to see the world from our own perspective, and in your perspective, you watched a dozen debates, assessed more than 20 Democratic hopefuls, and tried to select the one you felt best suited to the job vis a vis your own ideological biases. From this perspective, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, even late-stagers like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were closely examined by the electorate and found wanting. But the truth is, only five candidates ever received any real scrutiny through the year-long primary process, and of those, only two were particularly well known by average voters, which you, dear reader, are not one of. It’s not an accident that in presidential nominations, the person or persons leading the Invisible Primary are the same people that come out at the end, cycle after cycle. There are occasional exceptions — a Bill Clinton here and Barack Obama there. And these trend-buckers are the reasons we see 20 candidates throw their hats into the ring.

Biden, though unexciting to many millennials and Gen Z voters, is perceived by party mainstreamers as highly electable. These perceptions carry important implications for the behaviors of donors, volunteers, candidates, and tertiary actors such as the punditocracy, who hold important narrative-setting power in the electoral ecosystem. Biden will likely be pushed towards selecting fellow primary contender Amy Klobuchar as his running mate, and in the two-person debate last Sunday, the candidate shrewdly dominated the news cycle by announcing that he will select a female running mate.

Given her performance in the Democratic primary and status as a popular senator from Minnesota, Klobuchar likely leads Biden’s short list. Klobuchar’s reputation for bipartisanship and moderation will be immensely attractive to traditional Democratic strategists who will likely be looking at the VP slot via a regionalism lens, looking to solve the “Midwest problem.”

But whether this is the right lens depends on how you diagnose that 2016 loss. I don’t want to put words in the party’s mouth, but if media surrogates and candidate statements are any indication, it appears Democrats believe their 2016 losses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, as a reminder, were surprise losses, were due to the failure of Hillary Clinton to win over white, working-class voters. The movement of these Obama-to-Trump voters was the decisive element in Clinton’s loss, and the recovery of them must be the central element of any plan to recapture the Midwest.

This diagnosis, that Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters, is not quantitatively wrong. This is a mathematical fact. Where this diagnosis runs into trouble is misunderstanding why Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters and what, if anything, can be done about it. Because underlying the cycle-specific trends are the realities of the long-term demographic, coalitional realignments of the two parties, where the Republican Party is becoming a rural-based party of whites, particularly working-class whites (but more accurately, non-college-educated whites), and the Democratic Party is becoming an urban/suburban party, racially and ethnically diverse in a society that is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, and where college education is becoming a reliable predictor of Democratic candidate vote choice (so much so that I use it to predict Democratic candidate vote share in my modeling).

What this means, of course, is that every four years, fewer white, non-college-educated voters (especially those in rural areas) vote for Democrats. And this has profound impacts in the Midwest, because the traditional Democratic strongholds were often, in more rural, heavily unionized areas of these states. Which is why Democrats look at these areas as, “I used to win here, and I should be winning here now.” Which brings us back to the Obama-to-Trump voters. Some of these voters are actually “pure” independents. They broke against the Democrats in 2016 because they were the status quo. In data I worked with from Morning Consult, about 30 percent of Obama-to-Trump voters expressed unfavorable views of Trump as of last fall. My belief is that this group is likely the pure independent chunk, voters I call “change voters,” who we might expect to swing away from Trump in 2020 now that he represents the status quo (especially under an economic recession environment).

The whole forecast can be found here: https://www.niskanencenter.org/bitecofer-post-primary-update/

It is a very interesting read.

Good read and quite accurate IMO.

At the base level her analysis is statistically driven and that drives her fundamental insights which are psychological in nature.

There's not much to add as she covered it well. I'm not surprised she thought Klobuchar would be the VP choice, because the swing vote she's talking about is more prevalent in the mid-West than in the South.

Florida is often lumped in with those states as a vital swing state, but the white males she's identifying are probably different in Florida. Up North, whether or not that voter is a unionized worker, the tradition of the organized labor vote still has some residual meaning a Democrat can tap into by demonstrating how you will help them economically with something more tangible now than stoking xenophobic fears over outsourcing factory jobs. Trump has no more cards in his deck to play about how he will help people financially other than handing out government cheese between now and election day.

Strip away the regional distinctions and it will boil down to the "It's the economy stupid" line of reasoning as it often does. I do think this should be the historical moment for some kind of green new deal that can be promoted as a future job growth engine and legitimately so. I don't know if the Dems will play it too safe, but the opening is wide and you can drive right through it and win at the same time.

[HarthorneWingo]

Our leader!

Joe would've been better off hiring Saul Goodman's film crew.

Watch on YouTube

[B8RcDeMktfxC]

Rachel Bitecofer (thanks j4remi for introducing her to me) just released her post-Primary forecast. She's a forecaster who has come to prominence because she was the only one who predicted the Blue Wave in the House in 2018 (she almost hit the exact number of Democratic gains on the nose). Her latest forecast predicts a Dem win in November.

Here is her analysis in respect to the Primary result:

But even without a big assist from the looming recession, by avoiding a Sanders nomination, and with it, total party meltdown, Democrats are well-positioned for the fall general election. The changes to my original ratings from July 2019 reflect this reality and are universally positive for Democrats. When the original forecast was released, I said that the party’s nominee did not matter at all unless the nominee ended up being Bernie Sanders, and the reason that a Sanders nomination mattered was that it would be “disruptive.”

To illustrate what I mean by that, under a Sanders nomination, it is my belief that the traditionally nonhierarchical and, shall we say, strategically challenged Democratic Party would easily have been pushed both by their well-meaning consultant class and naturally moderate and well-read candidates and by a shrewd, calculating GOP into turning the 2020 cycle into a referendum on socialism instead of what it needs to be for the negative partisanship model to function at capacity: a referendum on Trump. With Sanders as the nominee, most, if not all, of the Democratic Party’s “frontline” candidates would have ended up with a muddled message- liable to spend as much time contrasting themselves with Sanders (and socialism) as their GOP opponents and Trump.

As GOP strategist Rick Wilson aptly points out in his latest book, and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and I painfully poke fun at in his podcast, Democrats already seem to struggle with the concept of referendum effects and, specifically, the power of tapping into or exploiting them. Due to their deep-rooted (seemingly unshakable) belief in the “median voter theory,” Democratic candidates/consultants/strategists would have fractured into chaos over a Sanders nomination. It would have been an unmitigated disaster the GOP was already positioning themselves to capitalize on. And although the many progressives reading this see Biden’s nomination as an unmitigated disaster, citing his bland moderation, this or that policy from 30 years ago, or general lack of what might be called “stump agility,” I can assure you, Biden fills the role of “generic Democrat” perfectly fine, and that is all that is really required from Democrats to win this election. Because as Sanders supporters are just now coming to learn, while 2016 was about revolution, 2020 is about one thing and one thing only: making the scary, bad man go away.

Dissatisfaction with the party’s nomination process is largely powered by people’s (and the media’s) unrealistic expectations of what these nomination contests can produce, precisely because it is reliant on the voting public. It’s a common mistake — we tend to see the world from our own perspective, and in your perspective, you watched a dozen debates, assessed more than 20 Democratic hopefuls, and tried to select the one you felt best suited to the job vis a vis your own ideological biases. From this perspective, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, even late-stagers like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were closely examined by the electorate and found wanting. But the truth is, only five candidates ever received any real scrutiny through the year-long primary process, and of those, only two were particularly well known by average voters, which you, dear reader, are not one of. And these trend-buckers are the reasons we see 20 candidates throw their hats into the ring.

Biden, though unexciting to many millennials and Gen Z voters, is perceived by party mainstreamers as highly electable. These perceptions carry important implications for the behaviors of donors, volunteers, candidates, and tertiary actors such as the punditocracy, who hold important narrative-setting power in the electoral ecosystem. Biden will likely be pushed towards selecting fellow primary contender Amy Klobuchar as his running mate, and in the two-person debate last Sunday, the candidate shrewdly dominated the news cycle by announcing that he will select a female running mate.

Given her performance in the Democratic primary and status as a popular senator from Minnesota, Klobuchar likely leads Biden’s short list. Klobuchar’s reputation for bipartisanship and moderation will be immensely attractive to traditional Democratic strategists who will likely be looking at the VP slot via a regionalism lens, looking to solve the “Midwest problem.”

But whether this is the right lens depends on how you diagnose that 2016 loss. I don’t want to put words in the party’s mouth, but if media surrogates and candidate statements are any indication, it appears Democrats believe their 2016 losses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, as a reminder, were surprise losses, were due to the failure of Hillary Clinton to win over white, working-class voters. The movement of these Obama-to-Trump voters was the decisive element in Clinton’s loss, and the recovery of them must be the central element of any plan to recapture the Midwest.

This diagnosis, that Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters, is not quantitatively wrong. This is a mathematical fact. Where this diagnosis runs into trouble is misunderstanding why Clinton underperformed Obama among white, working-class voters and what, if anything, can be done about it. Because underlying the cycle-specific trends are the realities of the long-term demographic, coalitional realignments of the two parties, where the Republican Party is becoming a rural-based party of whites, particularly working-class whites (but more accurately, non-college-educated whites), and the Democratic Party is becoming an urban/suburban party, racially and ethnically diverse in a society that is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, and where college education is becoming a reliable predictor of Democratic candidate vote choice (so much so that I use it to predict Democratic candidate vote share in my modeling).

What this means, of course, is that every four years, fewer white, non-college-educated voters (especially those in rural areas) vote for Democrats. And this has profound impacts in the Midwest, because the traditional Democratic strongholds were often, in more rural, heavily unionized areas of these states. Which is why Democrats look at these areas as, “I used to win here, and I should be winning here now.” Which brings us back to the Obama-to-Trump voters. Some of these voters are actually “pure” independents. They broke against the Democrats in 2016 because they were the status quo. In data I worked with from Morning Consult, about 30 percent of Obama-to-Trump voters expressed unfavorable views of Trump as of last fall. My belief is that this group is likely the pure independent chunk, voters I call “change voters,” who we might expect to swing away from Trump in 2020 now that he represents the status quo (especially under an economic recession environment).

The whole forecast can be found here: https://www.niskanencenter.org/bitecofer-post-primary-update/

It is a very interesting read.

There seem to be two arguments here.

One is that centerist candidates are always best. Or maybe best for the Dems - though no argument is made for a Dem/Rep distinction.

The other is this very intriguing argument about the Invisible Primary. Here's the money quote again:

It’s not an accident that in presidential nominations, the person or persons leading the Invisible Primary are the same people that come out at the end, cycle after cycle. There are occasional exceptions — a Bill Clinton here and Barack Obama there.

You can throw Jimmy Carter into that list with Bill and Barry too.

Things that make you go "hhhmmmmmm". I wonder what Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama have in common? And which distinguishes them from every other Dem pres candidate since LBJ in 1964?

[Clyde_Style]

Things that make you go "hhhmmmmmm". I wonder what Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama have in common? And which distinguishes them from every other Dem pres candidate since LBJ in 1964?

You made me go look at the list and the ones who failed are

Humphrey
McGovern
Mondale
Dukakis
Gore
Kerry

In contrast with the other three, they all lack a degree of relatability and the common touch that allows them to connect to a broader spectrum of people. Humphrey was a warm guy, but he had some melt downs (read Hunter Thompson) and that made him seem too weak for voters. And Hubert was actually too nice to play dirty and he actually didn't take the offensive against his opponents and that likely ended up costing him.

Of those three, Clinton and Obama had a level of self-confidence bordering on swagger that I can't attribute to Carter. Jimmy did have a form of self-confidence as a self-made man, but his particular character was more humble and self-effacing.

[coopnyc74]

If you are for Bernie that is cool but when Joe wins the nomination your asses better be at the polls for Uncle Joe or you are pretty much the equivalent of a Trump supporter.

[robillionaire]

If you are for Bernie that is cool but when Joe wins the nomination your asses better be at the polls for Uncle Joe or you are pretty much the equivalent of a Trump supporter.

This will convince fewer people than it did four years ago