Democratic Primary 2020

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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby cmsellers » Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:02 pm

Buttigieg and Abrams are my top two right now (though it's not clear Abrams is definitely running), but I'm not locked in yet.

If I don't vote for Buttigieg or Abrams, Klobuchar is still fairly high on my list, mostly because she has the best proven electoral track record when it comes to winning over non-Democrats, even if the Minnesota nice thing I was hoping would contrast her with Trump is gone. Buttigieg still has the Midwestern nice thing, which is why I prefer him (with him it seems to be actually genuine, but I thought Klobuchar was for real too, so fingers crossed), but since he hasn't competed for state or federal office, I'm a little more nervous about his crossover appeal.

The big thing that changed for me is Gillibrand. She's been behind a push to ban neodymium magnets, and I recently learned she was also behind a push to effectively ban most exotic pets. At this point, I'm convinced she's a nanny state busybody who is pathologically opposed to fun. I mean, her candidacy has been dead in the water for months anyways, but she's now in my personal bottom tier of candidates as well.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Windy » Mon Apr 15, 2019 12:44 am

This might be a little late but have any of you considered voting for Trump in 2020? You'll be on the winning side for once.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Absentia » Mon Apr 15, 2019 1:10 am

"For once"? 2016 is the first time my preferred candidate didn't win since Ross Perot when I was nine years old. (I thought he was funny.)
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Krashlia » Mon Apr 15, 2019 3:58 am

Gabbard, for the Internet freedoms... supposedly.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Windy » Mon Apr 15, 2019 7:29 am

Absentia wrote:"For once"? 2016 is the first time my preferred candidate didn't win since Ross Perot when I was nine years old. (I thought he was funny.)


Wtf you voted for Bush twice :evil:
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Absentia » Mon Apr 15, 2019 1:41 pm

Windy wrote:
Absentia wrote:"For once"? 2016 is the first time my preferred candidate didn't win since Ross Perot when I was nine years old. (I thought he was funny.)


Wtf you voted for Bush twice :evil:


I wasn't old enough to vote for him. My stupid teenager phase was believing in Middle East interventionism and the infallibility of free markets.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby gisambards » Mon Apr 15, 2019 1:51 pm

Personally, I am concerned at this stage about the ability of any of the four main front-runners (Harris, Sanders, Warren and Booker) to actually win the general election. Thus far, I've yet to see anything to suggest that they've really thought much about how and why Trump won. Something that is perhaps indicative of the political state of America is that it rarely feels like they even acknowledge that the country they're campaigning in is the same one that elected Trump. Obviously part of this is that they have to win the primary first and thus are pitching themselves to Democrat voters, but even so I do feel like there's almost a sense, certainly in a lot of left-leaning American news media and social media, that whoever wins the primary is going to easily become president (based seemingly on no more solid a notion than that the good guys must always win), and that risks falling into exactly the same sort of traps as Clinton.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Mon Apr 15, 2019 6:58 pm


If Biden ends up not running, I wonder if we'll see Sanders and Buttigieg in a Trump/Carson situation.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby cmsellers » Mon Apr 15, 2019 9:16 pm

Gis, from the polls I've seen, Booker doesn't really look like a frontrunner, and Warren barely does, based on most polls I've seen, though DP's poll has her neck-and-neck with Harris. Polls have been showing Biden, Bernie, and Beto as ahead of the rest of the pack, and now Buttigieg is getting up their too, though apparently at Beto's expense. Given that this seems to be the year of the B's, I'm surprising Booker isn't doing better, actually.

As for electability, I've pointed out that Warren is uniquely poorly suited, as the only Democratic Senate candidate who did worse in her home state in 2018 than Clinton did in 2018. Warren's problem is that she's really popular with Democrats, but pretty much nobody else likes her.

Sanders is problematic as well, because the socialist label combined with his promises are likely to turn people off. Another thing I've been on record about repeatedly is that I only supported him in 2016 because there was no chance of a Democratic House before 2020 with a Democratic president. A lot of people have been skeptical that he can get his agenda done with a Democratic House and Senate, but I think he could probably get single-payer (which I don't mind, as long as it doesn't ban private insurance like he proposed, but I don't think anything that passes will) and or substantial aid for college tuition (which I strongly object to).

Meanwhile, my mother, who has always said voting third party is beyond the pale of acceptability, said she would have voted third-party if Sanders had been the nominee. Sanders is likely to turn off a lot of the socially liberal, fiscally conservative, white-collar, suburban voters who have been defecting to the Democrats since Trump came to office. He also has potential to win back some of the socially conservative, fiscally liberal voters in the Midwest who carried Trump to victory, but he'd need electoral votes beyond the former "blue wall," and he potentially endangers New Hampshire, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado if he runs.

Booker and Harris, meanwhile, are simply unproven, fairly generic Democrats. I have concerns about Harris, who has been running hard to the left and who comes from San Francisco, and I still worry about the nepodultery thing. However her "tough cop" image, which I hate, could prove successful in the Midwest. She could go either way; it feels like there's more upside and more downside to her relative to Booker. Booker, I'm concerned would be unfairly seen as "boring" in the general, and he's too centrist for many Democratic primary voters, but I don't see major upside or downside to him in the general election.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Windy » Tue Apr 16, 2019 3:51 am

gisambards wrote:Personally, I am concerned at this stage about the ability of any of the four main front-runners (Harris, Sanders, Warren and Booker) to actually win the general election. Thus far, I've yet to see anything to suggest that they've really thought much about how and why Trump won. Something that is perhaps indicative of the political state of America is that it rarely feels like they even acknowledge that the country they're campaigning in is the same one that elected Trump. Obviously part of this is that they have to win the primary first and thus are pitching themselves to Democrat voters, but even so I do feel like there's almost a sense, certainly in a lot of left-leaning American news media and social media, that whoever wins the primary is going to easily become president (based seemingly on no more solid a notion than that the good guys must always win), and that risks falling into exactly the same sort of traps as Clinton.


They're not planning to win, they're just doing this for fundraising. Everyone knows you have to wait 8 years for the president's party to alternate.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby JamishT » Tue Apr 16, 2019 4:04 am

I think it is far too early to tell if any of the Democrats can beat Trump because no one knows what the issues are going to be a month and there hasn't been an actual debate or primary yet, so I'm not too worried about picking a person yet.

However, I did see this:


I really hope it's just pandering to the base, because he seems like a smart guy who'd understand the logic behind the Electoral College.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Absentia » Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:02 am

JamishT wrote:I really hope it's just pandering to the base, because he seems like a smart guy who'd understand the logic behind the Electoral College.


What do you consider smart about the logic behind the EC?

Before we agreed on universal adult suffrage, it was a good way to balance the influence of states which might have different rules about who was allowed to vote; under a national popular vote system, states which allowed fewer people to vote would have been at a considerable disadvantage. In effect, the EC propped up slave states who got to count non-voting slaves as 3/5 of a person for determining their electoral votes. It also provided a comforting buffer between the will of "the mob" and the highest office in the land, back in the days when nobody was sure how this whole democracy thing was going to turn out.

Today its main effect is to exaggerate the importance of a handful of swing states and discourage candidates from campaigning anywhere else. The idea that it protects Middle America from the Coastal Elites is mostly a fiction based on the fact that it happens to have turned out that way the last couple of times it came up.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Apr 16, 2019 6:16 am

JamishT wrote:I really hope it's just pandering to the base, because he seems like a smart guy who'd understand the logic behind the Electoral College.


Since apparently I'm a dumb guy, please explain to me why the Electoral College is not just a good idea, but so great an idea that no smart person could disagree with it.
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- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby JamishT » Tue Apr 16, 2019 7:35 am

I think of the US Presidential Election as a collection of states selecting a leader of the Federal government. I don't see the President as the President of every person, but of the States, but I also want a reasonable degree of parity between the states' level of influence in selecting the President. I'm sure the EC could be improved in a lot of ways, but I don't think abolishing it is the best idea.
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Re: Democratic Primary 2020

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Apr 16, 2019 9:21 am

JamishT wrote:I think of the US Presidential Election as a collection of states selecting a leader of the Federal government. I don't see the President as the President of every person, but of the States, but I also want a reasonable degree of parity between the states' level of influence in selecting the President. I'm sure the EC could be improved in a lot of ways, but I don't think abolishing it is the best idea.


So anyone who wants it abolished is an idiot (or more precisely, not a smart person) because you don't see the President as the president of every American?

Which Americans are these who are not subject to the power of the presidency, anyway?
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