Going back to Hickenlooper for a moment, I really hope he gets the hell out of the race and runs for Senate. He’s one of the few candidates who might actually be hurting his political career by running for the presidency. He’s been a good mayor of Denver and a good governor of Colorado, and he’s been a solid balance of center-left pragmatism, but as I said in the last post: he’s just looking like a real asswipe in some of the debates and some of the stories that leak out about his campaign. He needs to go back home because it’s not going to work on the national stage, and he might be ruining his brand with progressives back home.
*Whoever *gets the Dem nomination is going to immediately be labeled by the GOP and the NRA as “the most extreme” or “the most liberal” etc. Whoever they fear most will get it earlier, and it’s obviously started already. It will be easy for the gun nuts since anything at all looks extreme to them.
Pete Buttigieg made a similar argument in the debate, and David Axelrod rightly tore into him for it. The point is not whether the GOP will make these accusations about any nominee — they definitely will — but whether the accusations will be able to stick in the judgment of Rust Belt swing voters, or will look desperate and off target. Therefore this type of talking point is utterly specious and really dangerous.
Beto is probably going to get a substantial boost from publicity surrounding the El Paso shooting attack today. I don’t mean that in any disrespectful-to-the-victims way in the least, I simply mean it as a matter of political fact. There will be substantial attention on Beto today and in the days to come and that will raise his profile a lot.
It’s also an opportunity to make himself look like he’s a grandstanding opportunist if he’s not careful, so I’d probably defer to local authorities on this one.
Still, there’s a spectrum, and with what 25 contenders? It’s perfectly Ok to say that the guy with the most extreme of those 25 is extreme. He ranks as 25th with Harris at 24. Of course, every Dem candidate will support some sort of gun control, no doubt. Actually the least extreme fall about where trump is, in reality. But yeah, the NRA will call them out as "gun grabbers’ even if their policies are about the same as trump, who they will give a glowing recommendation to.
Yeah, well, I also cited axios, Vox, Newsweek, LaTimes and even the NRA. I hit them all. I wanted to be fair and show the whole spectrum.
O’Rourke probably does have the best chance of winning Texas, of any of the Democratic candidates. But it doesn’t matter, because Texas is irrelevant. The only way any Dem, even O’Rourke, wins Texas is if the Dems get an electoral tsunami, which would also mean winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, and all the other swing states.
I was excited about O’Rourke in his run against Cruz, because he was the best candidate for that race. I’m not excited about him in this run, because he’s a terrible candidate for this race.
I dont care if Beto WINS Texas so much. But with him as Prez or even Veep, Texas will be in play, so the GOP will have to spend time and money down there. And Texas doesnt liek the Wall.
You understand that the GOP would only to spend there if the Dems do, can likely spend less defending it than the Ds would need to spend in the offense, and are looking to be very well funded.
I saw a story that the Democratic super PAC is much better funded than the Republican one. If you don’t believe me, I can try to find a cite later when I have more time.
Thank you. This fringe idea that the Dems can trick the Republicans into overspending in Texas insults everyone’s intelligence.
The Republicans might be nervous about the future in Texas but they sure as shit are not going to frantically dump money there next year just because Beto polled well. Get it to fucking gether people.
They’ll work with the people they’re intended to work with - it’s part of reaffirming tribalism, and in a way that is at least superficially more acceptable than racial or gender or sexual ones, since it’s about a matter of choice. I really doubt there are many swing voters left on the topic of gun “rights”, as evidenced by the shrinking minority of Americans who actually own any.
I posted it in another thread, but the issue of gun rights is both political and cultural, and I think the only way gun control advocates are going to make inroads is to accept this reality.
As I posted in another thread, what Trump (and also organizations like the NRA) has done is to weaponize cultural divides between white rural and suburban America and America’s more diverse urban centers. They have found ways to convince rural and suburban white voters that people from cities are not like them, and they don’t have the same value system they do, and that they’re dangerous for the future of their America.
In a number of cases, it seems that the progressive response has been to claim that their political opposition is essentially evil, and they’re looking for ways to increase their strength by encouraging more of their own base to become more politically active. They can win elections that way, but the political divisions will still be there.
Progressives must find ways to connect the concerns of people living in cities with those who live in rural and suburban areas, which won’t be easy.
This election hinges on the votes of a relatively small number of white people in the Rust Belt and especially Wisconsin, who voted for Trump in 2016. You don’t think gun rights have a disproportionate impact with such voters?
Especially when you started off talking about gun control. I won’t say the suburbs are monolithic on this, but most suburban parents don’t want their kids’ school shot up, or want someone walking down the street open carrying when little Johnny and Janie are playing in the yard.
