This. When I was doing my polling average last fall, he was at 27% +/- 1%, week after week after week after bloomin’ week. Like the speedometer of a car on cruise control.
I’ve stopped doing my average, but like you say, 538 says nothing’s changed there.
I’ve been thinking about this ad more, and I suspect he knows what he’s doing. He can’t win the nomination without black support, and this commercial will appeal to a lot of those voters. (Also suburban moms.) He needs to really start poaching AA voters from Biden if he wants to do well in Super Tuesday and the weeks following. This ad will help with that.
Sure, it won’t necessarily resonate with my Uncle G and Cousin D, but that can be more of a conversation for the general. If Bloomberg can’t start poaching support from Biden, he won’t even get to the general.
Bloomberg will be in the next debate. There are no longer donor thresholds to meet. He already has passed the polling threshold.
Regarding MFA, the way I see it is Warren took much more heat about it in five months from fellow Democrats than Sanders did in the five years he has been running for president. Hillary saw him as an annoying fly she just had to wave away and did (no, it was not rigged), but the others don’t prod him. They did to Warren.
I have to agree. It’s not going to sit well with my brother D and nephew A either, but it’s going to get their attention.
And I really like it that he’s using the Kemp case in these ads and I hope it may reach black voters. I don’t want to get too deep into gun control as an issue in this thread, but it’s always bugged the hell out of me that the debate always seems to be about white rural militias and suburban school shootings. It’s an issue that has an outsized impact on African-Americans but I think they’ve been disenfranchised from the debate.
Maybe. But one of the clearest lessons of this absurdly long primary campaign is that swaying Black voters is difficult. The polls showed a huge block of them supporting Biden before he even officially jumped in and they haven’t changed since then. Literally every other candidate has tried hard to pander to them with little or no success.
I think it also reflects growing public distaste for Warren. Whether it’s her debt-forgiveness program (which makes people who ***did ***suffer and scrimp and save to pay off their debt feel cheated hollow,) or her snarky clap-backs to people, or her refusal to address tough facts and numbers of her MfA, or her insinuation that sexism must be a reason for people not liking her, people are more and more thinking “This isn’t someone I want.”
The NY Times (online) had an interactive feature yesterday, that asked you 10 Y/N questions and determined your ideal candidate based on those answers.
Some of them were tough: how do I feel about free college? Is it important that the president be able to work with Republicans?
But it gave me a split decision: my ideal candidate is either Steyer or Warren.
Steyer? Seriously? I haven’t given him a moment’s thought.
That’s true, but what if Biden tanks once the voting starts? Bloomberg is setting himself up as the next candidate for African American voters. Bloomberg’s candidacy was launched on the notion that Biden was underperforming and may not make it to the general. His instincts may be paying off.
Apart from gender what makes that different from Sanders?
Sanders is cranky when challenged. He shouts over people, yells canned lines … “I WROTE THE DAMN BILL” “AND I’M WHITE” “I SAID BLACK FIFTY TIMES”.
Warren’s and Sanders are on the same wing. She said the 2016 primary was rigged and now says “I’m with Bernie” on the debate stage.
What hurts her chances that doesn’t get to him? To me it’s that she takes far more heat and Sanders might get away with it now but if he gets the nomination it’ll all come hurtling at him. Warren is the one pressed for the math by interviewers, moderators and competitors among the democrats. Sanders went on CBS this week and couldn’t answer despite having five years of running for president.
What kind of answer is you don’t know, nobody knows, it’s impossible !
Steyer is actually running quite a progressive left wing agenda in his campaign.
For years has been a top fundraiser for democrats in national elections and down-ballot, funding green environmental initiatives and research and using his wealth to give back to communities. He’s a decent guy and a solid democrat.
It’s just because he’s a billionaire a lot of people automatically don’t give him a chance because “he’s trying to buy the nomination”. The Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, is a billionaire and the second richest elected official in US history (behind Bloomberg) but he’s achieved a lot of progressive goals in his first year:
He, for all his many flaws, is perceived as honest and authentic. She now is not.
She had a solid established brand with issues that were her issues: mainly reining in Wall Street excesses. She left those behind to try to jump in the front of the MfA parade that was in fact Sanders’ damn plan, waving a baton, and trying to plaster her “I have a plan.” logo all over it, only to quickly realize that most of the party wasn’t as big of a fan of that parade as she thought, and backing off. Cue sad tuba sound, but meanwhile Sanders has kept playing his same tune, bluntly honest that yes middle classes taxes will go up, and that no he does not have all the details of the plan, what he has is the vision. No I don’t buy what he is selling but I get why it sells, and why Warren’s posturing blew it for her.
Shame. She was my choice for back-up quarterback in case of Biden collapse (or possibly taking over the spot even without such). Now I’ve got to consider Bloomberg for that position.
My experience is that people from New York have absolutely no conception of how much the rest of the country loves guns, and how hard they are willing to fight for them. I couldn’t come up with a better parody of an “Ivory Tower Liberal” than airing gun control ads in the Super Bowl if Bloomberg himself paid me a billion dollars to do it. This is absolute madness.
Is the following a fair description of why Sanders appeals and Warren doesn’t?
Warren “has a plan”, a detailed plan. (Plans that top economists and other thinkers helped her design.) By claiming specifics she becomes vulnerable to specifics.
Sanders is the absent-minded but lovable carnival barker: “We need a revolution! What does it cost? Who cares!!!” His specifics are just as bad as Warren’s but they’re irrelevant. Sanders isn’t about specifics; he’s about waving his hands and being the lovable barker.
Meanwhile, even winning the White House neither Warren nor Sanders could get the programs they want enacted anyway. There’s only so much that can be done with executive orders, and Congress — even if the Ds get their 50 Senators — will not go along with a radical agenda. And Sanders in particular would be loath to compromise.
Paradoxically, it’s a moderate, e.g. Biden, who would be viewed as reasonable by moderate Congressmen and therefore be most successful at getting a progressive agenda passed by Congress!
No matter how many times you say this is madness, doesn’t make it true.
I suspect Bloomberg knows what he’s doing with his millions better than you understand. I’m a rural Michigan union-hall voter, with suburban Michigan union-hall voters all over my family. This commercial won’t connect with them, hell it doesn’t push my buttons, but it doesn’t necessarily need to. It’s gonna connect with African-Americans and even suburban moms and pro-gun-control young people. For the Industrial Midwestern beer-drinking blue collars watching, it’ll likely be something that doesn’t interest them from the get-go so they’ll head to the fridge for another cold one or re-fill their plate with hot wings.
Bloomberg’s really, really making an effort to be the alternative to Biden for African-Americans, should Biden flame out in the early-state primaries. Running this ad is far from “absolute madness” when viewed from that perspective.
Also everyone in the senate likes Biden and owes him favors. That doesnt necessarily mean they will jump to his tune, sure, but if the senate is pretty close to 50/50, I think Biden would get things done. Not the most liberal things, the best things- sure, but some things. UHC? Maybe not, but lowering Medicare to 55 as a starter could fly. Confiscation of Assault weapons? No, but a voluntary buy back and banning future sales. and so forth. The republican senators are tired of bossy Mitch.
I’d like some evidence that this ‘perception’ of Warren exists outside of a small circle of friends, or perhaps a small circle of pundits. Got any polling on this?
‘Quickly’? (a) She’s still for M4A. (b) Not sure what’s inauthentic about saying, in effect, “OK, a lot of you find M4A scary, well, here’s a plan that’s less scary that would be a big first step toward M4A, and we could see where we are then.” (c) She went most of the year before coming up with that second plan. “Quickly,” my ass.
When did modifying a proposal in response to voter feedback become ‘inauthentic’? It’s one thing if you do a Buttigieg 180°, but if you’re still headed in the same basic direction, but in a way the voters find more acceptable, WTF is ‘inauthentic’ about that?
What’s really happened, of course, is that she got hammered with “how are you going to pay for it?” for months, but hardly anyone’s asking Bernie tough questions about his ‘vision.’
Indeed this is my perception, based as much on how my personal assessment of her changed during the process, from having her become tied in my mind for first choice to blech during the process.
My view is that she can only blame herself for her fall. She’s the one who went from March’s initial open-ended position considering eliminating private insurance but also open to a plan that expanded Medicaid and other approaches, to June’s raising her hand that she would eliminate all private insurance, saying that she was “with Bernie” on his plan, to then claiming that she had a plan for that, one that would do it “without one penny” of raised taxes on the middle class. Sanders answered the same question and stated simply that it would save money for the middle class in net but no promise of doing it without middle class tax contribution. Really. An incredible claim made like hers will be questioned. His got some acknowledgement of being honest about it. And she then made it worse from there with every response. November 1 she released her plan for that. And then yes, my ass considers less than three weeks later releasing her backtracking second plan to be “quickly.” Not sure where you get “most of the year before coming up with that second plan” … It was 17 days.
The impression I got was that she read the polls and the reviews of her trying to jump in front of that parade, realized she had made a miscalculation and tried to reverse course. Sanders just kept marching in the same steps he’s always marched.
Minimally the timing of Peak Warren and her subsequent fall fits my take.
Oh yeah, like what are they going to do if Bloomberg passes background checks or red flag laws - start a civil war? I seriously doubt it. Gun enthusiasts talk a lot of shit about how nobody better take away their guns, but it’s just talk mostly. For one thing, nobody’s planning gun bans or other ‘end times’ scenarios - they’ll still have their guns. But for another, a lot of gun owners - the silent ones who don’t show up at nut job protests - quietly support a lot of these gun laws, too.
This is spot on, and it’s worth noting Bloomberg already has support from DC’s mayor and I’m guessing that he’ll have mayoral support elsewhere, which is going to be huge. It enables him to connect with people of color and gives Bloomberg a ground game at a local level in ways that even Biden’s machine doesn’t possess.