Okay, that’s a relatively reasonable criticism (though I wouldn’t characterize his job as a “nothing job”). The way you phrased it before just made it appear personal.
Not personal, just harsh. I said pretty much the same thing when he was being pushed for President or VP a few years ago. If he s so great, he’d run statewide. REpublicans have nominated blue and purple state Republicans for President but Democrats stick to blue states and that’s actually not healthy.
And while HUD CAN be a real job, it tends to be a nothing job in practice and Castro can point to no real accomplishments other than “I was HUD Secretary and I’m handsome”. Beto can point to “I’m handsome, a little weird in a good way, and oh BTW, I scared the shit out of Ted Cruz!”
Beto needs to work on controlling his hands while he speaks. The hand thing kinda annoyed me when I’d see videos of him speaking at events during the Senate campaign, but I chalked it up to adrenaline on the stage. But in his announcement video, he’s flailing around like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. I wonder how many takes it took before he got through it without accidentally back-handing his wife’s face.
He’ll be easy to impersonate if nothing else.
The Democratic base was angry that day, my friends.
Speaking of this, I think SNL should tap Jon Heder to do Beto. (Listen to his concession speech, his voice is a dead ringer for Napoleon Dynamite.)
Could even work a “Vote for Beto” t-shirt into it somehow .
something I noticed this week - the Iowa caucuses had around 170k people voting in 2016. Which means that 0.05% of the US population plays a big role in picking the leader of the free world.
By no means a new observation, and the same may be said of New Hampshire. Both are also older, whiter and more rural than the U.S. population as a whole.
They play a *prominent *role, but not a strongly influential one. The Iowa winner is only occasionally the nominee.
IA and NH prune the field to a size less informed voters in big states can digest.
Yeah, it’s a big field right now, but I’d be very surprised if there are more than three after Iowa and New Hampshire. The size of the field at this point in the cycle doesn’t mean much.
In 2020 it will be a little less influence than usual. The primary season will start late, with Iowa voting on February 3rd rather than early January. After that it’s only three small states until a relatively early Super Tuesday on March 3rd. Eleven states vote on that day, including Texas and California and states from several other regions including the South, New England, Midwest, and the middle part of the east coast.
Oh, I think we’ll see more than three, probably six. Harris is going to Super Tuesday no matter what, as is Beto. Booker won’t drop out until he does badly in SC.
So I figure Biden, Sanders, Harris, Booker, Beto, and Warren are likely to get to Super Tuesday. Although if Warren doesn’t get at least 2nd in NH she probably leaves then.
Thinking on that it raises the importance of “the invisible primary”.
Money needs to be spent throughout Super Tuesday states early on with little gap between Iowa and those stats voting. Harder for a lesser known to surprise early and prevail.
What’s interesting is that because of the variety in the Super Tuesday states I think a lot of the candidates will continue on past that. Harris will probably do well in California, Beto in Texas, Booker in Virginia, Warren in Massachusetts, Sanders in Massachusetts and Vermont, and Biden all over the map. That’s why Im curious as to how the delegates that get pledged to the lower placing candidates, say 4th or 5th place and worse, will get divided up among the top three or four at the convention. I doubt that even Biden will emerge from the primaries with a large plurality.
Right. With the caveat that a lot can happen between now and next winter, I agree that none of the six listed above are likely to drop out before TX and CA vote–and I’d expect that at least a couple of the others will do well in IA and/or NH and continue on.
Harris, as mentioned–why drop out before her home state votes? And if she does poorly in IA and NH she’ll be able to say, Sure, but these states are not at all representative of the US as a whole and especially not representative of the Democratic Party–those who won those states will still have to show that they can win in places that aren’t 95% white.
Cory Booker can’t exactly wait for NJ to vote, but he’ll have essentially the same argument for staying in even if he does badly in both Iowa and NH. As adaher points out, for him the real test will be South Carolina. If he does badly there it’ll be time to fold the tent, but not before.
O’Rourke, well, he will also hang around till Texas votes. (We could make the same argument for Julian castro, but I don’t know that he’ll have enough $$ to get him that far…)
Sanders will a) probably do very well in the first two states, if their demographics are a guide, and b) if he doesn’t, he’ll probably stay in anyway; he is second only to Trump in his zeal for campaigning, and his fundraising machine is unlikely to stop working unless the bottom really falls out.
I agree that Warren is potentially in trouble if she doesn’t do well in New Hampshire. But unless she gets buried, I think she has every reason to see what happens in states like SC and Texas, where I doubt she’d win, but might well be able to position herself as the progressive who is most likely to win the nomination.
Biden, if he gets into the race, is not going to do so in order to drop out after 2% of the electorate has voted. He just isn’t.
And of the others, it seems likely that someone from among Gillibrand, Inslee, Klobuchar, Hickenlooper will do very well in at least one of the first two states and get a real boost to his or her campaign. --I do think that at least a couple of these will drop out in the early going. Klobuchar is the one who probably has the most to lose early on–if she does poorly in Iowa she’s going to face a real uphill climb.
I predict seven or eight candidates remaining after the NH primary; five or six, minimum.
(Now watch–the race will be essentially over after Gillibrand or Hicklenlooper unexpectedly wins 63% of the vote in Iowa and 74% in new Hampshire, with no one else getting as many as ten percent…)
Agree with most of that although I think you’ve got the front runner’s incentives backwards. If Biden has a really bad day in IA and NH he’s done. He’s expected to win one of them, or at least finish no worse than 2nd. Castro doesn’t go to TX unless he does well in IA or NH. With Beto in the race he just has no favorite son advantage. Klobuchar is in Pawlenty’s position, it’s IA or bust for her. Warren though, NH is essentially MA, it’s their media market. If she does poorly there the South and big states won’t look any better.
It’s a tricky one, though, because it’s also Sanders’ home turf. I know Vermont and NH are very different places in many regards but still, NH is going to be played to the hilt as a Sanders-Warren battleground. Everyone else will get a pass for a poor showing there, and will instead focus on Iowa.
If Sanders wins both but Biden finishes 2nd, Biden has a rationale to go to the big states, and like Clinton, he should beat Sanders there. South Carolina too. I’m thinking more if Booker, Beto or Harris overtakes Biden then he should probably drop out and endorse whoever beat him of those two. So if NH looks something like this after a Bernie win in IA:
Sanders 38
Beto 23
Harris 22
Biden 15
then Biden should really drop out and endorse Beto or Harris.
I’m not so sure about the second part. If Biden were to drop out this early the smart thing for him to do would be to wait until it becomes more clear who the from runner is rather than to just endorse whoever beat him that isn’t Sanders. If he did that Sanders might start back in about how the establishment is rigged against him, and the last thing we need in 2020 is for the primary to be about Sanders vs. The Establishment.
Explain, please?
Why Virginia, in particular, for Booker?
Also wondering why. Thanks.