South Carolina will go big for Biden and his stock will rise tremendously afterwards.
His poll numbers are dropping by the day in SC, and it’s happening as a result of his abysmal results in IA. Do you think his numbers in SC will turn around after he finishes fourth in NH? How about if he loses NV? Will his support in SC go up then?
He may “win” in SC, but don’t expect this to be the savior it was once thought to be for him, as far as delegate count goes.
I have a hard time believing “his stock” will go up tremendously at this point no matter what the outcome in SC is. He’s getting shellacked and is struggling with fundraising.
Sorry if it was unclear that I was presenting what I can see as a realistic scenario of where this might end up by the end of the primary process. Not where we currently are.
A minor question for the OP - why the quote marks around “Mike” in the thread title? Isn’t that his name?
I’m the person who created the thread, and I put Mike in quotes because he was Michael till he decided to run for President. He’s running ads with Obama making nice comments about him and Obama calls him Michael throughout.
So what’s Bloomberg’s endgame? According to 538, Sanders has about a 1 in 2 chance to get a delegate majority outright.
There is about a 25% chance no candidate gets a majority. In this scenario Sanders is likely to enter the convention with a delegate plurality.
So Bloomberg stans- explain to me what happens. Do you think Bloomberg, or any other “moderate” candidate, can convince their opponents to give him all their delegates to put him over the threshold? How do you think certain voters will react to the candidate who won the primary popular vote being denied the nomination, by a billionaire former Republican no less? We’ve been hearing for 3 years about how HRC won the popular vote (by plurality) nonstop and how that is all that matters. What changed? Do you think there will simply be severely depressed voter turnout among Democrats in November, or will there also be riots in the streets of Milwaukee to look forward to?
It’s bonkers. This road leads to ruin and would destroy the party, and rightfuly so.
You don’t want Sanders as the nominee? Fine. All the Non-Bernies need to drop out immediately, save for one acceptable centrist Democrat. Warren can also stay in to continue to split the Left vote. If Bloomberg is the Chosen One, then the party leaders/donors need to pull off the band-aid immediately and tell Pete, Biden & Amy to drop out ASAP. Have them hold a joint press conference so they can give some song and dance about how impressed they are with Bloomberg and how they know on their hearts that he is the president we need in these troubled times, or some bullshit like that.
This isn’t some deep mystery- we saw what happened in 2016 on the GOP side. Trump had too many opponents who all took their turn as the party’s chosen savior, and they all failed to overtake Trump because there were always other Non-Trumps still in the race sucking up votes and campaign donations until it was too late. It’s happening again, clear as day.
The difference is HRC campaigned poorly. She was looking to expand the electoral map before having the blue wall in-hand. Bloomberg doesn’t seem to be repeating that mistake. He’s visiting states he needs to both win the nom AND win the genera,l all the while others are dumping their cash and time into two states that will offer up 74 delegates and are electoral map road apples.
Sure, he may not excite the left, but most of them will turn out. However, the bulk of the Dems across the country still seem to prefer a moderate.
I think the Democratic convention, no matter how chaotic or prolonged, will still give enough time between then and November that the party will patch any wounds and come against Trump as a unified whole. Three months is a long time. They hate Trump enough that splintering the vote won’t be an issue this time. It’s not like the Democrats are only going to announce their final candidate two weeks before Election Day.
Craziness. I’d rather have 4 more years of Trump rather than ever again vote for a party that so ghoulishly subverts the will of its voters. A billionaire former Republican installed as the nominee by a smoke-filled room of party elites- you couldn’t make up a better way to irreversibly piss off at least a quarter of Democrats. Insane.
If Bloomberg must be the nominee, he needs to win the most delegates or he will be deemed illegitimate by a substantial number of people.
I think that despite them both being billionaires, Bloomberg’s wealth is on a different level than Steyers. Steyers entire net worth is one years income to Bloomberg.
I think one appeal of being a billionaire candidate is that you can’t be bribed. Nobody can offer you 50 million dollar in exchange for your obedience, as you already have your own money. Trump played up this aspect of his wealth a lot, how he couldn’t be bribed but he had done a lot of bribing of politicians himself.
However Bloomberg does have skeletons. Not just stop and frisk, but he spent 11 million helping to re-elect GOP senator Pat Toomey in 2016. Seeing how close the senate is right now, and how its possible to win it back in 2020, Bloomberg has to answer why he was giving millions to GOP senators as recently as 4 years ago. He also gave a quarter million dollars to Lindsay Grahams campaign in 2014.
The vast majority of people who voted in 1972 are dead now, and the people who vote are totally different people. Either way, LBJ won in a landslide in 1964 and he was pretty far left too. FDR and LBJ were pretty far left by todays standards and they won in landslides. But either way its not pertinent, as virtually eveyrone who voted back then is dead now. The youngest people to vote in the 1972 election are almost 70 now.
I think there is a risk some liberals stay home if Bloomberg is the nominee. Of course some moderates may stay home if it’s Sanders. I guess Dems need to pick their poison.
There is the risk, but voters in both camps should swallow their pride and accept that either of these two would be better than Trump. Especially in these times, general elections are not the occasion to express your displeasure with the primary process.
Our entire political system is under threat. There is a very real risk that we may never again have normal elections after 2020. It’s a real risk that the 2020 election itself may not be a normal election. We cannot become a circular firing squad. We have to recognize and act against the danger that’s in front of us, and that danger is Trump.
I personally fear the consequences in terms of policy and the long-term reputation of the democratic party if Sanders gets elected, but that wouldn’t mean shit to me if it’s him against Trump. The danger with Sanders in my eyes is that he turns out to be a monumental mistake, but one that voters can correct. With Trump, he is a mistake that the Constitution’s mechanisms have been unable to stop and unable to fix, and that cancer will metastasize if he’s in power past January 2021.
Seriously??? Liberals absolutely hate Trump enough that they would vote for Bloomberg rather than stay home. Moderates don’t hate Trump nearly as much.
If the Dems were to nominate the personification of Alfred E. Neuman, I’d vote for him against Trump. Hell, if they were to resurrect Richard Nixon from the grave and run him against Trump, I’d vote for Tricky Dick. So sure, if Bloomberg wins the nomination, I’ll vote for Bloomberg in November.
Actually, I’m starting to be more than a little Bloomberg-curious. Two reasons:
- He seems to take climate change very seriously, and as Warren might say, he’s got a plan for that.
I think the thing that really struck me about his view on climate change is that, well, it’s easy to have a little “Climate Change” box on your issues page for you to click on, but even if he’s got a good plan, who knows how important it is to him, really?
Then I clicked on the box for “Puerto Rico.” And the first sentence is:
To me, suggests that for him, climate change is not just in that one box.
- He hasn’t said a word about the filibuster AFAIK. But if he’s the sort of guy who wouldn’t get extremely pissed at the notion that a Democratic Senate majority might put that arcane tradition ahead of actually getting important shit done, then I’ve totally misread him.
I’m really not keen on the notion of nominating a mega-billionaire for President. But we’ve got to deal aggressively with climate change, and soon. There are other problems that we should fix now, but won’t kill us to wait a decade. If Biden and Sanders are willing to let arcane Senate traditions get in the way of trying to save the fucking planet, which it appears they are, then fuck both of 'em.
If Warren’s campaign is going nowhere, which is the way it looks right now, Bloomberg might be the best bet.
I didn’t really say that, did I? :eek:
Apparently I did.
He not only has a plan, he’s actually been enacting policy. He’s partnered with the Sierra Club in an initiative to eliminate coal fired power plants.
Since 2011, they’ve closed 299 of them ( out of the 515 ).
https://content.sierraclub.org/coal/posts/major-milestone-america-halfway-moving
(Note: this article is from 2017 and they give the number of shuttered plants at 262. But the updated number is 299.
He’s selected 25 partner cities and he’s working with them in a 2 year program to move them towards sustainability, providing them with funding, expertise and data to enact their own programs.
That why I like him, he’s not just talk.
Because I have only started coming around to taking him seriously, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about him until now. So this is good to know.
People on the far left possibly stay home or vote Green if Bloomberg is the nominee. Not a lot of people, but some maybe enough to get Trump re-elected. A smaller group of moderate Dems will possibly stay home if Sanders is the guy.
I wonder how many people forget, or ever even knew, that Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat before switching to the Republican party to run in and eventually win the election to become mayor of NYC. People see another rich guy from New York and just assume he is really a Republican. I have no idea, of course. But for another example of his Democrat bona fides, check out his position on gun control. As for him being rich, I’m not really concerned about that because it seems to me that once you are as rich as Bloomberg, running for president just to add to your wealth (present president notwithstanding) and what one would do when elected regarding that wealth just isn’t an issue with me. And given his history since leaving the mayorship, his philanthropy, I think he definitely deserves a good look.
Many people don’t know Trump was a pro choice Dem for a long while. The media pointed that out when he first entered the race.
This I think is worth returning to. Not my original thought but this track record has many mayors willing to put their GOTV machines in his service during both the primary and general elections. Running it up in the cities while winning the suburbs is not a bad tactic.