Time now for Warren and Bernie to drop out and endorse Biden. He’s your last best hope for victory this fall.
He won’t get my vote. He pissed me off all over again yesterday when he basically gave Beto a blow job on stage with his ridiculous anti-gun crap. I can probably live with Biden as POTUS, but I won’t help him get there.
Are guns a single issue litmus test for you? If so, was there ever any possibility of any Democrat getting your vote for president?
The Clyburn endorsement was a gamechanger.
Biden was going to win SC regardless. But he needed a huge win. Because his campaign was broke, he barely had any presence in the Super Tuesday states, and he had just 48 hours to get a positive press bounce to build momentum. The week before SC polls were showing a shrunken lead and polls ranged between about 6-12%. Ordinarily a good win, but not good enough to claim a comeback when you staked your candidacy on this one state. Such a result would have been good enough for Sanders to claim some sort of success in second place given he barely set foot in SC.
Clyburn endorses and turn out goes through the roof giving Biden the landslide he needed. He had a good Sunday when he appeared on all the main morning shows and did well and with Buttigieg and Klobuchar clearing the path instead of splitting the moderate vote he’s now turned it around. He owes Clyburn big time.
Bernie not going down without a fight. Even last night, he started with the Him vs. the Democratic Establishment rhetoric. If the Dems want to hold the party together, they are going to need to work out a solution with the Sanders movement to bring them into the party in a more meaningful way. Biden/Sanders 2020… otherwise a lot of Bernie’s supporters will stay at home on November 3rd.
And today, he’s got new ads showing how much Obama really, really loved him.
Heaven forbid. That would be the Muppet Show Balcony Ticket. I like Harris or Duckworth for a VP.
No, they showed up because they knew Steven Chu would be the next secretary of energy.
Does Duckworth qualify as a natural born citizen?
I don’t think they’ll stay home but the democratic establishment does need to listen to them. People act like last night was an overwhelming blowout, but after all the ballots are counted, Biden and Sanders will be more or less tied. Biden will be in the lead, but it may be something like 650 vs 600 delegates.
Yes, her father was a U.S. Citizen.
Ahh! Chu.
So nothing new, then. They stayed home yesterday.
I think your information re voter turnout among Dems v. Republicans is out of date – meaning pre-South Carolina.
Democratic voter turnout was huge yesterday, and it wasn’t the Sanders base that turned out. These are new Democrats. People who have never voted before, people who have turned away from Trump.
In Virginia, Democratic primary voter turnout nearly doubled from 2016. In many other states, the turnout increased by 20-30%. Let me say it again: That’s with Bernie’s base staying home on the one day they really needed to show up for him.
I’d like to see the Sanders people work to unify the party, but like you, I heard Bernie immediately deploy the language of division last night. I’m sorry to say this, but when he starts using snarl terms like “Democratic establishment” and “corporate oligarchy” to describe other Democrats, he sounds exactly like Trump. He uses this Cult of Perpetual Grievance tactic in exactly the same way as Trump does. And yes, that word, “rigged.” Can that be far behind? Trump’s already using it.
The day Bernie used that same term in 2016 to describe what he believed was happening to him by Democrats even when it was already obvious he could not win the nomination, is the day I turned my back on him forever.
Bernie himself has created this false notion that Democrats are as underhanded and sneaky as Republicans. It persists to this day. You can see it in this thread. Now, whenever Democrats who vote do anything that is adverse to Bernie’s preferences, their motive must be because they “hate Bernie.” Not that they’re pursuing what they believe to be the best and wisest course, not because they seek party unity, not because they actually believe Biden is the best choice for the job. It’s just that they must “hate Bernie.” It sounds so much like Trump I can’t stand it.
Remember a few weeks back when Hillary Clinton said she hoped Bernie would not do a repeat of 2016 and be a spoiler in 2020? I fear she may have been prescient yet again.
“Feel the Bern,” indeed.
They’re acting like it was an overwhelming blowout because it was an overwhelming blowout.
Yesterday was supposed to be Sanders’ big day. He was going to come out of Super Tuesday with such an insurmountable delegate lead, no one else would be able to catch him and he would become the presumptive nominee. Biden not only overwhelmed Sanders’ projected lead. He outdistanced it handily.
And he did it with almost no money, no advertising and no ground game.
You can try to spin that like it’s no big deal, but it’s a big ****n’ deal.
What must the “democratic establishment” do to persuade Sanders supporters that they are listening to them? Enlisting Beto O’Rourke into working on gun legislation isn’t enough? Biden’s promise to immediately rejoin the Paris Climate Accord means nothing? His promise to immediately roll back Trump’s stupid tax cuts? What will Sanders supporters find persuasive? I’d genuinely like to know.
Last night was the best result the Democrats could have hoped for. Granted, their choices were between a flawed candidate and a disastrous one, but they picked the best hand out of a weak deck.
Biden is still an underdog to win against Trump, but I suspect the race will be close, which means Democrats should at least hold their own in he House and Senate. A Biden loss will still likely leave at least the House in Democratic hands, and Biden has a decent chance to win. So best case, Biden wins. Worst case, you have divided government and the Democrats retain some ability to keep Trump in check.
IMO, a Bernie candidacy would result in a general election blowout, which could easily result in Trump being re-elected with what he thinks is a big mandate, and a Republican House and Senate with the old school Republicans diminished and the Trumpoids ascending, That is the REAL disaster scenario, and even a right-leaning person like me thinks that would be a bad outcome.
Bernie’s only chance from here on in is probably to help force a brokered convention, but that would be a disaster for Democrats and Bernie would be crushed by the super delegates and the backroom power brokers anyway. He still has a slim chance to win the delegate race, but the minute Biden gets to the point where Bernie would have to win at the convention he should shut down his campaign and help unify the party against Trump.
But I don’t think he will.
Good points, Mr. Clark. It’s still very close, and there aren’t as many South Carolinas left for Biden to rack up big margins in.
You seem to be forgetting that TRUMP WON, and in no small part BECAUSE he used those words.
Hillary lost in 2016 because she was a shitty candidate, not because of Bernie Sanders. Biden will, probably, lose in 2020, because he’s a shitty candidate, not because of Bernie Sanders.
Let’s say I plan an expedition to climb Mount Everest. I’ve convinced all my friends to donate money to me for supplies and travel expenses. I am an average mountaineer with enough skill to climb average sized mountains, successfully, but I’m generally acknowledged to be past my prime. I’ve tried several times to climb Mount Everest before, and failed every time. I manage to accumulate enough money for the expedition. I get to Base Camp. I gather all my supplies and prepare the climb. I manage to make it 85% of the way up Mount Everest, before losing my footing and falling down off of the mountain and breaking my neck.
Who’s to blame? Bernie Sanders, of course!
Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Delaware, and Pennsylvania should be very good for Biden.
Didn’t he try this (sort of) at the 2016 Convention, by getting Vermont to be the last state and then personally calling for Clinton’s nomination by acclamation?
I don’t think he, personally, can unify the party - it’s up to his supporters, and it may well be a case of, “We don’t support you (as a person); we support your positions, which almost certainly won’t be enacted in a Biden administration, so why should we vote for him?”
That’s also why I don’t see him stepping down - his supporters would never forgive him for “caving in to the moderates.” What I think he needs to do once he realizes that Biden is going to be the nominee is, to explain to his supporters while he’s campaigning for Biden (assuming his Senate duties let him - I expect another budget fight starting in September) that they need to vote in progressives into Congress as well, so there’s a chance that at least some of the proposals will see the light of day.
He would need to do that even if he was the presumptive nominee. Being POTUS alone doesn’t mean your agenda gets passed. His ideas are so far out of mainstream, it will take huge shift in congress to get even a small portion of them passed.
Funnily enough, this is pretty much exactly, like word for word exactly what the Democrats said would happen to the Republicans when they nominated Trump. You’re replaying all the greatest hits; “They’re a spent force”, “They’ll be in the wilderness for the next twenty years”, “They’ll lose the house and the Senate”, “We’ll be able to get Garland on the SC” etc…etc… All you’ve done is switch the parties.
Sometimes, the wildcard pays off. Sometimes, the wildcard wins the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and gets to stack the SC with wildcard friendly judges. Sometimes, the wildcard destroys the other party.
You can smugly opine that no-one would vote for a socialist. But about 65 million people voted for a half-retarded reality show sex pest last time, so maybe you don’t know the electorate as well as you think you do.
If there was anything to be learned from 2016, it’s that a pissed off population will vote for a maverick over a Washington Insider, even if that maverick has no Earthly idea what he’s doing. Even if he’s a crook. Even if he grabs women by the pussy and lies with every breath that he can muster. People will pick him over the Washington Insider.
And what have the Democrats done? They’ve decided to fall in line behind yet another Washington Insider! Worse, they’re lining up behind a weaker Insider than the last one. Say what you like about Hillary Clinton but at least she was sharp. At least she was quick on her feet. At least she could speak in clear, coherent paragraphs. Joe Biden can barely speak at all. His gaffes are so frequent, and so goddamn weird that it’s hard to dispel the notion that he’s suffering from some form of dementia. Last night, at his victory speech, he got his wife confused with his sister and then promised a cure for cancer. It was pitiful.
I don’t know if Bernie could beat Trump (although the polls suggest he easily could), but I simply can’t crowbar my mind open wide enough to accommodate the notion of a Biden victory. He’s got more chance of winning Glamour’s Woman of the Year.