Biden Easily wins Virginia Democratic Primary

The exiting of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar from the 2020 Democrat primary contest and their pledge of support to Joe Biden in an effort to blunt Bernie Sanders' campaign prospects seems to have worked in Virginia.  While Virginia is moving to solid blue state status, it remains a moderate Democrat state where socialism even when coupled with the term democratic does not hold strong appeal as evidenced by Biden's 20 point lead over Sanders with almost all precincts reporting. Sanders supporters claim that Sanders represents "the majority" yet his winning of only 23% of the vote argues otherwise. Only in Sanders world does 23% trump - no pun intended - the other 67% of the voters.  Sanders' inability to win even half of the Democrat vote in Virginia (even in Northern Virginia) does not bode well for his ability to win in the key Mid-West states that will likely determine who wins the Electoral College in November.  It is a reality that Sanders - who like Trump only sees what he wants to see - and his base refuse to face.  Disturbingly, Sanders will no doubt claim his drubbing in Virginia was due to a conspiracy - imagined in Sanders' mind - of billionaires, the Democrat "establishment" and CEO's.  Anybody but the 67% of voters who voted for someone else. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Biden's win in Virginia.  Here are highlights (note how some Trump supporters voted for Sanders):

RICHMOND — Former vice president Joe Biden easily won Virginia's Democratic primary Tuesday, according to unofficial early returns, with exit polling suggesting that voters mostly chose the candidate they thought had the best chance of defeating President Trump.

With most of the vote counted, Biden was far ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Biden stands to gain many of the 99 delegates up for grabs in the increasingly blue state, according to unofficial returns.

In interviews with voters around Virginia, Biden emerged as a consensus pick only late in the game. Many said they settled on him after their preferred candidates dropped out. Others didn't decide until they stood in the voting booth.

But most shared one goal: "I want to get Trump out of office by all means necessary," said Josephine Stewart, 66, a cook for Richmond public schools who opted for Biden.

Virginia is still deciding its shade of blue. On Tuesday, that uncertainty followed voters to the polls, which closed at 7 p.m. with official returns expected soon after.
 In early exit polling by Edison Media Research, over half of Virginia Democratic primary voters said they would rather see the party nominate a candidate who can beat Trump, compared with about 4 in 10 who said they’d prefer a candidate who agrees with them on major issues.

About half gave Biden the best chance of winning in November, while roughly 2 in 10 said Sanders is best-positioned to beat Trump.

Across the state, polling places reported turnout slightly higher than usual. Absentee voting was up; Virginians cast nearly 54,700 votes in advance of Tuesday’s primary, up from just over 26,000 in 2016, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. At Yorkshire Elementary School in Manassas, Tim York cheerfully announced that he, too, chose Sanders in the open primary — in hopes of helping Trump get reelected in November.

“He’s the weakest candidate,” York, 39, said of Sanders, predicting that the senator’s calls for Medicare-for-all and free college tuition would turn off moderate voters. “I think the president has a good chance, regardless, but especially against Bernie.”

Concern that Sanders is vulnerable to Trump drove many voters to settle on Biden as the safer bet. In Henrico, Kate Giska, a 39-year-old small business owner and political independent, came to vote with her 7-year-old son. “My son’s name is Bernie, but we don’t think that Bernie is our candidate,” she said, describing Sanders as “just too extreme, just like Trump is a little too extreme. We’re kind of, like, in the middle, just, like, status quo, just get along.”

She voted for Biden, someone she thinks has appeal for “the middle voter, a candidate that can attract the masses.”

Virginia’s establishment Democrats have come out hard for Biden in the past few days. Former governor Terry McAuliffe led the charge, pumping up crowds and rallying other leaders, including Sen. Tim Kaine, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), head of the legislature’s Black Caucus. The question playing out Tuesday was whether that grass-roots enthusiasm is broad enough for Sanders to win.

Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, said he saw a similar phenomenon in Virginia in 2017: In the gubernatorial primary, former congressman Tom Perriello made a hard push for the Democratic nomination over then-Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam. Perriello ran to the left, tapping into a Sanders-like populism that brought him fervent support at rallies throughout the state.

But Northam wound up beating Perriello by a wide margin, with voters seeming to reward the more middle-of-the road, establishment candidate. Northam then easily defeated Republican opponent Ed Gillespie.

“Bernie may have a ceiling in Virginia,” Kidd said, because establishment Democrats still outnumber the young liberals.

My fear is that Sanders has a low ceiling in every moderate state, including the crucial Mid-West states.

The Insane Fury of the Democrat Online Left Toward Buttigieg (and Moderate Democrats)

Back in early 2017 Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders thrust themselves into Virginia's Democrat gubernatorial contest pushing a far left candidate and trashing Ralph Northam who ultimately went on to win the primary and the general election.  Had Warren and Sanders and their far left followers prevailed, in my view, Virginia likely would now have a Republican governor and who knows where control of the General Assembly would now lie.   All that mattered was that Northam did not meet their standard of ideological purity and wasn't radical enough.  Never mind that Northam ran on perhaps the most progressive agenda of any gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history.  It was a near repeat of how the far left was similarly disenchanted with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and seemingly stayed home or voted for third party candidates - think Jill Stein - to throw the election to Donald Trump.  History is repeating itself at the national level again as the left of the Democrat coalition attacks moderates and pushes an agenda that likely would help re-elect Donald Trump.  A prime target of the left's wrath is Pete Buttigieg whose sin is not being radical (and un-electable) enough to meet the left's purity tests.  Absurdly, some of the far right in the gay community whine that Buttigieg is not "gay enough."  From my experience, one is either gay or not, which underscores the idiocy of these folks. A piece in CNN looks at the lefts targeting of Buttigieg and moderates and, in my view, secure a Trump victory in 2020.  Here are excerpts: 

Increasingly, their opposition to Buttigieg is turning to fury, fueled by a boisterous online ecosystem of progressives who are driving anti-Buttigieg commentary and memes. They view him as beholden to corporate interests, unable to win over the diverse Democratic base that these activists take pride in, and disinterested in the systemic change they believe the country desperately needs on issues like the influence of big money on politics and climate change and systemic racism.

These narratives have persisted in spite of what his campaign points to as evidence to the contrary, including that Buttigieg has proposed plans to address those very issues such as a climate change plan to cut emissions to zero by 2050 and a proposal to address systemic racism that he calls the Douglass Plan.

Buttigieg supporters say the criticism has become unhinged, with some progressives eager to latch on to virtually any negative narrative about Buttigieg whether it is true or not.  There is no question: The youngest candidate in the 2020 presidential race, at age 37, isn't doing well with young Democratic voters. Since he jumped into the race, Buttigieg has gone from a little-known, small-town mayor, to representative of the Democratic Party vision has of itself as an inclusive party to, now, the arch-nemesis of certain progressive advocates.

The intense heat on Buttigieg from some corners of his party comes as he rises in both early state and national polls and vies with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for a slice of the college-educated electorate. Both candidates have upped their contrasts with each other in recent weeks as the Iowa caucuses near.

"The nature of presidential politics is the better you do, the more you are tested," said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist of his campaigns. "Buttigieg has made a pretty remarkable progress in 2019. Now he is being tested as a legitimate top tier candidate and we'll see how he handles it." "It is an inevitable part of this process," he added. Buttigieg's critics cite a dramatic turn in his approach to his candidacy and are particularly incensed by his criticism of Warren on "Medicare For All." (Buttigieg, for his part, has pushed for a proposal called "Medicare for all who want it," an option that would keep private health care plans.) They consider his low standing with black and Hispanic voters to be disqualifying, and pejoratively refer to him as "Mayo Pete" for his overwhelmingly white supporters. As a result, his candidacy, in their view, is akin to the vanity project of an overly ambitious, privileged white man [as if Sanders' isn't exactly that]. "He's phony," said Adam Jentleson, when asked why he opposes Buttigieg's candidacy so strongly. 

For Washington insiders, Jentleson is a well-known figure, a former senior aide to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, a far cry from the kind of left-wing progressive candidate Jentleson now would prefer. But now, Jentleson is known online as a progressive flame thrower, leading the anti-Buttigieg charge and slamming him for his attacks on more progressive candidates like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Warren.
 Buttigieg's campaign largely dismisses the intense criticism they have experienced from people like Jentleson. "We're not focused on the small echo chamber of Washington insiders talking to each other on Twitter," said Chris Meagher, a Buttigieg spokesman, "we're focused on talking to voters about the issues that matter most to voters." He continued: "This election is about defeating Donald Trump and uniting the country the day after this president leaves office. Pete is the best candidate to do just that." The kind of attacks that have been directed at Buttigieg have puzzled the candidate as well as his aides. And as they have gone from the internet to real life, including a wave of new protests outside of his high dollar fundraisers. "It is a little strange, because I think that I broadly share a lot of the same values and goals," Buttigieg told The Washington Post's Bob Costa in an interview when asked if the protests bother him. "It's a little hard to have a conversation with them, so I don't know for sure." It has been perplexing to Buttigieg supporters that a particularly vitriolic brand of anger has been reserved for Buttigieg rather than other moderate candidates like Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Vice President Joe Biden, both of whom share Buttigieg's positions broadly on issues like Medicare for All and college affordability. Many of the progressive voices fanning the anti-Buttigieg flames explain the disproportionate attention by pointing to Buttigieg's standing in the polls and a feeling of inevitability that Biden's candidacy is not as strong as it currently seems. The distaste among some gay Democrats to Buttigieg has been the subject of a fair amount of analysis -- even raising the interest of Tim Miller, a moderate gay Republican and former Romney aide who has quizzically observed what he believes is a disproportionate amount of vitriol directed toward Buttigieg.

"They're the meanest," Miller said. "Within the gay community, unfortunately, I think it's a lot of resentment that Pete does not represent the gay ideal -- the pre-conceived notions about what a gay President would act like."

"The idea that he's a closet Republican is absurd, but I think because of his nature as a mild-mannered, traditional-acting religious man, that it's easier to demean him as being Republican lite," he added. But for others, the part of Buttigieg's identity that is the most salient is not that he is gay, but that he is white, which they believe has insulated him from the kind of scrutiny that other candidates have been subjected to. Throughout the Trump presidency Democrats have insisted that removing him from office is a top priority, but the #neverPete sentiment is testing that.

Donald Trump and his campaign must be smiling broadly.  If Trump wins re-election, as in 2016, the far left of the Democrats will bear a significant guilt for that result which will be the antithesis to all they allegedly support. 

Biden 2020 as Romney 2012

A lengthy piece in Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball looks at the current Democrat presidential primary contest and draws parallels between Joe Biden's and Mitt Romney's 2012 primary victory.  The comparison is worrisome given that Romney went down to defeat in the general election - something I fear could well happen with Biden even as I and many others will vote for whoever is nominated rather than Trump (one friend has secured bumper stickers which say "The Democrat in 2020").  Yet some on the far left of the Democrat coalition may reprise 2016 and sulk at home or throw away their votes on 3rd party candidates and, by default, re-elect Trump who is the antithesis to all that they claim to support. Such behavior - one cannot call it reasoning - is mind numbing, but a true potential given the cult mentality of some on the far left. I truly do not believe the nation can survive another four years of Trump - at least not as a democracy - as the Republican Party displays more and more desire to push the country to a near autocracy.  Here are article highlights:

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Joe Biden doesn’t rhyme with Mitt Romney, although one of the words emblazoned on the side of Biden’s bus (malarkey) sort of does.

More to the point, we are beginning to wonder if the endurance of Biden at the top of the Democratic heap is beginning to resemble Mitt Romney’s endurance two cycles ago.

Despite his troubles, Romney seemed like the best bet to win the nomination for almost the entire campaign (except perhaps for when Rick Perry entered the race to great acclaim in August 2011).

The same may be true of Biden, although the race remains volatile. But Biden’s position is arguably stronger than Romney’s was at this time eight years ago.

In that 2012 race, Republican voters appeared at times quite willing to go with a different option than Romney. From late August 2011 through February 2012, Romney was surpassed no less than five different times in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, first by Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich (for two different stretches), and then, finally, Rick Santorum. Yet Romney always ended up back in the lead after his setbacks and emerged by the end of the first month of primary contests as the clear favorite to win the nomination (that year’s race started in January, not February). Romney benefited from split opposition as the primary season went along, with Santorum, Gingrich, and Ron Paul all cannibalizing the non-Romney vote.

Biden, meanwhile, has consistently led national polling. For a brief time in early October, Elizabeth Warren effectively tied Biden in the RealClearPolitics average, but Biden has since regained a decent-sized lead — he’s in the high 20s, with no one else within 10 points of his lead: Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) along with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg are all clustered within the low-to-mid teens.

In the first two contests, Biden trails in Iowa and New Hampshire. However, he leads in Nevada and South Carolina, which round out the February contests before March 3’s Super Tuesday kicks off a three-week barrage of primaries.

Democratic voters have been sampling their other options, but they have not coalesced around a clear alternative to Biden. Again, this is reminiscent of GOP voters’ inability to ever settle on a true Romney opponent.

Beyond the top four, the freest-spending candidates (by far) are two others: late-arriving Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, and wealthy activist Tom Steyer. Neither have been able to crack the top tier anywhere, although they have surpassed many other candidates who have far more formidable political resumes but far less money to spend.

Bloomberg, who could spend a billion dollars on ads without making a dent in his personal fortune, is pursuing an unusual strategy, declining to seek the breadth of donor backing currently required to qualify for debates and focusing on building his support nationally as opposed to in the early states. It is an unusual strategy that we don’t think will work — ultimately, we’re skeptical that Democrats are all that interested in buying what Bloomberg is selling, and whoever does well in the early states will bask in the glow of free media more valuable than Bloomberg’s paid variety — but Bloomberg’s level of spending may end up being unprecedented for a primary.

The four polling leaders, and the two big spenders, are denying oxygen to the other candidates, of which there are many. That’s even after Gov. Steve Bullock (D-MT), former Rep. Joe Sestak (D, PA-7), and, most notably, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) dropped out of the race earlier this week.

Her exit arguably helps Biden the most. Not because Biden necessarily stands to inherit the bulk of Harris’s meager support, but because her exit removed someone who even in her diminished state seemed like a potential threat to him.

Biden’s top challengers right now — Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg, all of whom are whites elected from northern cities/states — do not appear to have any obvious appeal to black voters, particularly older black voters. Poll after poll shows Biden, who served dutifully and effectively as the first black president’s second-in-command, with an imposing lead with African Americans. Nationally, Quinnipiac University pegged his support at 43% with blacks and The Economist/YouGov at 48%, with the next-closest candidates struggling to break double figures.

Could black support shift? Sure. Again, let’s keep an open mind. But the possibility of dramatic change isn’t the same as the likelihood of dramatic change. Biden could do poorly in both lily white Iowa and New Hampshire and still retain significant black support, so long as his leading rivals remain Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg. The real threat to Biden is if one of these three win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and maybe even more diverse Nevada too — thus establishing themselves as the clear alternative to Biden. . .

Why are we so fixated on black voters? Because they form the bedrock of the Democratic Party, dominate the voting in many Southern states, and strongly influence the voting in many more.

Biden remains the most acceptable candidate available for black voters, at least at the moment, and those voters also tend to be more moderate-leaning, too.

As Theodore Johnson noted in our recent book, The Blue Wave, the growth of liberal/progressive self-identification among Democrats has been driven by whites, not blacks. With Warren and Sanders positioned clearly to Biden’s left, with Buttigieg currently showing so little appeal to blacks, and with the black candidates either struggling or exiting, Biden’s position with black voters remains formidable.

This is not to say Biden has been a strong candidate or has run a great campaign. He continues to show his age in public appearances and debates, and he is lagging his rivals in fundraising. That’s different than Romney, who raised the most among the Republicans in 2012 and had a well-funded Super PAC that his allies deployed to great effect at critical moments of the campaign (one wonders if the nascent Biden Super PAC could do something similar — he very well may need it).

The Democrats who fear Biden may not be up to the task of this grueling campaign could well be proven right, and if Biden were to be nominated only to lose to Donald Trump, parts of the left will make the same argument that parts of the right did in 2012: the party establishment sacrificed ideological purity and received nothing in return.

For the general election, it isn’t just who is chosen as the Democratic nominee. It’s how he or she is chosen, how damaged the nominee is from the process, and how fractured the party is once it’s over. Democrats being Democrats, some will be off sulking for a while.

And some primary voters may disappear in the fall: It’s easy to imagine some supporters of the outsider candidates, most notably Sanders, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI-2), and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, falling by the wayside, even if the candidates themselves dutifully get behind the eventual nominee.

Still, Trump is a great unifier for Democrats, and that effect will kick in come fall, maybe even summer. We still see the general election as basically a 50-50 proposition, which is reflected in our early Electoral College ratings.

I cannot help but be very afraid of where things might end up come November 2020. Emigrating might yet be a plausible option. 

Democratic Candidates Veer Left, Ignoring Winning 2018 Strategy

Having been involved in both the GOP and the Democrat parties over the last three decades, I often think that at various times, each party has shown itself to be its own worse enemy.  Now, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential and federal elections, Democrat candidates seem to be quickly becoming a potential threat to defeating Donald Trump and holding the House of Representatives and gaining control of the U.S. Senate.  As a prior post noted, some are jumping on board the reparations bandwagon which I perceive to be an absolute loser in the 2020 general election.  Similarly, many of the would be presidential nominees are lurching leftward seemingly oblivious to the realities that (i) one most be able to win the general election, not just the primary, and (ii) voters - and especially GOP attack ads - will not allow far left statements and positions to go forgotten come the 2020 general election.  What plays with the so-called liberal elites doesn't play well in key states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what drives me to distraction as candidates pander to extreme elements of the Democrat base with no thought to what will happen once the winner of the primary contest is selected.  Here are highlights:

With a full embrace of liberal positions on hot-button issues from immigration to health care, taxes and abortion, the Democratic presidential field has effectively abandoned the strategy that propelled the party to a landslide victory in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 43 GOP House seats and won 31 districts that Trump carried in 2016. The sharp shift to the left, laid bare over the course of two nights last week on the Miami debate stage, has scrambled the country’s political dynamics headed into a 2020 campaign in which Democrats hope the 2018 results, combined with Trump’s relatively low approval ratings, would put them in a strong position to retake the White House.

Last year’s midterm strategy focused on what party leaders viewed as a sensibly moderate message designed to attract centrist voters. In that campaign, Democratic congressional candidates denounced GOP tax increases for the middle class in Trump’s 2017 tax cut and blasted Republican plans to take away federal protections for preexisting conditions in private insurance.

But many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates are running on a Medicare-for-all plan that would replace private insurance entirely for most Americans and raise middle class taxes to pay for it. Several of the candidates support plans to not just increase background checks for guns but buy back guns already in circulation. They are also elevating social issues Trump has embraced politically in the past like police misconduct, transgender rights and immigration.

“These are not mainstream proposals. Think about it. They are way to the left of Barack Obama,” said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster working on Trump’s reelection campaign. “They are talking about middle class and small business tax increases, no restrictions on abortion. How do you think these things are going over in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio?”

Democratic strategists from the 2018 campaign agree there is a danger.

“We should not be deploying strategies right now that make the national battlefield smaller,” said Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His research on the electorate after Trump’s 2016 win concluded it was a mistake to get into a simple base turnout fight against Trump, who has proved remarkably successful at motivating non-college educated white voters to go to the polls.

In the short term, the new Democratic messaging is aimed less at suburban swing voters in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan than at liberal donors clustered in coastal cities and nonwhite voters in the party’s base, who tend to be more liberal and hold significant sway over the nominating fight.

Last year’s midterm strategy focused on what party leaders viewed as a sensibly moderate message designed to attract centrist voters. In that campaign, Democratic congressional candidates denounced GOP tax increases for the middle class in Trump’s 2017 tax cut and blasted Republican plans to take away federal protections for preexisting conditions in private insurance.

But it is not clear how dramatically the candidates plan to pivot if they do win the nomination, and whether they will be successful. Many reject the argument that more liberal policies will alienate needed voters. They point to Trump’s inability to use immigration fears of migrant caravans to stop a Democratic wave in 2018.

Warren and Sanders, in particular, have cast Trump as a symptom of broader rot in the American political system, not the root cause. The larger problem can only be fixed, they argue, with dramatic policy changes that shift resources from the wealthy, including new taxes on Wall Street, corporate profits or the richest Americans. They contend that message will ultimately resonate with many of the same working-class white voters who supported Trump in 2016.

[S]ome veterans of Obama’s 2012 reelection also chimed in with concern, not just for the coming election but for the prospect of governing, even if Democrats recapture the Senate and hold the House.

“I wonder if we’re solving a problem that is not there and spending the vast majority of our political capital on it,” said Obama’s former campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, who is unaffiliated in the 2020 race. “Expanding upon and improving Obamacare accomplishes the vast majority of goals that Democrats are looking for.”

Polling shows that single payer health care remains a confounding idea for many Americans. Recent Kaiser Family Foundation polls have found that 56 percent of the nation favors the Medicare-for-all, compared to 74 percent of Americans who support expanded Medicare as an option for younger Americans in addition to private insurance.
When the same people were told that a Medicare-for-all plan would raise taxes and eliminate private health insurance, support fell to 37 percent.

Rick Tyler, a conservative Republican strategist who has become a vocal critic of Trump, said he believes Democrats are playing right into Trump’s hands.

“They are not talking to the blue collar workers that I understand that vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan,” Tyler said. “Are they seriously capable of choosing a nominee who is going to beat Donald Trump? Right now, I have my doubts.”

Perhaps Democrats Have Not Moved So Far to the Left After All

I have noted many times my fears that the far left of the Democrat Party would push too hard for far left policies not popular with a majority of Americans and, as a result nearly guarantee the re-election of Donald Trump - something I see nothing less than a catastrophic.   While it is very, very early in the 2020 Democrat nomination process, something is happening that suggest that perhaps the far left of the party has been living in a bubble and is simply out of touch with even the mainstream of Democrats much less the mainstream of all voters. Other than Bernie Sanders, the far left favorites are struggling to gain traction and Joe Biden - written off as a has been - is leading the pools by a for now commanding margin.  In third place behind Biden and Sanders is Pete Buttigieg who the far left is attacking for being "too white" or "too privileged," taking identity politics to an extreme. Taken together, the Biden and Buttigieg supporters suggest that a majority of Democrats are moderates and simply do not want what the far left is selling.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excepts (note the reference to how wrong the far left was on Virginia's blackface debacle where the far right played the far left like a fine violin): 

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive . . . . And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

[I]nitial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. . . . News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular.

While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it’s only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. . . . . The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. . . . Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump’s gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country’s problems on a single party.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam’s resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

Many in GOP would like Nothing More than Sanders as Democrat Nominee

Sometimes seeing who those on the opposing team see as must vulnerable ought to make one think twice about their own choice.  Rational people might pause and question their support when the opposing political party see your choice as the easiest one to defeat.  Most likely, such thoughts will not register with Bernie Sanders whose peevishness put Trump - a man diametrically opposed to what they claimed to espouse - in the White House in 2016.  Many Democrats fear a reprise of 2016.  As a piece in Politico reports, many Republicans are salivating at the prospect of Sanders winning the 2020 Democrat nomination.   I share their views of Sanders' potential liabilities, especially the risk of losing moderate and independent voters.  Note how Republicans also view a Sanders nomination as a boost to their effort to retain control of the U.S. Senate.  Here are article highlights:

Republicans like their chances of keeping the Senate in 2020. But there’s one thing they think would all but seal the deal: Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Some GOP incumbents are practically cheering him on, confident there’s no way a self-described democratic socialist could win a general election against President Donald Trump and that he’d drag other Democrats on the ballot with him.

“It would be good for us to have a nominee like that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection next year and sounded downright giddy about the prospect of Sanders representing Democrats at the top of the ticket.

Trump and the Senate GOP have explicitly designed their 2020 strategy around Sanders, beating the anti-socialism drum incessantly and attempting to tether every Democrat on the ballot to what they call a creep away from capitalism and toward collectivism.

“A lot of people think that in that crowded field, he could break out,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). He added: “If we can run a race against a person that’s an out-of-the-closet socialist and promoting socialist ideas, it’s a great contrast for us.”

The strategy shows Republicans are much more comfortable talking about Sanders and tying other Democrats to his brand of socialism than they are in defending this year's meager legislative agenda. But Republicans could be making the same mistake Democrats made four years ago, when Trump launched his presidential campaign and they began salivating over the prospect of a Senate sweep.

That misunderstanding of Trump’s appeal is now the subject of repeated examination by Democratic politicians and strategists.

“I would suggest they underestimate me at their own peril and I hope they do,” Sanders said in an interview. Republicans are unlikely to run on their own forward-leaning agenda, he added, “So they have to figure out some boogeyman that they think they can run against.”

Though Republicans will try to attach the socialist label to anyone who endorses sweeping expansions of government health care programs and climate change legislation, GOP lawmakers and Trump allies concede it would work much better against Sanders than it would against some of his rivals. Independent voters tired of Trump might hold their nose and back him again if Sanders were the alternative, the GOP logic goes, in turn lifting vulnerable Republican senators to victory. However, one Democrat working on Senate races said a Sanders nomination could help individual Democratic congressional candidates assert their independence from their party in key races.

Democrats have a clear but narrow path to the Senate majority that hinges largely on picking up seats in states like Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Arizona, and defending incumbents in Michigan, Alabama, New Hampshire and Virginia. Democrats need to net at least three Senate seats to win the chamber.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is urging at-risk Republicans to emphasize to voters that the GOP Senate is a “firewall against socialism in this country.” And apparently they're listening.

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, perhaps the most endangered Republican up next year, is lacing into Sanders’ proposal to let prisoners vote as “not who America is” and the “antithesis [of] our values.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), up for reelection next year, said his fortunes will improve if he gets to run against Sanders because he can cast his race as "a referendum between free enterprise and socialism."

[S]ome Democratic senators said privately they agreed with Republicans that a Sanders nomination would be too easy for the GOP to demagogue. Some fretted about the down-ballot effect he would have on Senate and House races if he were to win the nomination. They declined to speak publicly because it's early in the race and they didn't want to exacerbate tensions within the party.

Two moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, both acknowledged that the GOP’s strategy of painting the entire Democratic Party as in lockstep with Sanders could work in a national election. But Tester, who won reelection in deep red Montana last year, said Republicans are merely deflecting, given their own heartburn over Trump.

The LGBT Community Is Often Its Own Worse Enemy

Like the Democrat Party as a whole, the far left of the LGBT community is often the community's worse enemy since it continually wanders off into the political weeds, utterly clueless to the need of (i) pushing candidates with a realistic chance of winning, and (ii) stop pushing radical agendas that a majority of Americans simply either do not want or find outright fearful. Worse yet, these elements have embraced the Democrat circular firing squad model of demanding total perfection in politicians from birth with no forgiveness ever for past mistakes even if they occurred decades ago. A case in point here in Virginia is Equality Virginia which has burned its bridges with Governor Northam, Lt. Governor Fairfax and Attorney General Herring, all of whom were dis-invited from the Commonwealth Dinner last month and told they were unwelcome. Lost in what I can only view as delusion, members of the EV board think they still have a "great relationship" with these powerful Democrats who they have insulted and scorned. With this type of clueless leadership, it's no wonder EV has managed to pass so little legislatively. 

On the national level, similar cluelessness is coming from far left elements in the LGBT community who are attacking Pete Buttigieg for being a white male rather than being ecstatic that a gay candidate for the first time ever has been deemed credible at the presidential level. Even if Buttigieg doesn't win the Democrat nomination, he is opening minds and generating much needed conversations, but for the circular firing squad crowd, they cannot forgive him for being white and male.   A piece in Huffington Post looks at this self-destructive phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Pete Buttigieg has a shot at becoming the first openly gay president in American history. But his candidacy is already exposing tensions in the LGBTQ community between gay white men, who benefit from the economic and social privileges of being white men, and all the other queer people who don’t.

“Is Buttigieg a run-of-the-mill white male candidate, or does his sexuality set him apart? That mammoth question can be broken down into smaller ones that get at why diversity matters,” Slate’s Christina Cauterucci wrote in March. “Has Buttigieg faced setbacks or barriers to success because he’s gay? … Would a win for Buttigieg be as historically significant and culturally meaningful as a win for a member of an underrepresented race or gender?”  “In a primary for the overwhelmingly pro-gay Democratic Party, Buttigieg can be more accurately lumped in with his white male peers than with anyone else,” she concluded.

Cauterucci’s piece drew immediate criticism, primarily by white men, for dismissing Buttigieg as not being gay enough. “Ludicrous,” wrote Drew Goins, assistant editor of The Washington Post opinions section. “It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause,” wrote John Aravosis, editor of AMERICABlog.

The LGBTQ community is obviously not monolithic. It has the same fault lines of race, gender, class and economics that persist in the rest of American culture. But some of these disparities may have been obscured under President Barack Obama, who helped unite queer people around his pro-LGBTQ agenda. And President Donald Trump has certainly given queer people a common purpose in fighting his assault on LGBTQ rights.

At a time of historic diversity among Democratic presidential candidates, Buttigieg ― a white, upper-class, Ivy League-educated, Midwestern man of faith ― is exciting LGBTQ rights groups as much as making them confront more complicated questions about the best person to represent the interests of someone who is, say, transgender, black and female.

“As a black, same-gender-loving man, hearing a white, gay, Democrat political leader introduce new ways of having conversations about political identity and religion and intersections is exciting,” said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. “But we need to pause to think about not only how gayness exists as a political identity for gay white men, but how LGBTQ gains have worked over the last few years.”

Johns said the priorities of prominent LGBTQ rights groups have largely been driven by gay white men, from fights to allow domestic partnerships in various states, to ensuring that financially comfortable gay and lesbian couples can adopt children, to fights over banning gay conversion therapy. . . . . “Not only is the world set up to benefit them, but shifts in political and social environments have allowed them to enjoy additional privileges. While those gains have been made, there hasn’t been parallel progress or investment in black communities or black LGBTQ communities.”

Some LGBTQ rights groups didn’t seem to want to talk about Buttigieg’s candidacy exposing these fractures. The National Center for Transgender Equality declined to comment for this story. The National LGBTQ Task Force did not respond to a request for comment.

Human Rights Campaign spokeswoman Sarah McBride said LGBTQ people all over the country are inspired by Buttigieg’s candidacy.

“Throughout his campaign for president, Mayor Pete has made a point of emphasizing LGBTQ equality, including the urgent need to fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people,” said McBride. “The unprecedented field of pro-equality candidates running for president will ensure that LGBTQ rights are a central part of the 2020 debate, and it’s clear that LGBTQ voters will play a decisive role in both the primary and the general election.”

“No single candidate can represent the diversity of the LGBTQ community, and Buttigieg undoubtedly enjoys advantages because of his gender and race,” added Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “But he is also a compelling candidate who has shown tremendous courage, including by challenging the harms inflicted on LGBTQ people by officials and leaders who misuse religion to justify discrimination and bigotry. We can acknowledge the impact of sexism and racism on our national politics without diminishing Buttigieg’s importance or well-deserved success.”

To be clear, all of the LGBTQ rights advocates HuffPost talked to ― some spoke on the record, some spoke privately ― said they are thrilled that Buttigieg is a candidate. But some felt torn about yet another white man getting so much attention in a race full of women and people of color, particularly after Hillary Clinton came so close to winning in 2016.

“Do we think it will end up causing some fault lines within our community? I’m sure it will. Mostly among women, from our corner,” said Stephanie Sandberg, the executive director of LPAC, which helps elect LGBTQ women. “But we now have more than 20 people in the race. We have plenty of time. I hope [Buttigieg] does as well as he can and continues to pave the way. It’s fantastic.”

For his part, Buttigeg seems fully aware that he can’t speak for the entire LGBTQ community. But he’s made efforts to embrace the causes of it.

The reality for Buttigieg, though, is that his most enthusiastic LGBTQ supporters so far are affluent gay white men. He “rarely goes more than a few days” between private events hosted by prominent gay donors, The New York Times reported Wednesday, including gatherings in New York City and Beverly Hills hosted by composer Stephen Sondheim, Bravo host Andy Cohen and former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe.

Johns said he’s waiting to see who Buttigieg surrounds himself with and the diversity of perspectives he’s willing to consider before deciding if he can get behind him.

Sadly, individuals like Johns seemingly would rather by default re-elect Trump than recognize that politics is about what is possible and will get the support of a majority of voters. That is objective reality - something lost on too many in the far left of the LGBT community. As for complaints about the issues pushed by many LGBT rights organizations, another reality is that most are disproportionately funded by white gay males who, by default set priorities. 

Will the Far Left and Their Media Attack Dogs Re-Elect Trump?

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One of my ongoing fears is that the far left Democrats - e.g., Bernie Sanders cultists and Warren supporters - will splinter the party and as a result re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.  Indeed, had fewer Sanders supporters stayed home or voted for totally un-electable third party candidates such as Jill Stein, Trump would not have been elected. Frighteningly, nothing seems to have been learned from 2016, and the same factions aided by certain media outlets that seem more concerned with satiating the egos of some of their staff members, pushing an agenda to extreme for independents and moderates and, worse yet, attacking viable Democrat candidates seem hell bent on reprising the same electoral disaster again in 2020.  ANY Democrat is better than re-electing Trump and without a Democrat victory, NONE of what these individuals and media outlets claim to support will be accomplished. Defeating Trump and the GOP must be the only focus and the sniping at moderate Democrats needs to cease.  A piece in Politico looks at the damage being done by The Intercept, one far left media outlet.  Here are excerpts:

Captain Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, has a picture-perfect political résumé: the Space Shuttle commander and veteran of the U.S. Navy became a gun control advocate after his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot and suffered a severe brain injury.

For a broad swath of Democrats, a Kelly campaign is precisely what the party needs. He’s a patriotic, mediagenic, center-friendly liberal who has a rare chance to turn the longtime Republican stronghold of Arizona into a state with two Democratic U.S. senators.

But on March 5, a missile came for Kelly—launched, improbably, from the left. Reporter Akela Lacy revealed that Kelly, who like many progressive hopefuls claimed he was running a campaign free of corporate PAC donations, had made at least 19 paid corporate speeches in front of audiences including Goldman Sachs. A follow-up story dinged Kelly for another swampy tradition: a planned appearance at a fundraiser hosted by lobbyists from Capitol Counsel, a major Washington firm.

The stories were published by the Intercept, the five-year-old left-leaning online news outlet, and they stung.

Founded in 2014 by muckraking national security journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, the Intercept is still best-known for its first incarnation as an obsessive anti-surveillance reporting enterprise, and an activist voice for privacy and civil liberties—more anti-government than partisan.
 But in the past few years, and especially in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign, the Intercept has taken a sharp turn into party politics. With a hard-charging Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim, driving its political coverage, the Intercept has taken a more classic “gotcha” approach to campaign reporting, and landed in a unique spot in the media ecosystem—as the loudest voice attacking Democrats from the left. As the party grapples with fractures emerging in its coalition, the Intercept is a crowbar working those fractures apart, probing hard at fault lines like criminal justice reform, “Medicare for All,” the “Green New Deal,” racial justice and corporate funding of candidates like Kelly. The outlet has become a routine headache for the Democratic establishment and its leadership.
 By far its favorite target has been the party organization that works to elect Democrats to the House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which the Intercept has repeatedly pilloried for seeking to kneecap a new wave of insurgent lefties. In a March story, the Intercept hammered the DCCC for moving to blacklist consultants working with primary challengers to Democratic incumbents. . . . The Intercept has also offered a platform to the candidates it favors.
 In today’s fast-moving media environment, seemingly every election elevates a new publication to the center of the conversation. In 2008, there was the Huffington Post and Politico; 2012 saw the rise of BuzzFeed; in 2016, Breitbart transformed the conservative media landscape. As 2020 approaches, some see the Intercept as the political site of the moment, a disruptive force focused on one of the most important political stories of our time, the Democratic identity crisis.
 But as it gears up for 2020, the Intercept faces some big questions. One is whether its owner supports the war it is waging. The Intercept is almost totally funded by a single billionaire backer, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who supports the site through parent organization First Look Media. Omidyar, who through a spokesperson declined to comment for this story, appears to live in a different political reality from his own publication.
 And unlike the heroes of the Intercept’s political coverage, Omidyar isn’t some left-wing outsider; he’s a mainstream Democratic donor and was even a supporter of the conservative “Never Trump” super PAC. Several people I spoke to—sources inside the company and other media observers—are now asking: How much longer will the billionaire patron bankroll a news outlet so clearly at odds with his own politics?
 The Intercept faces a political question, as well: As the Democratic Party strives to mount a coherent attack against a president it loathes, will the site’s belligerent strategy be effective, or will it handicap the only Democrats who have a serious chance of capturing the White House?
 [Is it] a Breitbart of the left, trafficking in drive-by hit pieces, an approach that will ultimately undercut the larger goals the site supports. Says one Democratic operative, frustrated with the Intercept’s relentless attacks on the Democratic center: “Grim apparently doesn’t ever want to win an election again and is dead set against anyone who does.”
 Intercept headlines tend toward the flashy, with stories that are hyper-aggressive toward those the publication deems too moderate. That approach can lead to clumsiness, as when the site last year had to walk back a story that originally reported as fact that DCCC-backed candidate Gil Cisneros had left a message on the answering machine of his competitor saying he was about to go negative. The Intercept also dedicated plenty of favorable coverage to a host of progressive candidates who lost their primaries or—perhaps more damaging to the party—lost winnable races to Republicans in 2018 (Intercept haters often point to Kara Eastman in Nebraska and Dana Balter in New York).
 The Intercept’s “out for blood” approach, some Democrats argue, is totally wrong for a moment where the party’s sole focus should be on beating Donald Trump in 2020. “The Intercept at its best is when it’s doing the hard work that others will not do, and it’s not an oppo drop,” says one Democratic operative. “The Intercept at its worst is when it’s ideology with a little work.”

Even progressive voices in the trenches have their doubts. “The sort of antagonistic style of journalism that you have to do to report on surveillance abuses and police abuses, I think, doesn’t necessarily translate as well when you’re doing intra-Democratic Party things,” says Sean McElwee, co-founder of progressive think tank Data for Progress, and a lefty warrior frequently in the mix on intramural Democratic squabbles. “Democratic voters don’t think that Kamala Harris is the equivalent of the surveillance state. I think a lot of people are concerned about her prosecutor record, but they still like her.”

If the Intercept had a fairly clear hero and villain in the 2016 Democratic primary, 2020 is already proving to be more complicated. Or at least more crowded. Warren is most certainly on the site’s good side, whereas candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker have received tougher coverage. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden—a former prosecutor and a onetime opponent of school busing, respectively—have no shot at winning the Intercept primary.
 As in 2016, Sanders is a clear Intercept favorite. In March, Briahna Gray, a columnist and senior politics editor for the site, joined the Sanders campaign as national press secretary—no surprise to anyone reading her Intercept coverage.

Sanders cultist will shriek that Sanders has the best shot at winning against Trump, but the appear totally out of touch with the Mid-West and even states like Virginia. He or a Warren will push moderates right back into the arms of Trump. 

Will Far Left Democrats Help Re-elect Trump in 2020?

One of my biggest fears as thing heat up in the 2020 election is that the far left of the Democrat Party will drive candidates too leftward to make them electable in the 2020 presidential general election.  What we are witnessing is akin to what one sees within LGBT activism where wealthy gays living in liberal cities and states are clueless as to the reality on the ground in most of the country and want an agenda that simply is not realistic in terms of legislation that can be actually enacted and what will play well with a majority of voters. In the context of the 2020 election, some far left Democrats are showing a similar blindness as to what can garner 270 electoral college votes and play passably in moderate and more conservative states.  Add to this the purity police and the no forgiveness ever mindset we have witnessed in Virginia over the last two plus months, and Trump must be smiling with glee.  A long piece in Vanity Fair looks at this very real danger of far left Democrats sabotaging more moderate candidates who could actually take on Trump and win.  Here are article highlights:

Ideas that once seemed out-of-bounds are now creeping into the mainstream of Democratic politics, with social media acting as the accelerant. Democrats, in the rush to appease the noisiest voices on the Internet and grab onto any gust of fleeting attention, so far have shown they’re willing to jump on a bandwagon of ideas that Barack Obama would never have endorsed on his way to winning two presidential elections: backing reparations, abolishing ICE, getting rid of the Electoral College, running away from the word “capitalism.” As The New York Times put it on Tuesday, “activists are leveraging the early stages of the Democratic primary, creating pseudo-litmus tests for candidates eager to respond to the energy that is driving more extreme policy proposals.”

These “extreme” litmus tests get re-tweeted online with emoji claps from activists (and journalists whose reporting often veers into activism). Many of those same people point to polls showing that progressive momentum is on their side: a survey last week from the Des Moines Register showed that “more than half of likely 2020 Democratic caucusgoers [in Iowa] say they would be satisfied with a presidential candidate who wants the U.S. to be more socialist.” Times have certainly changed since Obama ran for office. There’s great hunger among Democrats, from New Hampshire to Arizona, for bold policies designed to empower the middle class and fix a grossly distorted economy in which the richest 1 percent of American families own 40 times the average family’s wealth. Once-forbidden ideas like Medicare-for-All and a wealth tax sound both audacious and common sense. Democrats of vastly different cultural backgrounds, whether they shop at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly, seem united in their contempt for unaccountable billionaires and corporations.

But this Democratic primary is about to test something else: whether burgeoning public support for daring economic policies coincides with support for more hot-burning cultural issues that seem to dominate Twitter in the Trump era. In other words, Democratic voters are very down with Medicare-for-All. But do they want to be talking about reparations or socialism in a head-to-head against Trump next year? Already, at least one prominent Democrat, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, is sounding an alarm, however gently, about a presidential primary in which the current rule of the game appears to be chasing the latest shiny metal object on Twitter to win over the most plugged-in and fashionable online.

“I want our candidates to start thinking about the general election and how you’re going to win the general election,” Brown told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “Of course we play to the progressive base,” Brown said, “but we’ve got to talk to workers. I don’t think our candidates are thinking of the general election.

Brown—who voted against NAFTA, opposed the Iraq War, and supported marriage equality before most every Democrat in his party—is no one’s idea of a moderate. But the Ohio senator, who last week decided against a presidential bid, also won four statewide elections in a culturally conservative state by keeping a tireless focus on kitchen-table topics, not the gurgles of Twitter. “I get gun owners votes in some significant numbers in Zanesville and Mansfield and Lima, Ohio, because I talk about education, and I talk about keeping their health care, and going after the drug companies and how to send your kids to community college.”

He believes that winning back the White House means reclaiming the Midwest—including Obama voters who flipped to Trump and African-Americans who were iffy on Clinton. Put another way, he knows that it would be folly for Democrats to abandon their former Electoral College strongholds and bank everything in 2020 on winning the “rising electorates” of Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.

Brown, somewhat obliquely, was suggesting that there seems to be a rush among the Democrats to respond to whatever the Twitter hive mind is demanding on a given day, without hewing closely to a consistent message that can appeal to voters across Iowa and South Carolina and California. Playing to short-term national attention on Twitter, when it’s off-brand and reactive, is a surefire way to get in trouble.

A host of Democrats, including Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, embarrassed themselves by rushing to defend disgraced actor Jussie Smollett on Twitter after his staged hate crime in Chicago—with Harris and Booker calling it a “modern-day lynching” without any set of facts at hand.

What Brown knows is that having a set of organizing principles and a clear message can be enough to inoculate a politician against the minute-by-minute demands of professional activists and angry tweeters. Candidates who make policy-by-Twitter, the ones who chase every micro-news-cycle, risk losing sight not just of what voters care about, but also why they’re running for president in the first place.

[I]n our era of forgetting everything that happened yesterday, what doesn’t get mentioned in these conversations is that Democrats have generally had a favorable view of socialism for almost a decade, well before Sanders emerged on the national stage. In a 2010 Gallup poll, 53 percent of Democrats reported a “positive view” of socialism, a number that has since crept up only slightly, to 57 percent. What has changed are the Democratic views of capitalism: In 2010, 53 percent of Democrats had a positive view of capitalism. By 2018, that number had dropped to just 47 percent.

But does that mean Democrats are ready for socialism? Is America yearning for a planned economy? It’s hard to tell if voters in these polls know what “socialism” or “democratic socialism” actually means or implies. Is Barb in Council Bluffs saying she’s open to socialism because she’s been up late reading Michael Harrington and scanning Twitter for red rose avatars to follow? Or is Barb saying she’s open to socialism because she likes how Sanders has presented it: as an audacious but common-sense message to fight income inequality and provide access to basic services? It seems like the latter. At the very same time socialism is claiming a moment, a Harris Poll released last month asked voters, “Which label do you most identify with as a Democrat?” Almost half of Democrats chose the labels “Obama Democrat”—anathema to the emergent socialist left!—or “moderate Democrat.” Less than 10 percent picked “Socialist.”

Almost half of Democrats in Iowa said Sanders was “too liberal.” Confused? Same here. Twitter tells us that a “moderate” cannot win the nomination. Neither can a white man. But actual conversations with voters tells us that Democrats just want to beat Trump with a candidate who generally excites them and aligns with their values. Ideology and identity aside, Democrats are eager to hear from every candidate about how to best do that.

Do not tell any of this to the Democratic Socialists of New York City, of course. Empowered by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a single Democratic primary in a safe House district last year, plenty of them are bathing in newfound attention from the media, mostly online.

But their political muscle is decidedly smaller than their attentional powers on social media. Socialism might pack a punch in some congressional districts and state house races, but its reach is decidedly more limited when exposed to a bigger Democratic electorate that doesn’t stare at smartphones all day. Case in point: socialists in New York rallied behind Cynthia Nixon’s primary challenge last year to Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, a corporate centrist fairly reviled on the left despite his progressive stances on social issues. But in spite of Nixon’s Instagram-friendly liberal politics and a gush of flattering media coverage, Cuomo clobbered her by almost 30 points, thanks in large part to African-American primary voters who lined up with the governor. In a statewide primary in the bluest of states, the unlikeable moderate guy beat Nixon with ease. Twitter, once again, was not real life.

Trump is already gearing up to weaponize the word socialism for a pretty obvious reason: because plenty of Americans are still frightened by it. That’s why two Democrats—Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—were quick to their feet with applause during the State of the Union Address when Trump declared that the United States will not become a socialist country. The goal posts are moving on the left, but despite what you read about those despicable neoliberals on the Internet, they aren’t moving fast enough for a sudden political realignment.

[T]he convulsions of everyday Twitter, a small club of media elites and professional opinion-havers, are plainly disconnected from the concerns of most Democratic voters. There’s a real risk that otherwise smart, promising 2020 candidates begin to self-sabotage in their haste to appease this microscopic cluster of social-media activists just because they’ve got a megaphone. Democrats won the House last November—and a bucket of governorships—not by charging to the left, but by flipping Republican seats with so-called “moderate” candidates who were attuned to the concerns of middle-class suburbanites and working-class white women, primarily health care. Socialist, capitalist, feminist, white, black: the voters of 2018 cared little for labels. And those voters offer the best sample set for Democratic politics moving into 2020.

What Townsend and Carter are saying—one an old-school labor Democrat and the other a young socialist—is more or less what Sherrod Brown was arguing for on MSNBC earlier this week. Having a message that speaks to middle-class fairness is the most powerful tool one can brandish in Democratic politics. It’s a boring superpower that’s been proven time and again. Economic fairness is an argument that cuts across race, demography, gender, disability, and age. Nor does a focus on “middle-class” issues have to come at the expense of fighting for racial and social injustice. Those cultural battles become easier to fight when candidates have a reason for running: they can be folded into the message and a biography, if it’s a good one.

Politics on Twitter, generally, is about making you feel bad. People are shamed for going to certain schools, for practicing a certain faith, for their gender, their race, or for using the wrong words, regardless of intent. Politics at the presidential level, the successful kind, could not be more different. Winning campaigns find a way to build coalitions, to unite people with shared values under an umbrella of charisma and a succinct message that rises above the din of Washington. This is how Democrats have won the presidency in the past.

Will Democrat candidates wake up to these truisms and remember what worked in 2018?  I hope so.