Will Bernie Sanders Supporters Elect Trump Again in 2020?

For the record, I am not a Bernie Sanders fan and frankly do not view him as electable. (And, yes, I still hold a grudge for Sanders' attempts to meddle in the 2017 Virginia election, which fortunately failed).   More over, he proved himself to be an opportunist in the 2016 contest and had no allegiance to the Democrat party. He ran as a Democrat simply to further his own interests and, not surprisingly, many in the party saw through this opportunism.  One commentator on a friend's blog summed up the feeling well:

[O]ne candidate was a Democrat, the other an independent running as a Democrat to take advantage of the existing organizations. As soon as the primary was over the disgruntled new ‘Democrat’ went back to being an independent. Surprise, surprise.

Sanders could have remained a Democrat post-2016, but instead immediately left the party, thus underscoring his deep seated self-centered opportunism.  In my view, he should not even be allowed to run as a Democrat in the 2020 contest.

The other issue I have with Sanders is that a certain element of his base strike me as akin to cult followers - much in the way some of Trump's supporters are cultists rather than normal Republicans of yesteryear. In 2016, the Sanders supporters who stayed home or exercised a protest by voting for a third party candidate with no chance in Hell of winning basically put Donald Trump in office.  The national nightmare we are experiencing is the result of the peevishness of this Bernie or no one crowd which ignored the number one principal of politics: electing candidates who will implement the policies most like those you support.  This doesn't mean you will necessarily get your perceived perfect candidate, but that you support the one of the available alternatives is closer on your issues. Now, with 2020 approaching, many are fearful that the Sanders cultist will had the White House back to Trump if Sanders isn't the Democrat nominee.  An article looks at this justified fear based on the 2016 experience.  Here are excerpts:

It was hard to miss Cheri Pichone’s excitement about Bernie Sanders’ second presidential run. She showed up to a recent Iowa rally decked out in Sanders gear, complete with a figurine of the Vermont senator and progressive icon.

But underneath her exuberance, the 36-year-old was still mad about the last Democratic primary, when Sanders’ bid for the presidency fell short to Hillary Clinton. “They cheated,” she said, directing much of her anger at the Democratic National Committee. The party establishment, she lamented, was “actively working against us.”

Pichone voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and said she may vote for a third party again if Sanders doesn’t clinch the nomination.  She’s emblematic of a persistent group of Sanders supporters who won’t let go of the slights — real and perceived — from the last campaign.

Some establishment-aligned Democrats worry the party could lose in 2020 if lingering concerns about the last primary aren’t put to bed.  “It has the potential to escalate, and it has the potential to help re-elect Donald Trump,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for Clinton and the DNC.

According to data from the Pew Research Center, the tension took a toll. About 81% of people who consistently supported Sanders during the primary season and were confirmed to have voted in the general election said they ultimately voted for Clinton, while 11% said they supported Stein or Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, and 3% supported Trump.  In a closely contested election, those moves away from Clinton may have factored into the results.

Since the election, party leaders have sought to smooth things over with Sanders and his supporters. DNC Chairman Tom Perez is planning a robust debate schedule. The rules governing superdelegates — party insiders who overwhelmingly backed Clinton — have changed.

[T]he [Sanders] campaign has made some moves that raise questions about whether resentments from 2016 will linger. Briahna Joy Gray, formerly a liberal journalist who voted for Stein, is Sanders’ national press secretary. Nina Turner, who called the DNC “dictatorial and pompous” in 2017, is one of his national campaign chairs.

And some of Sanders’ most loyal supporters in the crucial early voting states say they’re not ready to fully move on.

“If they steal it from him again, I’ll go independent or something other than that,” he said. “The Democratic Party’s on their last edge of me if they kind of try to screw him again.”

Even in South Carolina, where Sanders lost momentum after a 47-point drubbing from Clinton, some supporters are still smarting over a process they believe was rigged.

"Lost might be a stretch,” said Tom Amon, of Summerville, when asked how he felt about Sanders’ ability to perform better in South Carolina than he did in the 2016 primary. “It was stolen from him.”

Trump must be grinning widely.  If the Sanders cultist re-elect Trump in 2020, they will truly prove that they care nothing for the country or the policies they claim to support.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's Ego-Crazed Foolishness

Starbucks CEO whose over sized ego may reelect Trump.

Perhaps the most important thing facing America is making sure that Donald Trump is NOT re-elected in 2020.  To make sure this occurs, we need a unified Democrat Party with a good candidate and no vanity campaigns by third party or independent candidates.  We do not need another Jill Stein (who may have conspired with Russia) or Ross Perot campaign that splits the anti-Trump vote.  Yet, despite this reality, Starbuck's CEO Howard Schultz has indicated that he is considering exactly such a campaign - something that must be thrilling the Trump camp.  Not surprisingly, many (including yours truly) are furious with Schultz's plan that will benefit no one but Trump.  I'd go so far as to say that I have spent my last dollar at Starbuck's if Schultz's foolishness continues.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Schultz's ego driven idiocy.  Here are column excerpts:  

Just what we need, another ego-crazed billionaire with zero experience in government who thinks he is destined to be president. What could go wrong?

Howard Schultz, the man who put a Starbucks on every corner, said in a “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday that he is mulling a run for the White House as an independent. Schultz admits he’s “not the smartest person in the room,” but he must be smart enough to know he can’t possibly win.  He is quite capable of reelecting President Trump, though.

At present, the specter of a second Trump term looks comfortably remote. The blue wave in the midterm elections and Trump’s cellar-dwelling approval numbers show what the country thinks of him and his corrupt, chaotic, kooky administration. A recent poll shows him trailing any of his likely Democratic opponents. If the election were held next week, I’m pretty confident that Trump would lose to a ham sandwich. He does have a chance in 2020, however, if the anti-Trump vote is split between two or more candidates. Imagine Schultz, a lifelong Democrat, siphoning off even 5 percent of the Democratic candidate’s vote in, say, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The horror of 2016 threatens to become a recurring nightmare.

Schultz seems to be an honorable and decent guy, and I have nothing against him. But I most certainly will if he saddles the nation with four more years of Trump’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny, ignorance, dishonesty and incompetence.

As I said, Schultz can’t actually win as an independent. Even Trump was smart enough to figure that out.

A person familiar with Trump’s thinking told me why. Trump understood that the most likely outcome, if he ran on his own, would be to guarantee Hillary Clinton’s election by taking votes away from the GOP candidate. In his wildest dreams, he might hope to win enough electoral votes to keep either major-party candidate from reaching a majority. But in that case, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives — which would surely choose the Republican or the Democrat, not Trump. His reasoning about the inevitable outcome was sound — and remains so today. Schultz may follow through on his pledge to spend whatever it takes to compete in all 50 states. But he can’t win. I know that party affiliation has been steadily weakening and that a plurality of voters consider themselves independents. Despite all of this, the Democratic Party and the GOP remain deeply entrenched and highly adaptable institutions. Either might be susceptible to a hostile takeover, as Trump proved. But only a supreme narcissist would think himself capable of singlehandedly vanquishing both. The inference is that Schultz might be more likely to run, and persist in running, if it looks as if an ideological progressive such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is likely to win the Democratic nomination. Schultz may be hoping to get the attention of Democratic donors and influencers, and shift the intraparty debate in a more moderate direction.

Or — and I fear this is more likely — he may just be surfing a great big wave of pure ego.

The anti-Trump majority of Democrats, independents and sensible Republicans must let Schultz know, in no uncertain terms, that this is no time for such foolishness. Instead, perhaps, he should angle for a Cabinet post. Or just have a decaf latte and chill.

Turning Revulsion of Trump Into Votes

On election day 2016, more registered voters stayed home than voted for Donald Trump.  Others who voted, threw their votes away on third party candidates motivated by some misguided sense of ideological purity.  By not voting or throwing away one's vote on a third party candidate with no chance in Hell of winning is in effect the same as voting for the least appealing candidate of the two major parties.  Had these non-voters voted or third party voting not occurred, America would not now be undergoing the daily nightmare of Donald Trump in the White House.  Hopefully, this reality is sinking in and now the task is to translate revulsion for Trump into votes at the polls come November, 2018.  In Virginia in 2017, Ralph Northam's campaign managed to do this via an incredible ground game that coordinated with all of the House of Delegates campaigns.  It's a pattern that can be replicated in 2018 provided voters belated grasp that their vote does matter and may be a bulwark against the worse excesses of Trump and the hideous GOP agenda.  A column in the New York Times looks at the need to turn hatred of Trump into votes in November.  Here are highlights:

During the 20 years that he has led the social democratic Working Families Party, Dan Cantor has waited for the left to get serious about building power through local politics. “People, sophisticated people, barely know who their state senator is,” he told me. A significant portion of nonmilitary spending in America is done at the state and local levels, he pointed out, “so it’s not like these are trivial offices. This is where people live.”

The religious right has long understood this. It became a major part of the Republican Party by systematically capturing seats on school boards and city councils. But many on the left either disdained electoral politics altogether — preferring demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street that quickly turned into ends in themselves — or gravitated toward nihilistic spoiler campaigns like those of Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

Donald Trump’s election has changed that, spurring progressives to search for ways to exert power in the face of terrifying powerlessness. They have flooded into down-ballot races, bringing them unprecedented attention.

According to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll, one in five Americans have either protested or attended a political rally since the start of 2016. These activists, many newly minted, are overwhelmingly anti-Trump. Mitchell aims to make sure they turn their revulsion into votes. . . . . much of the anti-Trump resistance is made up of middle-aged suburban women, and most identify as Democrats.
 Building a party that can simultaneously encompass feminist actresses in Manhattan, black liberationists and white Appalachian strikers is no small thing. All over the world, right-wing populism is ascendant, and so far we have little evidence that multiracial left-wing populism can successfully challenge it. But one thing that Trump’s election taught us is that just because something has never happened doesn’t mean it can’t. “Can we merge these ideals with serious electoral heft?” Mitchell asked. People dreaming of a country that’s egalitarian, cosmopolitan and humane have no choice but to try.

The Moral Bankruptcy Of Trump's Supporters

As noted in a number of previous posts, much of the 2016 presidential election cycle has provided a deja vue experience of what happened in 1930's Germany where complacency by some, self-centered self-promotion, and putting supposed principle ahead of pragmatic reality led to the rise of Adolph Hitler.  With much of Donald Trump's campaign seeming like a warmed over version of Hitler's bigotry and slogan based campaign, one has to admit that far too many Americans appear to be either morally bankrupt or frighteningly blind to the potential horrible consequences of their actions.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excepts:

[B]oth Mrs. Clinton’s virtues and Mr. Trump’s vices have been obvious all along. How, then, did the race manage to get so close on the eve of the debate?

A lot of the answer, I’ve argued, lies in the behavior of the news media, which spent the month before the first debate jeering at Mrs. Clinton, portraying minor missteps as major sins and inventing fake scandals out of thin air. But let us not let everyone else off the hook. Mr. Trump couldn’t have gotten as far as he has without the support, active or de facto, of many people who understand perfectly well what he is and what his election would mean, but have chosen not to take a stand.

Let’s start with the Republican political establishment, which is supporting Mr. Trump just as if he were a normal presidential nominee.

I’ve had a lot of critical things to say about Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. One thing of which I would never accuse them, however, is stupidity. They know what kind of man they’re dealing with — but they are spending this election pretending that we’re having a serious discussion about policy, that a vote for Mr. Trump is simply a vote for lower marginal tax rates. And they should not be allowed to flush the fact of their Trump support down the memory hole when the election is behind us.

This goes in particular for Mr. Ryan, who has received extraordinarily favorable press treatment over the years — portrayed as an honest, serious policy wonk with a sincere concern for fiscal probity. This reputation was never deserved; his policy proposals have always been obvious flimflam. But in the past, criticisms of Mr. Ryan depended on pointing out hard stuff, like the fact that his numbers didn’t add up. Now it can be made much simpler: Every time he’s held up as an example of seriousness, remember that when it mattered, he backed Donald Trump.

While almost all Republican officeholders have endorsed Mr. Trump, the same isn’t true of what we might call the G.O.P. intelligentsia – actual or at least self-proclaimed policy experts, opinion writers, and so on. For the most part, the members of this group haven’t spoken up in support of this year’s Republican nominee. . . . If you look at who has endorsed Mr. Trump — say, at the signatories of the statement of support from “Scholars and Writers for America” — it’s actually a fairly pathetic group.

But if you think that electing Mr. Trump would be a disaster, shouldn’t you be urging your fellow Americans to vote for his opponent, even if you don’t like her? After all, not voting for Mrs. Clinton . . . is, in effect, giving half a vote to Mr. Trump.

[T]he response from sane Republican economists has been especially disappointing. Only charlatans and cranks have endorsed Mr. Trump, but only a handful have risen to the occasion and been willing to say that if keeping him out of the White House is important, you need to vote for Mrs. Clinton.

Finally, it’s dismaying to see the fecklessness of those on the left supporting third-party candidates. A few seem to believe in the old doctrine of social fascism — better to see the center-left defeated by the hard right, because that sets the stage for a true progressive revolution. That worked out wonderfully in 1930s Germany.

But for most it seems to be about politics as personal expression: they dislike Mrs. Clinton — partly because they’ve bought into a misleading media image — and plan to express that dislike by staying at home or voting for someone like Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.

In fact, the biggest danger from Mr. Trump’s terrible week is that it might encourage complacency and self-indulgence among voters who really, really wouldn’t want to see him in the White House. So remember: Your vote only counts if you cast it in a meaningful way.

 The column's author is 100% on point.

The Progressive Case for Hillary Clinton

As noted in a prior post, a number of Millennials and progressives who supported Bernie Sanders continue to have their panties in a wad and are making noises about voting for a third party candidate or staying home on election day.  Personally, as a long time political activist, I view such behavior as self-defeating.  All such conduct will do is put Donald Trump in the White House and help usher in policies that are diametrically opposed to Sanders' agenda.  More maddening is the reality that it ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton is running on one of the most progressive platforms in history.  A piece in Mother Jones lays out why Millennials and other disgruntled progressives need to smell the coffee and support Clinton on election day.  Here are excerpts:

For a lot of liberals, the most important goal of this election is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. And since Trump naturally sucks up most of the political oxygen, that means lots of blogging about Trump and not so much about Clinton.

But a lot of lefties aren't happy about that. They want a positive argument in favor of voting for Clinton, not just a negative one for voting against Trump. That's fair enough, so I figured I'd put one together.

But I should be crystal clear here: Nobody should take this as an attempt to demonstrate that Clinton is perfect or to persuade you to vote for her. If you think she's too instinctively hawkish—as I do—that might be reason enough for a liberal to vote for someone else. On some issues—supporting the Iraq War, supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, voting for the Patriot Act, etc.—she's taken positions that might be flat deal killers. On other issues, you might think she's not strong enough, or that it took her too long to get to the right place. Finally, on a personal level, she's often oversecretive, overly lawyerly, and sometimes skates a little close to some ethical lines. She distrusts the press and withholds information too often. And she is, plainly, an establishment politician, with all the flaws that implies.

On the other hand, no successful politician is ever perfect. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed on to lots of compromises that liberals detested. Ronald Reagan did the same with conservatives. Clinton will too. There are just too many competing interests in a pluralistic country like America to expect anything else. But all that said, the liberal case for Clinton remains pretty overwhelming.

The following list is by no means exhaustive, but here it is:
1.     In 1995, despite strong pressure from diplomats and White House aides to remain low-key, she went to China and said, "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights."
2.     She worked her heart out for health care reform in 1993.
3.     She now supports Obamacare, and supports expanding it.
4.     She supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour. This is good for workers, but less likely to have downsides than a national level of $15.
5.     She supported comprehensive immigration reform in 2007 and continues to support it.
6.     She was a prime mover behind the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, and was a key figure in finding compromises that allowed it to pass after partisan bickering nearly sank it.
7.     Sen. Sherrod Brown: "As much as we want to move this country forward, you gotta cajole, persuade, work with, whatever it takes. And I think she does that better than about anybody I know."
8.     She supports LGBT rights.
9.     She worked with Attorney General Janet Reno to create the Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women.
10.  She was one of the prime movers behind SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, eventually signed into law by Bill Clinton.
11.  She pushed the Adoption and Safe Families Act through Congress.
12.  She was instrumental in the founding of the Center for American Progress.
13.  She has been the target of countless baseless attacks but has always rebounded and kept on working anyway.
14.  President Barack Obama: "What sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying, and she never stops fighting for us—even if we haven't always appreciated it."
15.  She voted against both of George Bush's tax giveaways to the rich.
16.  She favors closing the carried-interest loophole.
17.  Jill Abramson, who covered Bill and Hillary Clinton critically for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of theWall Street Journal and later at the New York Times, says this about Hillary Clinton:"Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy…There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor."
18.  She supports legislation to end racial profiling at all levels of government.
19.  She wants to clean up the toxic lead remaining in soil, water, and paint.
20.  As secretary of state, she was tireless in traveling the world to repair the damage to our reputation from the Bush years.
21.  German chancellor Angela Merkel: "I admire her strategic thinking…Whenever I was able to work with Hillary Clinton, it was a great pleasure."
22.  She wants to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
23.  She voted for TARP.
24.  She was the principal author of the sanctions on Iran that brought them to the bargaining table.
25.  She then began the secret negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the treaty stopping their work on nuclear weapons.
26.  She supports Dodd-Frank.
27.  At the age of 29 she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families advocacy group.
28.  She is annoyed by airline bag fees.
29.  She supports a higher tax rate on the very rich.
30.  She supports the Paris Climate Agreement and has endorsed a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050.
31.  She wants to restore voting rights to felons who have served their sentences.
32.  She was one of the original co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have implemented card check.
33.  She has literally spent her entire adult life advocating for children and women.
34.  Sen. Barbara Boxer: "She is authentic. Hillary is Hillary, and she's not going to become a cheerleader with pom-poms."
35.  She supports automatic voter registration at age 18.
36.  She has a lifetime score of 94 percent from the AFL-CIO and 98 percent from AFSCME.
37.  She pushed through State Department regulations that gave same-sex couples most of the same rights as straight couples.
38.  She supports universal pre-K.
39.  She has set a goal of producing one-third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years before Obama's deadline.
40.  She wants to expand home visiting programs, one of the best known ways to improve child development.
41.  She wants to spend $275 billion (over five years) on rebuilding infrastructure.
42.  She was instrumental in securing help for New York's 9/11 first responders.
43.  In the Senate, she fought Republican attempts to privatize Social Security.
44.  She spent 11 hours testifying in front of the Benghazi committee and made Republicans look like idiots.
45.  She supports net neutrality.
46.  She would nominate liberal judges to the Supreme Court.
47.  She would also nominate liberal judges to the lower courts.
48.  She supports a plan that allows people over 55 to buy into Medicare.
49.  She co-sponsored the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.
50.  She is pro-choice and supports the right of all women to have access to affordable contraception and safe and legal abortion.
51.  She wants to prevent pharmaceutical companies from jacking up the price of long-standing drugs.
52.  She supports the addition of a public option to Obamacare.
53.  She wants to overturn Citizens United.
54.  She has fought for decades for increased funding for HIV treatment and research.
55.  She wants to restore the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently struck down by the Supreme Court.
56.  She supports Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.
57.  She wants to beef up antitrust enforcement.
58.  She worked to ensure ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.
59.  She wants to impose a tax on high-frequency trading.
60.  She's a big supporter of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
61.  In the Senate, she had a very good reputation as someone who could work across the aisle to get things done. Her word was always good.
62.  Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on his Republican colleagues in the Senate: "Two of them, her very prominent antagonists in this election, and one looked over at the other and said, 'Boy, she's good.' The other one leaned back and said, 'Yeah, she's really good.' And that's the Hillary that they know. Not the talking points Hillary or the caricature, but the real person."
63.  She wants to tighten regulation of the shadow banking system, one of the prime causes of the crash of 2008.
64.  She wants to strengthen the Volcker Rule.
65.  She supports DACA and DAPA, the "mini-DREAM" executive orders.
66.  She supports 12 weeks of paid leave for new mothers or to recover from a serious illness.
67.  As first lady, she fought for the Family Medical Leave Act. As a senator, she worked to expand FMLA to cover wounded soldiers and their families.
68.  She has long supported gender equality efforts around the world.
69.  She has legendary stamina and endurance.
70.  Sen. Al Franken: "She is the toughest, most experienced, hardest-working person I know."
71.  As secretary of state, she personally negotiated the 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
72.  She has a 100 percent rating from both NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
73.  In the Senate, she co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
74.  She did not kill Vince Foster.75.  She did not issue a"stand down" orderafter the Benghazi attack.
76.  She didn't flip-flop on the bankruptcy bill.

Now consider what a president Trump would do on these issues.  When viewed in such a light, I do not know how a pragmatic progressive can do anything but vote Clinton-Kaine on November 8, 2016.