Bernie's weekend really highlighted both his positives and negatives. On the one hand, he had clear ideas for what to do and communicated those to his supporters well. On the other hand, he was unable or unwilling to work with his colleagues to actually influence the bill being negotiated.

I'm not sure it's effective with voters, but kudos to Biden for comparing Trump to McClellan.

It's nuts to think the President, who loves to use executive power wouldn't deploy the military to construct makeshift hospitals. Is it because Biden suggested it in his coronavirus address a week and a half ago?

So a new nightmare scenario occurred to me, and I hope it doesn't happen, but definitely in the realm of possibility given age. Say Trump and Biden both get coronavirus, and both unfortunately succumb to it.

What happens with the election? Is it Pence vs. Biden's VP (Adams?) or do you have to redo a condensed primary process in the middle of a pandemic, or …

I don't know the law at all in this kind of area.

Suppose it depends on timing, right? If they haven't had the conventions yet, they haven't officially decided on the nominee.

I think it’s more likely he doesn’t want to because in his world every extreme measure is seen as a weakness. If he does it he will just claim he had the plan in place long before Biden mentioned it and we had been working on it behind the scenes all along.

Bloomberg is apparently not going to be doing what he said. Huge shocker!

Bloomberg lays off hundreds as coronavirus bears down - POLITICO

Looks like Bernie supporters are trying to lay the #metoo card on Biden

Did you see the interview where Biden said he was a professor and Penn after he was done in the Senate?

A simple google search shows he was a professor at Penn. Now it looks like a silly, prestige position, but he wasn't lying or confused.

I guess if I givwe my buddies $10 to call me president of Saturn, so be it.

Not quite. Big schools all have these positions where they hire industry leaders or politicians that don't do much, but are highlighted by the college as a prestigious professor.

6 of one, half a dozen of another

Ohio GOP fucking with the primary election.

Are you surprised? It was as predictable as sun-rise. Republicans are going to make any move to vote by mail as convoluted as possible. The last thing they want is people actually being able to vote easily.

Few things at play here:

(1) Make it more likely for Bernie to win (keeping Bernie around hurts the Dems at this point).

(2) Trial balloon to see what they can get away with in terms of restricting the vote. The general outline is "[Mumble mumble] WUHAN VIRUS [Mumble Mumble], and that's why we had to close all of the polling places in black and Hispanic neighborhoods in November for public health." But the more they can get a sense of what the courts will let them get away with at this point, the better they can start to fill in the mumbles.

(3) Discredit vote by mail by running it very poorly. The vote by mail states show us that it increases turnout and decreases fraud. But the GOP likes low turnout, so they don't want to do it.

(And I'm not quite this extreme, but if you are one of the people who thinks that the GOP also does not mind foreign interference in elections, then the "decreases fraud" part of vote by mail is also something they would dislike.)

Cuomo up to 9% to win the Democratic nomination on PredictIt.

I guess the theory is that Biden possibly gets sick, and if you end up with an open/contested convention, Cuomo has become the golden boy candidate?

dola:

I would note that as that possibility has risen, so has Trump's odds for reelection.

Another interesting tidbit which could work against Biden

Don't overvalue a single poll.

The basic problem of Bernie stans sitting at home or voting for Trump is seen in other polls, but the narrow race and the enthusiasm gap hasn't been consistent in polling.

I have seen a lot of #NeverBiden stuff on Twitter. A lot of Bernie stans going on about how Biden is the same as Trump (it was silly when they compared Hillary to Trump, but this is even more ridiculous IMO - now that we've seen how Trump has governed and any populist things he was campaigning on was a lie).

The Sanders base has a lot of people that don't vote (even for Bernie) and people that won't vote if it doesn't involve Bernie. They really are the left's Trump supporters. For a lot of them it's Bernie or chaos so that they can tell you how much better Bernie would have been.

An interesting "deep dive" on the woman who accused Biden of sexual molestation:


https://medium.com/@eddiekrassenstei...n-e4cb3ee38460

If any of you think Biden beats Trump you are seriously mistaken.

Im not a Trump guy, but Biden is not the guy.

The only way he wins is getting the middle group of voters. That isnt happening. No matter how poorly Trump is handling this, because most of America doesnt believe this virus is real. And because it is hitting mostly urban areas, where the dems dominate and not the rural areas where the Trump voters live, guess what?

Polling doesn't support either of those claims.

From the article:

"With this said, however, it is the media’s responsibility to thoroughly investigate accusations before jumping into a story and allowing those allegations to potentially destroy another human being, or, in this case, a political campaign. Every woman deserves to be heard, but every media outlet still has the responsibility of investigating and then relaying to the public all of the facts at face value."

The hypocrisy of this statement is staggering.

What JPhillips said. My question for tarcone is this: what evidence is there in polling, special elections, the '18 midterms, etc. for your contentions? Anyone can believe whatever they wish, but all the indicators right now point in one direction.

How so? This woman is being heard, and her facts do not add up. Both statements are true.

And you guys said the same thing in 16. All the indicators said HRC wins easily.

Take a poll in rural Missouri or Rural Georgia or......

Polls are taken in mostly left leaning areas. There is a greater concentration of people and its more easily done.

Obama lost a ton of seats in his mid terms, more than Trump. That always happens with a sitting president.

I'll give you that Biden won't win Missouri or Georgia.

This argument has been dealt with on these forums in the past. It's part misleading, and part totally false. Most notable though is the complete lack of any evidence whatsoever presented to support your previous assertions.

Trump winning in '16 was a historical outlier. Only twice in modern history has someone lost the overall popular vote and won the election, the other done being the razor-thin Bush-Gore campaign in '00. Before that, it hadn't happened since 1888. The national polls were right on the money with Clinton getting 3% more of the vote. Additionally, there was a historically high level of undecideds which also played a major factor.

Credible polls are specifically crafted to match the electorate, and there is a great deal of analysis done to ensure they do. Responses are weighted in order to ensure a representative sampling. Ergo, where the poll is taken is not the important issue. Methodology is. And again, disregard polls if you want. What other evidence do you have?

Midterms - Trump's losses in 2018 are higher than the modern average, and with a good economy. Special elections went the same. Obama's results in 2010 were indeed worse, but this is a half-truth as his 2012 results were better than Trump's in '18. For example, George W. Bush's midterms results were both better than Trump's showing in '18.

Spin it how you want. HRC did win the popular vote. But she won them in the wrong places. Trump won the votes in all the right places. And those places will come out and vote again.

No doubt this anecdotal. But Im on the ground. I see what is happening. I was in Gatlinburg TN a couple weeks ago. The people there were very Pro Trump and blamed the mefia, the Chinese and the Dems for this virus.

I talk to people outside my bubble. If you dont think those people that came out and voted fro Trump wont in 2020 after all the crap the dems threw at him this past year and then this virus and the strength of the economy, you are sorely mistaken.

Sometimes polls are wrong, no matter how hard you wish they were right.

I will not vote for Trump, I will not vote for Biden. But Biden is not the guy to get the voters out to win.

If HRC couldnt do it, what makes you think Biden can?

And, surprising no one . . . https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...63d_story.html

But I was in Massachusettes, New York, and California and people at diners love Biden.

Uh... because people don't irrationally hate Biden as they did with Clinton? Look at the Democratic primary - it's becoming very, very obvious that in 2016 a lot of the people voting for Bernie didn't do it because they were all in for democratic socialism, but because they didn't like Hillary. That's why Sanders won Michigan and almost won Missouri in 2016, but 4 years later Biden wins every county in Michigan and Missouri - and those races aren't even close.

It's not spin. As you know, I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a fan of Biden. I have no axe to grind here aside from a general strong dislike of Trump.


I don't think they'll do it because they didn't in '18, because in literally every special election that's been held the GOP has significantly underperformed what Trump did in '16, and because the polling data all points that way.


Biden isn't disliked nearly as much as HRC. Hillary was the second-worst presidential candidate in modern history behind Trump. Again that's not opinion, it's what the favorable/unfavorable splits tell us. Biden is basically break-even on that question, far better than either of them; Hillary was double-digits underwater by this point in '16 and stayed there. He's simply a far better candidate, not because I say so but because the public says so.

I live in rural Michigan, where there is not nearly the anti-Biden sentiment as there was anti-Hillary. I mention this only because it's just as relevant as your on-the-ground observations, which is to say anecdotally interesting vis a vis our individual experiences but not at all germane in the big picture.

As was the case with you fraud Libertarians (Republicans that are cowards to say they are one) in 16 a vote for a 3rd party is a vote for Trump except or spin it.

:D

The thing is, none of the places you talk about really matter. Gatlinburg, TN is not a bellwether in any shape or form.

I've said it a few times on here, but a slightly better turnout at the polls in Milwaukee and Detroit gives Wisconsin and Michigan to Biden. Milwaukee showed they could do it in 2018 as they came out for one of the most boring gubernatorial candidates I've ever seen in Tony Evers.

Biden may not have been my first choice but he is winning the Democratic primary with major help from the black community, which just happens to be the major demographic in these cities where he needs the turnout.

Yeah that's nonsense. I voted third party and it wasn't a vote for Trump. You can just as easily say it's a vote for Clinton, which would also be wrong. I do not buy the false binary lesser-of-two-evils argument. I also know personally multiple people who are libertarians, not republicans by a different name, and vote that way.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. That's going to be where the election is decided. You flip them like the Democrats did the House in 2018, Biden has 278 EV. Everything else (Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire) are bonuses.

We agree to disagree which is what makes America great.....well up to the last few years;)

I started the year thinking about the fundamentals, the economy, incumbency, etc. Now, though, I think the election comes down to the virus, not just those infected and dead, but how it affects the campaign and the vote. Does one of the candidates catch the virus? Is there a treatment that saves thousands of lives? How does the economy bounce back, if it does at all in 2020?

LOL. Lessor of two evils taken up a notch! I have no choice but to vote for the two establishment candidates, why even put 3 or 4 other choices on the ballot?!?!? And all candidates on the ballot are a vote for Trump since I support Democrats!

Trump barely won Michigan in 16. Do you honestly think after the way he has treated their governor and the state as a whole during this he wont lose any votes?

I can't really see Biden losing PA. He's from there and has always been more popular with white working class voters than Hillary. They view him as one of them. And you're seeing that in the primary results. Biden wins every county in these states. Michigan has been trending blue so I cant see him losing there either. Biden just has to pick up one more state to win(WI, AZ, NC, FL). There's a lot of time left and a lot can happen but I think Biden is the favorite right now. It'll be interesting to see Trump's poll numbers as the lockdown continues and voters get their stimulus checks, but the economy continues to struggle into the fall.

I didn't see a lot of details other than Pelosi pushing for "vote by mail". IMO this is premature and can see we will have most of this stabilized by then (e.g. curve is flatted, we have lots of respirators and masks, therapeutics will be in the market etc.).

If this is by snail mail, I don't see how that could work well. Vote in person and if there is a pandemic-like reason not to in Nov, then go with secured e-voting with a verifiable audit trail.

Well we have primaries going on earlier than November.

For some fucking reason, Wisconsin is NOT delaying it's April 7 primary.

You can't do e-voting without millions being unable to vote due to a lack of access to technology.