This Week in Election Night, 2020 (Week 2)
after some delay, we're back with the second week of this thread as we chug headlong into what will probably be a shitshow of a primary and an even bigger shitshow of an election. this is going to be longer than the last one, because there's been quite a bit going on, and i'm going to split the actual news from pieces that are either opinion or ideologically driven.
as with the previous thread, common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.
News
from CBS - The 2020 contenders. this is probably one of the most comprehensive rundowns of who exactly all of these people are, what they stand for, are what their qualifications are. (it also demonstrates what an absolute clown car of a race this is already, but that's another thing). if you're shopping around for a candidate in the democratic primary to support, this might be a good place to start.
from FiveThirtyEight - What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 13. in case you were curious what all of these people scurrying around the country were up to this week, 538 has you covered. of note are the whistlestop tours that sanders, o'rourke, yang, and harris are going on in iowa, as well as the ones gillibrand, booker, and currently speculative candidate michael bennet (the democratic senator from colorado and just-diagnosed pancreatic cancer victim) are going on in new england.
from NPR - Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan Joins 2020 Race With A Populist Pitch To Blue-Collar Voters. the clown car of a primary continues to grow with tim ryan's announcement. tim ryan, for the unaware, is a democratic congressman from ohio who currently sits in a district that voted D+6 in the last election, but is probably quickly sprinting to the right along with most of ohio. whether this is him trying to get ahead of what will probably be a hard seat to hold on to or him just being opportunistic, i dunno, but he's a fringe candidate to say the least. i'd be surprised if he made the debates, and he'll likely retain his seat since ohio is a state that allows you to run for two offices at the same time.
from The Hill - Swalwell running for White House on gun control: report. incidentally, we should also know by next week whether or not the primary will gain another member in representative eric swalwell (rep for california's 15th congressional district), who appears to be angling himself as the gun control candidate. for those of you keeping track, this will make him candidate number 19 if he does run (20, if you count ojeda before he withdrew). we're probably on track for at least 20 declared candidates, seeing as biden is presumably going to announce at some point.
from NPR - Sanders Tops Democratic Fundraising As O'Rourke, Harris And Buttigieg Draw Big Sums. fundraising is a very large part of the early stages of the race, and so far it's been a bonanza of cash for the frontrunners. sanders hauled in 18 million, harris hauled in 12 million, o'rourke 9.4 million, and buttigieg 7 million among others. smaller candidates will probably be releasing their numbers in the next few days or, if they don't, we'll see them on april 15th.
from Buzzfeed News - Andrew Yang Is Finding New Ways To Get Attention Offline. support for andrew yang is largely an internet phenomenon, but that hasn't stopped yang from campaigning like he isn't. we'll see if it pays off for him (he's seemingly in a weird middle ground between the second-tier of viable candidates and the ones that are basically guaranteed to get 1% in iowa and drop out), but i suppose actually being in front of the media can't really hurt him right now.
from Buzzfeed News - Joe Biden Says He'll Be "More Mindful" About Personal Space After Allegations Of Inappropriate Contact. if you've paid any attention to the news, you've probably seen the raking of joe biden recently for his history of being touchy-feely toward people who don't necessarily want it. this is his first personal acknowledgement of that, and while we'll have to see how it goes over, i don't think this is the last you'll be hearing of that particular subplot.
from The Guardian - Why the populist wave is setting the tone for Democratic candidates. this is a pretty straightforward piece on the undercurrent of populism--or the decided lack thereof--in the campaigns of many of these candidates on the campaign trail. expect to see this label come up a lot now that it isn't only sanders who it gets applied to.
Opinion/Ideology-driven
from Vox - Howard Schultz hasn’t gotten into policy specifics. Here are 4 ideas from women candidates who have. one of the early issues people are taking with the media so far in reporting on the primary is the decided lack of attention given to the female candidates (to which there may or may not be merit based on 538's tracking of candidate mentions). enter vox, then, with this piece highlighting some of the policy proposals they have. i could have probably categorized this under news, but it feels more like an opinion piece than not, so i'll leave it under this subheading.
from The Guardian - Democrats need a 2020 candidate who inspires. Joe Biden isn't it. biden is a fairly popular democrat both inside and outside of the party, but whether that lasts and whether or not people think he's worth voting for is a different story. there are plenty of people who have criticisms of biden, and this op-ed goes into a few of those criticisms. they're probably familiar to you if you've gone anywhere biden gets discussed, and whether or not they'll tank him if he runs remains to be seen.
from Slate - In a Diverse Candidate Field, How Is Pete Buttigieg’s Sexuality Factoring Into His Appeal? and A Conversation About Pete Buttigieg, Identity, and Diversity in the 2020 Race. these two pieces on buttigieg have been slightly controversial over the past week in their point that buttigieg, gay man as he is, doesn't really get treated like a gay man because he's also white and well off and shares more in common with sanders and o'rourke than any of the female or minority candidates. that's of course something you can probably dispute, but it's an interesting discussion to have (which is probably why there's a follow-up piece in the first place).
lastly and also from Slate - Elizabeth Warren’s Proposal to Imprison More Corporate Executives Is a Bad Idea. this article makes the case for the misguidedness of one of warren's proposals (which you can find here and also find her op-ed about here). on premise i personally agree, but i do find it curious that this objection comes when it's about corporate executives, seeing as corporate executives aren't exactly immutably corporate executives and they're also not a large portion of the population. i dunno, food for thought.
anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.
Regarding Elizabeth Warren's proposal to imprison execs, I think the Slate article listed is incredibly off-base, bordering on propaganda. Their sub-heading for the article is "This is how mass incarceration happens," as if the USA doesn't already have a mass incarceration problem. The key argument they're making is that "negligence is a very low standard of criminal punishment," which is disingenuous at best. I'm fairly certain that Elizabeth Warren is referring to criminal negligence, which has an important place in law. IANAL, so I will link to an article from someone who is: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-criminal-negligence.html
Executives currently have lots of legal loopholes to enable them to make decisions that are morally questionable at best, and destroying the planet at worst. EW's proposal helps close those loopholes, and start making progress towards holding corporations accountable for their destructive decisions.
some additional pieces from today:
from NPR - Pete Buttigieg Explains His Agenda For Black Voters, and from Reuters Courting black voters, Bernie Sanders draws personal contrast with Trump. both of these pieces focus on remarks by buttigieg and sanders respectively at the National Action Network conference this week outlining what they intend to do for the black population if elected (since they are of course a key constituency in the democratic primaries and neither sanders nor buttigieg are racial minorities themselves and therefore presumably will have to sell themselves to minority voters in a way someone like harris or booker wouldn't). sanders in particular it should be noted is actually relatively popular with minority voters currently--moreso than in his first presidential campaign at minimum--and isn't fighting quite the uphill battle he once had to with them, but he's still jockeying for position with biden (who is also quite popular with minorities) and the actual minority candidates, so it remains to be seen how that'll shake out.
from the Atlantic - Amy Klobuchar’s Hazy ‘Heartland Economics’. klobuchar has been relatively ignored by the media since it came out that she's kind of an asshole to her staff and polls pretty terribly in general, but this piece by the atlantic profiles the path she's nonetheless trying to craft to being a frontrunner in this grand clusterfuck of a race--a very rural, midwestern driven one, since she's really the only "midwestern" candidate running if you don't count buttigieg. it's probably not going to work, but if nothing else it's likely that at least some of her ideas will trickle up the pipeline to one of the bigger candidates or otherwise be adopted and pushed for by some of the people who inevitably crash out.
from TIME - The Latest Democratic Presidential Candidate Is Betting Big on the Rust Belt. tim ryan meanwhile is trying to define himself in the terms of the rust belt, which is probably something that sherrod brown, the other ohio candidate who was floating running, would scold him for. ryan's entire thing is playing up his ties to the area and his representation of the white, working class voter that democrats struggle with up north. this is probably also not going to work, because most areas aren't exactly rife with a white working class to be lost with consequences for the democrats nowadays, but he'll probably push some ideas up the pipeline too.
lastly, we have this piece from New Hampshire Public Radio - As 2020 Candidates Pitch Scrapping The Electoral College, Voters Are Intrigued . there's no real telling how the court-packing or electoral college abolition ideas some democrats are floating are going to go over with the general public this year and next, but people are certainly intrigued by the ideas. this will certainly not be the last you hear of them.
small update because i'm out of it:
jay inslee finally got a piece from the media in "The Radical Simplicity of Jay Inslee’s 2020 Campaign" over on Slate, so congrats to him. as i recall he's still only polling at like, 2% in a lot of polls, so i doubt he's going to be relevant outside of the debates.
petemania is still running wild, as shown by The Guardian: ‘Pete! Pete! Pete!’ Buttigieg fever hits New Hampshire – can he keep up the pace?. but of course, it remains to be seen if his support will fall back to what it was, like happened with beto after he announced.
with respect to this plotline, we also got cory booker's fundraising numbers today: about 5 million is the total. less than buttigieg, which is comparatively a little embarrassing considering booker is one of the candidates focusing on bigger donors, but still a decent sum i guess.
Wow, these are awesome. Just came here to say this before I have the time to read all of it. Keep it up :)