#Iowa for bernie

[uniqueartisanconnoisseur]

An Iowa Love Story, Dyersville & New Vienna

Inez and Bernie Kluesner live in New Vienna, Iowa. This amazing couple are involved in the farm toy collection hobby and the Heritage House Museum. They also share about their historic Catholic church in New Vienna. It is easy to see the Kluesner’s love for each other. Their history in this area of Iowa makes a beautiful Iowa love song. The Kluesner’s are blessed with family. “We have five kids,…

[drfm-me]

Warren and Sanders Spar on Gender Issues at Iowa Debate

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati…

[woman-respecter]

Honestly i do see a lot of parallels to the Pete Buttigieg hate in the Sarah McBride hate… there seems to be this weird intense hatred of Type A honor student type queer people that they couch as being about “whiteness” (but they do it to QPOC when they fit too) or being insufficiently radical instead. It’s such clear crab bucket shit. Like are they supposed to be sorry for being smarter and more strategic than you? It just feels like resentment for the nerdy queer kid who made you feel dumb in social studies class. As a lesbian who fits into that same debate club gay mold it’s just so easy to see.

But a lot of it’s also the Contrapoints (who has been repeatedly cancelled by the same idiots) quote about not wanting power but to critique power. Anyone who actually attains power is going to have SOME way they compromised, or even just took the high road over getting into a pointless fight they were certain to lose, so there’s always some way you can pick at them in a way you can’t with someone who just yells on social media and nothing else.

yeah, agreed, tho i also think a lot of the mayor pete hate was exacerbated by people being in the Cult of Bernie, who got SO MAD that pete overperformed in iowa. that’s what made them overwhelmingly homophobic about him, same way they were misogynistic about liz warren (who was JUST AS PROGRESSIVE AS BERNIE. but a woman so that’s unacceptable) when she didn’t drop out early enough. i think about it a lot and it’s what turned me off from the left.

[qqueenofhades]

One of the most surprising things I learned recently is that Bernie doesn’t do well with Black voters, and I was wondering if you knew why that is? I feel like his platform is fairly popular so I just wonder why he fails to win their votes?

It's because Black Democrats a) like actual Democrats, and b) also don't have time to waste with empty moral posturing when they are intimately aware of how public policy and progressive (or reactive/reactionary) politics affect their everyday life, in a way that a lot of privileged white Bernie Bros were utterly unequipped to consider (and indeed, attacked the Black Democrats for "not knowing what's best for them," which is not paternalistic or racist at all!) Black Democrats also know how important voting is, because of the obvious fact that they were disenfranchised, had their political accomplishments totally dismantled at the end of Reconstruction, had to literally fight through dogs, gas, guns, and screaming white supremacists to exercise their vote and win their civil rights in the 1960s, and are consistently targeted today by white Republicans attempting to gerrymander, restrict, penalize, or otherwise eradicate their rights. Black Democrats don't vote for empty performative politics, they vote for results. Bernie is great at one, and very bad at the other. Three guesses which.

Elderly Black Democrats in South Carolina allegedly "saved" Biden's 2020 campaign (after Bernie had done well in the EXTREMELY white Iowa and New Hampshire primaries; the ordering of the primaries and the excessive prognostications attached to Uber White Midwestern/New England Results is dumb, but anyway). And that was because Black Democrats have good reason to like Biden. He spent eight years willingly supporting and never upstaging the first Black president, he picked the first Black/Asian woman as his vice president, he put the first Black woman on SCOTUS, he has spent years championing their concerns at an actual tangible and legislative level, and they know that they can trust him. By contrast, Bernie is one of those leftists who dismisses all other kinds of oppression as secondary to the class struggle and thinks that racism, sexism, misogyny, etc. are all inferior injustices to economic injustice. And yes! Economic injustice is very much a thing! But if you go around telling marginalized communities to their faces that their many, many years of lived experience with racial oppression isn't as "real" as economic injustice, and/or that racism will magically be solved by economic redress and you don't need to do anything else about it, don't be surprised when that is not a winning message.

Besides, and as noted: Bernie has spent fifty years in politics and achieved nothing really meaningful (unlike Biden, who has also been in politics for fifty years and has real and significant legislative accomplishments as senator, vice president, and president). His policies are on-paper progressive, but Black Democrats and Black people in general aren't a monolithically progressive voting bloc, and have other concerns and issues that intersect with their support (or lack thereof) for him. There are very few Black people who can afford to take their vote for granted, or to vote for somebody who hasn't demonstrated any interest in going through the legislative process to achieve real results, and instead spends most of his time talking loudly to left-leaning white progressives and cultivating a "Only I, Great Bernie, Can Solve Your Problems" political mentality, which then spills into sore loserdom and was an issue in both 2008 and (most visibly and unforgivably) in 2016.

Basically, in my view, Bernie mostly exists to be the totem for a certain subset of privileged white leftists to club the Democratic Party over the head and set impossible standards of what they "should" be doing, which in turn actively undermines support for the Democrats and helps nakedly fascist Republicans win more elections. And despite nominally running as a Democrat, he in fact is not a Democrat (he sits as an independent) and makes no effort to court central Democratic constituencies. Of which, and obviously, African-Americans are one of the greatest parts, due to consistently voting to get this country out of the mess that fascist white people keep trying to plunge it into. Any candidate who does not understand that, and does not make serious efforts to do so, likewise should not be taken seriously. Therefore, no matter how mad it makes his frothing internet stans (who likewise are not serious people with actual political opinions), the Democratic party apparatus has no real need to humor him and his self-aggrandizing constant talking about things that he never, ever actually does shit about.

[deadpresidents]

Do you think Biden would have beaten Trump had he run in 2016? I know Biden stepped aside because because of his son, but it also seems likely he stepped aside for Clinton.

Yes, I do think that Biden would have beaten Trump in 2016. I don't know how Biden would have handled a campaign at that time with the death of his son having taken place much more recently, but if he could have emotionally handled the rigors of a full-on Presidential campaign at that time, I think he would have beaten Trump in the general election.

The question to me is whether or not Biden could have won the Democratic nomination in 2016 if he had run against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Obviously, Biden was younger at the time than he is now and still a much better retail campaigner than Hillary ever was, but I don't know if a Biden campaign in 2016 would have had the same energy as the Sanders campaign that year -- either from the grassroots or from the top-down. It would have been a much different campaign than 2020, as well, because that one took place during the pandemic and Biden was able to run against an historically unpopular incumbent in the midst of botching the worst public health crisis that every voter in America had ever lived through.

The other big question if Biden had run in 2016 is the role of Barack Obama. In 2016, Biden was the incumbent Vice President, finishing his second term of a partnership with President Obama that ended up being one of the closest personal and political relationships that a President and Vice President ever had. But it is no secret that President Obama did not believe that then-Vice President Biden was the best choice to succeed him. Biden's emotional well-being after the death of his son in May 2015 certainly worried Obama, but in books and reporting since that time, it's been apparent that Obama believed that Hillary Clinton made more sense as his successor in 2016 than Biden for a number of reasons. That ultimately resulted in some hurt feelings on the Biden side at the time when Obama seemed to be urging Biden to step aside in 2016 while the Vice President was still considering a potential run. It never impacted Biden's loyalty to the Obama Administration or truly got personal, but it was especially troubling to Biden because he still had not made a final decision about a potential 2016 campaign and one of Beau Biden's dying wishes was that his father would run for President. Obama never directly discouraged Biden from running in 2016; he thought that Biden earned the right to make his own decision about the race, but he was worried about Biden's emotional state in the wake of Beau's recent death, he worried that Biden wasn't the right candidate to defeat Hillary or Bernie for the nomination, and he worried that a potential Biden loss -- either in the primaries or the general election -- would tarnish Biden's overall political legacy and possibly come across as a repudiation of the Obama Administration eight years in the White House.

Of course, Trump's victory over Hillary in 2016 gave Obama's successor the opportunity to immediately start reversing many of Obama's accomplishments and reset the hope and change represented by Obama's successful 2008 campaign. And the irony is that the crucial, traditionally-Democratic blue-collar voters that Hillary Clinton's campaign tended to overlook in 2016 are the same voters that Biden has spent a significant portion of his political career representing and connecting with. So in 2016, Trump won battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that Obama had won in both 2008 and 2012. Without those states in 2016, Trump wouldn't have defeated Hillary Clinton, and when Biden did run against Trump in 2020, his victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (Trump once again won Ohio and Iowa) were crucial in the Electoral College.

[beardedmrbean]

In the winter of January 2020, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a member of the party’s informal left-wing House bloc dubbed “The Squad,” temporarily backed away from the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, after enthusiastically supporting him.

Among the reasons she reportedly “grew less interested in helping Sanders’ campaign” was Joe Rogan.

Sanders’ campaign had touted a quasi-endorsement from the wildly popular podcaster, who has a record of inviting controversial guests on to spew conspiracies and bigotry while dabbling in both himself, apparently unnerving Ocasio-Cortez and her team in the process.

Four years later, the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has Ocasio Cortez’s fervent backing, is in discussions to appear on Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience.

It marks a dramatic 180 from the Democratic movement’s response to Sanders merely noting Rogan’s praise four years ago.

Reuters reported Monday that Harris campaign officials were in talks with Rogan’s team about having her on the show, which former president Donald Trump has said he plans to appear on before election day.

The arguments for and against appearing on Rogan remain little changed.

First, there’s the baggage.

Rogan falsely claimed “activists” were behind California wildfires and touted a conspiracy theory associated with climate change denial that claims shifts in the earth’s magnetic poles bring about natural, apocalyptic catastrophes like the flood in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark.

Nearly 300 doctors, physicians and science educators wrote to Rogan's distributor, Spotify, when he spread Covid-19 information, including claiming young people didn’t need to get vaccinated and promoting the taking of veterinary drug ivermectin to treat the disease.

In 2022, he apologized after a compilation of clips of him repeatedly saying the N-word went viral.

Among his past guests are Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right neo-fascist group Proud Boys, and Alex Jones, the malicious conspiracist who waged a years-long campaign against parents whose children were murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

It could be pointed out that Howard Stern, the reformed shock jock whose show Harris appeared on last week, has a decades long archive of sexist and racist broadcasts. But Stern has backed away from his past antics in recent years—though he’s also paid his way into the Democratic fold, attending top dollar fundraisers.

But, unlike Stern, one need not reach years into the past to find Rogan’s controversies. Earlier this year, his Netflix standup special Burn the Boats was criticized for his mocking trans people and preaching vaccine skepticism—and, arguably more important for a standup special, it was also unfunny, reviewers agreed.

But then there is the case for Rogan, for which the Sanders campaign made a compelling argument for in 2020.

Rogan has a giant audience—tens of millions of subscribers across Spotify, YouTube, Instagram and X. That audience skews heavily male (81%) and young (56% between 18 and 34), demographics relatively immune to legacy media (only 12% of Rogan’s audience says they trust newspapers).

The best way to reach them—agree or disagree with all of their views—is on their turf. If some of them join the Democratic fold and help defeat Donald Trump, great.

Sanders, in fact, had already appeared on Rogan’s show months before the endorsement controversy. In his interview, he took advantage of Rogan’s deferential interview style—part of the reason why right-wing guests on the show frequently make crazed claims without being challenged—to hammer home his message of economic justice directly to the host’s massive audience.

“The goal of our campaign is to build a multi-racial, multi-generational movement that is large enough to defeat Donald Trump and the powerful special interests whose greed and corruption is the root cause of the outrageous inequality in America,” the Sanders campaign told Vanity Fair in 2020. “Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our values.”

Sanders was pilloried by Democratic aligned organizations like MoveOn and the Human Rights Campaign. They may yet issue similar reprisals if Harris does ultimately agree to appear on Rogan.

[nodynasty4us]

I could go on about Trump’s lies, his selfish narcissism, the felonies he has been charged with committing, or his desire for autocratic leadership—but that has all been said over and over. It doesn’t matter. Iowans still bow to Trump. They turned out in subzero weather to honor their king and vote for him. That is what cults do, sacrifice for their leader. At their own expense. This time, it is at our country’s expense.

Retired school counselor Bernie Scolaro, Iowa nice—till hell freezes over. Thoughts on the Trump vote - Bleeding Heartland

[sexytummyache]

People who yell at other people to vote a certain way OR ELSE are not doing their point any favors. And honestly it speaks to a certain type of privilege and over-generalizing.

For one thing, the amount your vote matters depends on location. Maybe you live somewhere that your vote is actually worth something but my vote wasn't counted in the 2016 election (problems with an absentee ballot) and it didn't impact anything because Hillary still won in Cook County, Illinois. She was always going to. (Luckily the local elections actually went the way I was intending to vote).

When I lived in Iowa, I did feel like my vote mattered but that's not the case anymore.

Additionally, the Democrats have undermined voter faith in the democratic process in the past two elections by strategically undermining Bernie's campaign. You can say whatever you want about whether he would have won or not, but you can't deny the fact that the democratic party worked harder to beat Bernie than they did to beat Trump.

Finally, during every election since the turn of the millennium, people have been pulling the "vote third party next election. This time you just have to grin and bare it" about Bush, then Romney, then Trump. There's no long term strategy. Voting third party has the potential to actually alter the future because a third party candidate winning 5% of votes will get federal funding in the next election and force the Democrats to actually get with the times.

A lot of people are dedicated to voting Democrat because they're worried if they don't they'll be responsible for the actions of a hyper-rich imperial leader, but you are not responsible for something that you have minimal agency to impact on the first place. And yes, that varies by what state and county you live in like everything else. I for one am no longer interested in acting out of fear of doing the wrong thing when I could be acting out of a desire to do the right thing.

I don't judge any leftist for how they have decided to vote or not vote in this election. I have my ideas about the best option and maybe I'm wrong. I think it's more important to vote for the local positions anyways. And I'm happy to hear someone's reasoning for why they think I should instead vote blue. But when you just yell and demean the moral integrity of people who are trying just as hard as you are to make the right choice this fall, you are being an ineffective asshole. You are creating division in the movement and I think that's worse than not voting.

And no this is not tone policing because democratic voter is not a marginalized class.

[evilelitest2]

Was Sander's Robbed in 2020?

Ok so lets walk to the past for a bit. Its 2020, the Democratic primary is getting heated. Biden keeps leading in all the polls, but after three primary elections, he has been coming off short. Moderates are panicking and it looks like Bernie Sanders might be able to get the nomination after all. He was counted out after the heart attack, and yet he kept on going.

So Sanders going in 2020 had two options for how to run his campaign. About 30% of the party loved him, about 20% of the party absolutely hated him, and 55% were mixed more ambivalent about him. He could either

Try to win over the parts of the party that aren't already supporting him, in particular the black community (Sanders does this a bit with the Latino democrats, his latino outreach very impressive and very underreported in the Democratic party

Try to hold unto your 25-30% of the party and hope rest of the vote is split between all the different moderates, so he can win with a plurality of the vote. due to the weirdness of the Democratic primary rules he can still win the nomination even without the majority, the winner only needs a plurality. if the moderate votes are split between Biden, Mayor Pete, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar, then Sanders could squeak in a victory with less than a third of the party.

Biden is the frontrunner, is polling ahead of everybody else, particular among the all important African-American segment of the democratic electorate. However he isn't beloved and there are a ton of Moderates running against him, and all of them are focused on attacking Biden in the hopes that they could take his place.

Sanders too option 2, which was risky. Winning with a plurality rather than a majority always leaves a lot of sore feelings, and had Sanders won the 2020 primary he would have to have dealt with the 70% of the electorate who didn't vote for him feeling sore, but maybe he could have handled it, we will never know. The advantage of his plan is that he just needed to hold unto his base, who already loved him. The danger is that if the moderates ever managed to rally around a single candidate, suddenly he is very outnumbered. Risky play but he did it. This is the same plan that trump use to win the Republican primary in 2016 (to be clear, that isn't a moral judgement on sanders, Trump isn't bad because he won with a plurality, he is bad because he is a fascist). There is one key difference though the Republican primary uses a winner takes all approach, so who ever wins the state gets all of the points, which allowed Trump to expand his lead. This is because Republicans don't believe in democracy.

Those are some great mittens

So far this plan has been working well for Sanders. The moderates have split the vote, Sanders won Nevada, New Hampshire and either won Iowa or it was so close that he basically won Iowa. Biden has yet to do well in any of the first three states.

But Then, South Carolina, the first state with a large black electorate. Biden secures a key endorsement from US Representative and Civil Rights activist Jim Clyburn. The results were a pretty stunning turnaround for Biden, who won 49% of the votes and got 39 of the delegates. Sanders came in second, with 20% of the vote and 15 of the delegates. Buttigieg, Warren, Steyer, and Klobuchar didn't get a high enough percentage of the vote to get any delegates.

Biden almost won more than the rest combined.

So lets take a moment to talk about the US primary system, because it is both illogical and needlessly complicated. Rather than have all the states vote at once like a normal fucking country, each individual state plus the territories plus DC hold there own primary, most of which are not in order. So for example, the great state of NY, fourth largest state in the country and the center of the global economy, has its primary at the literal end of the process. So yeah, I've never in my lifetime gotten to have any effect on a presidential primary, because the race is already over by the time it gets to NY. So who wins a primary is not necessarily the most popular person with the party, its who ever can stay in the race longest, its a marathon. A super popular candidate could still drop out if they aren't popular in the first few state. Maybe Elizabeth warren was super popular in New York and if she had been able to hold unto those state she would have won, but we will never know. this system sucks, and I hate it.

So the way the primary goes down is that you have 4 elections from individual states. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. Then you have something called Super Tuesday, where Virginia, North Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, and Utah all go at once. So basically you go from 4 individual states to a fuck tone of state (including the two largest) all at once).

So another critical thing about the democratic party is demographics. While the republican party is a white Christianity identity party, the democratic party is a diverse coalition. The most important part of that is the African American vote, who have steadily become the deciding vote in the Democratic party since the 60s. About 90% of African American voters are democratic, and African Americans make up just over a quarter of the Democratic party. They are also by far the most organized and proactive voters, due to years of having to fight against voter suppression (especially in the South). The black electorate in the democratic party is one of the parties greatest advantages, and it also why the party has become steadily less racist every year (Obama really accelerated this process). To be clear this is a good thing, the Democratic party is better for it.

For a series of very complicated reasons I could get into another time, Sanders had never done particularly well with African American voters and Biden has. This isn't universal, the African American community is not a monolith and has a diversity of views but that is how the demographics played out generally in the primary. Most importantly, apart from Biden was the only candidate, moderate or progressive, who seemed to excite the African American voting bloc.

The reason why this matters is that Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada don't have very large black populations, Iowa and new Hampshire are lily white, and Nevada is less than 10% African American. Despite being more than a fourth of the party, the first three states are not representative of the African American vote (maybe we should have one nation wide election eh?)

So once biden won South Carolina, it became obvious that A) Biden's defeats in the first three states were not affecting his popularity in the larger states B) none of the other moderates had any real African American support. This is what leads to the supposed "betrayal"

The Day before Super Tuesday, Obama called up the remaining moderates, and convinced most of them to drop out and endorse Biden. They did so, and it basically shattered Sander's chance of winning. With most of the moderates unified, Biden won 10 states to Sander's 4, wracking up 726 delegates to sanders 505. Biden got 286065 votes to sanders 74,755. Not only was this a great victory for Biden, after super Tuesday all of the other moderates withdrew, allowing him to crush Sanders going forward. Biden had 2709 Delegates to Sanders 1,113, but more importantly Biden won 51% of the votes, with sanders getting 26%. Some Sanders fans have blamed Elizabeth Warren for not dropping out, but even if Warren had and every one of her votes had gone to standers (and there is a lot of evidence to suggest a third of her votes would have gone to Biden), that would only make Sanders at 33% to 51%.

To put this in raw numbers, Biden won 19 million votes. Sanders had just under 9.7 million. Biden won 10 million more votes than Sanders (Elizabeth warren got 2.8 million)

So I see a lot of leftist types claim that this was an example of democratic treachery, that the DNC party robbed sanders of his chance of winning, this was Nixon style Ratfuckery that destroyed Sander's populist campaign to put Biden, who nobody likes anyway, in charge. And as a progressive who didn't want Biden to win, I have to say it sucked...but that wasn't a cheat.

Biden won the popular vote, love him or hate him, he did win more than half of the democratic votes, that makes him the candidate, that is how democracy works, sometimes you lose. Some have claimed that Obama calling up the other moderates and getting them to drop out was a cheat but....how? The moderates knew they couldn't win after South Carolina, and they were ideologically closer to Biden, so they dropped out and endorsed the person they agreed with more. Most Sanders fans wanted Warren to drop out, so I knew you guys understand that importance of consolidating behind a winning candidate. Thats just good politics, the fact that Sanders didn't bother to try to court other candidates to drop out is actually a major weakness of him as a candidate. If the situation had been reversed, and the moderates were trying to win with only 30%, wouldn't you guys want the other progressives to drop out behind sanders

Because Sanders is a populist, and his rhetoric is so tied to the idea of "The people rising up against the elites" that idea that he lost demographically is sort of a trauma his more radical followers can't really deal with, so they retreat to conspiracy theories. Remember, a conspiracy theory is something people turn to to avoid facing a difficult truth. If you identify yourself as populist, and you lose demographically, you have to face some difficult questions. Maybe sanders was the wrong candidate? Maybe he made mistakes? Maybe his fanbase sabotaged his chance of winning, maybe his hardcore fans make a mistake in there understanding of the political situation. Maybe he didn't do anything wrong, it just wasn't the year for a progressive? Or maybe Sleepy Joe Biden actually was a more cunning political operator than they gave him credit for and they were duped.

Or most difficult of them all. Maybe most Americans just don't agree with Sander's position?

Those are hard questions, but you kinda of have to answer them if you want to be a progressive who accomplishes things. I might do later posts that address them if people are interested.

There is a segment of the left who are moving into purple

However, for those who can't face difficult choices, they retreat to conspiracy, and they claim that Sanders was robbed

Hey you know who hasn't been saying that Sanders was robbed by the DNC? Bernie Sanders, because he is an adult who understands how democracy works. He lost, he took it gracefully and then he endorsed and campaigned for the winner, cause sanders actually cares about the cause and not faux revolutionary nonsense.

(Fun fact, Biden and Sanders are friends Irl. Like no joke, those two get along personally)

I didn't vote for Biden in the primary and I was not happy when he won the Primary. However I never thought Biden was senile, or a fool, or a hack, I think that he is a very cunning politician who has a public persona that encourages people to underestimate him And become people can't stand the idea that they could lose to Biden, they retreat into fantasy. This is why MAGA denies the election, they can't face the reality that most of the country doesn't like them, and they can't admit that they lost to a man who doesn't fit there mental image of an impression leader

Yeah...that ends well.

[gaywatch]

I'm a little hopeful

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung-rev2&sca_esv=7f167d0aab507d88&sxsrf=ADLYWIIIRhzybBMuAdKtY7snH4RokBfkqg:1730792238584&q=selzer+polling&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO-L3E18SJAxXIEFkFHY1rK6wQBSgAegQICRAB&biw=412&bih=726&dpr=2.63

I definitely have good reasons for cautious optimism, including the Iowa poll, but like everyone else who experienced 2016 up close polls will always be the very last thing we put any stock in. The good news is that in every major election since you can't escape the idea of not letting any polls lull you into complacency, which is another reason I'm cautiously optimistic. You could tell Democrats that Harris is winning by ten points in all fifty states and we'd still be like 'NO COMPLACENCY GO VOTE.' We got absolutely bitchslapped out of the idea that anything is a foregone conclusion, and anything that results in more engagement is a win for us.

Other reasons I'm cautiously optimistic:

-Record voter turnout in Texas. Not because I think Texas will flip this year (if it ever does I'll cry, it's my home state) but because any news of record voter turnout, especially after 2020 raised the bar, is a good sign.

-Donald has never won the popular vote, and repeating the run of swing state wins he pulled off to take the electoral college in 2016 would be extremely difficult (and partially dependent on low voter turnout).

-In 2016 Donald ran in opposition to a two term president, and neither party has won the White House three elections in a row in 74 years. That's not the case in this election.

-Yes, the idea that 'we couldn't even get a white woman into office, why would we think a woman of color was possible' holds some merit thanks to the double-barrel of sexism and racism. However, when times get this dire the odds of dramatic leaps forward aren't as low as you think. If anything it encourages them, imo.

-Donald has a choke hold on his base, but he hasn't exactly been winning new people over by leaps and bounds or wooing Democrats to his side. Each side is pretty galvanized, and we outnumber them.

-Meanwhile, the energy and excitement around Harris is visible, palpable, and shocked out of complacency. That's why attempts to discourage voting have been so aggressive--when we vote, we go blue, and overall turnout jumped like eight points from 2016 to 2020.

-Biden ran a very good campaign in 2020, they got the job done in a huge way and all of that support has been thrown behind Harris and then some.

-Certain key groups and figures have made their support for Harris known. Palestinians, Bernie Sanders (who still carries a lot of progressive sway), etc have all come out in support of Harris, which will speak to a lot of hesitant voters.

-To be honest--and yes I'm knocking on wood before and after I type this--the energy around Harris reminds me of the energy around Obama in '08 way more than the energy around Clinton in '16 or even Biden in '20. Do not forget the overwhelming shift Democrats felt the second Biden dropped out. That shit was magical.

-Donald's camp was dumb and racist enough to piss off Puerto Ricans mere days before the election which is like...lol.

-The pro-choice movement is no fucking joke.

And as a general reminder: A ton of very professional people are gonna talk about how close this race is all day today, and that's gonna be anxiety inducing. But it's all conjecture based on polling. It's all because they need something to talk about to fill the hours. It's all theory. The truth is nobody knows much of anything until the results come in. The phrase of the day is 'turnout, not polling.'

Turnout. Not polling.

[indigovigilance]

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[mightyflamethrower]

In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina.

Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply evaporated.

The fear of a front-runner Sanders’ socialist victory and nomination—and thus an enviable landslide loss to incumbent Donald Trump in the general election—had prompted the donor class and shadowy political insiders to act.

And they did so by choosing a perceived moderate, old Joe Biden from Scranton. That required the coerced departures of all his far-left rivals, who had hitherto performed much better than Biden in the primaries.

Now front-runner Biden still displayed obvious symptoms of serious cognitive decline that had only seemed to mount through the 2020 campaign. And his dementia continued to accelerate during his first three years as president.

Biden had deceitfully promised to conduct a healing campaign and a unifying presidency. But once in the White House, his extreme agendas proved the most divisive and far-left in nearly a century.

Rumors of that prior March 2020 Faustian bargain emerged. The Bidens got to serve as useful moderate veneers. So, they enjoyed the ceremonial functions of the presidency while outsourcing the real operations to former Obama officials, consultants, and advisors.

Indeed, Obama did not, as most ex-presidents do, exit Washington upon leaving the White House. Instead, he bought a mansion and stayed close by.

Democrats demonized anyone critical of Biden’s obvious mental decline. Their smearing crested during Biden’s now-aborted 2024 reelection bid, even as Biden could no longer display even a veneer of mental and physical engagement.

Polls revealed an impending Trump landslide victory in November—and a massive Democratic loss of Congress.

So suddenly on a Sunday, July 21—just days left before state ballots were formalized with the names of the parties’ official nominees, and on the eve of the Democratic convention—party bosses, mega-donors, and Obama puppeteers went into action for yet a third time.

They reportedly threatened candidate Biden with a complete loss of any further campaign funding and raised the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment to end his presidency—should he not suddenly withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his surrogate on the ticket.

In one moment, the choices of nearly 15 million Biden primary voters were vitiated. No delegates were consulted. No other alternative Democrat candidates were even considered.

Biden was dethroned; Harris was coronated—without much public input or even knowledge of how or why.

Democrat grandees stopped smearing Biden’s conservative critics, who had worried over his dementia. Instead, they now trumped opposition criticism of Biden’s decline.

Yet Biden most certainly did not resign his presidency. Instead, he promised to serve out his remaining six months in office.

So Democrat insiders not only removed their leading candidate, who for the prior six months had won all the 2024 primaries and almost all the delegates, but insisted that Biden keep Democrats and himself in power—but only if he agreed to quit the race.

In sum, at the 11th hour of a two-year reelection effort, a cabal arbitrarily decided that Joe Biden might well lose the Democrats the White House and the Congress.

So, they reversed course, now claiming his dementia was so acute as to destroy their November prospects. But mysteriously, his decline was not severe enough to imperil the American people, whom Biden must continue to lead until January 20, 2025.

Furthermore, the bosses’ replacement choice, Vice President Kamala Harris, had entered no primary. She never won a single delegate. Harris also never captured a single delegate in her first and only presidential run back in 2020. She then dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.

We have now witnessed three left-wing veritable coups.

In 2020, covert actors decided to ossify the Democratic primary races. Next, they conferred the nomination on a clearly cognitively challenged Joe Biden. He was now tasked with serving as a useful moderate vessel for a virtual, even more radical, Obama third term.

The same operators next assumed virtual control of Biden’s presidential agenda, given his accelerating cognitive decline.

When that charade could no longer be sustained, for a third time, they circumvented the normal transparent democratic process.

So, they removed the once useful but now a liability Biden—while insisting that he was still fit enough to keep the left in power—until the anticipated Harris victory in November.

And all of this was the shadow work of those who sanctimoniously lectured America that “democracy dies in darkness.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Tuesday’s RNC Speakers list

Speaker list, via HuffPost:

5-5:30 p.m.

Chairwoman Anne Hathaway, Committee on Arrangements

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee

5:30-6 p.m.

Julie Harris, president of National Federation of Republican Women

Hayden Padget, Young Republicans chairman

Matt Brooks, CEO of Republican Jewish Coalition

Reince Priebus, chairman of host committee and former RNC chair

James Crawford, chair of the Potawatomi Nation

6-6:30 p.m.

Perry Johnson, businessman

Kari Lake, Senate candidate from Arizona

Eric Hovde, Senate candidate from Wisconsin

Bernie Moreno, Senate candidate from Ohio

Former Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.)

Dave McCormick, Senate candidate from Pennsylvania

6:30-7 p.m.

Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.)

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice

Sam Brown, Senate candidate from Nevada

Tim Sheehy, Senate candidate from Montana

Hung Cao, Senate candidate from Virginia

Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.)

7-7:30 p.m.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (N.J.)

Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), House Republican Conference Chair

Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), House Majority Whip

Rep. Steve Scalise (La.), House Majority Whip

Rep. Mike Johnson (La.), House Majority Leader

7:30-8 p.m.

Vivek Ramaswamy, former GOP presidential candidate

Savannah Chrisley, reality TV personality

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson

8-8:30 p.m.

Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas)

Randy Sutton, Board of Wounded Blue & Retired Law Enforcement Officer founder

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

8:30-9 p.m.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (Mo.)

Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.)

Michael Coyle, everyday American

Erin Koper, a Pittsburgh community activist

9-9:30 p.m.

Anne Fundner, everyday American

Family of Rachel Morin, Maryland woman killed last year

Madeline Brame, a victims rights advocate

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Dr. Ben Carson, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary

9:30-10 p.m.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio

Lara Trump, Republican National Committee co-chair

See Also:

Monday's List.

[mixtapemag]

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ'S TOWN HALL IN PARKCHESTER.

Photos by Christopher Hall.

Previously on Mixtape:

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Town Hall in Astoria.

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Attending EID Festival in Astoria Park.

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's NY-14 Town Hall in the Bronx.

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Sen. Bernie Sanders Rally for the Amazon Labor Union.

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Petition Drive in Jackson Heights.

Photos of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Ames, Iowa.

Photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Des Moines, Iowa.

Christopher Hall tweets over here. Rolling.

[dhaaruni]

"I have a theory that McCain-Romney-Trump voters are more devout Republicans but less devout TRUMPISTS than Clinton-Kerry-Obama-Trump voters, and the latter group thought Obama was “post-racial” but when he wasn’t, got extremely reactionary on race and immigration and well." <-- Sadly, this describes my grandmother to a T, so I think your theory is correct. She even supported Bernie before switching to Trump after he lost the primary.

I'm glad my theories make sense!

I really think Ohio and Iowa are honestly peak Obama-Trump territory which is why I think Trump swung those states so hard right.

[mariacallous]

Sarah Longwell: “On paper, Nikki Haley should be a top-tier contender in the 2024 Republican primary. She’s a successful former governor from an important, early primary state. She has an impressive personal backstory, solid foreign policy chops, and great candidate skills, too. This used to be an extremely attractive package for GOP primary voters.”

“Used to be. But not anymore.”

“Instead, Haley’s candidacy represents the best of the “meh” middle tier of 2024 candidates, which for now includes the likely notional campaigns of Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Chris Christie. No one is really asking any of those guys to run. But they don’t have anything better to do. So they’ll eventually put exploratory committees together and take a joy ride that may or may not make it to Iowa.”

“And Haley, despite how good she is on paper, finds herself in that same tier: No one is asking for what she’s selling. Why is that?”

fucking drag her, slay her, sipping on that true tea hunty

any ways I'd throw Tim Scott in there too, people who stand less than 0 chance with the party of 2023-4, people who represent the party the GOP image makers wanted people to believe it was in 2014-15 when really it was the party dying for Trump.

I mean, all she and those other will do is fragment the anti-Trump vote in the primaries (such as it is and might be) unless they do what the Dems did relatively quickly in 2020 and coalesce around a single non-Trump candidate. Trump is like a more dominant Bernie in terms of current primary field strength and support (he has a solid core but may not grow that strength and so would rely on the alternatives to be split so he can get the most delegates and wins), though I also think more republicans are likely to go for him if their particular other candidate drops out or loses.