2020: The Two Year Long Election

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Defeat this bigoted monster 

 

[fraurosena]

Well this is a step in the right direction!

Federal judge says 102 mile-long district violates Voting Rights Act, orders map redrawn

Quote

A federal judge said a Mississippi state senate district, which snakes 102 miles across the state, violates the federal Voting Rights Act.

State Senate District 22 stretches from near Cleveland, in the heart of the Delta, down to the Jackson metro area. Sen. Buck Clark, R-Hollandale, has held that senate seat since 2004. The defendants are Gov. Phil Bryant, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, and Attorney General Jim Hood.

The Mississippi Center for Justice and Jackson-based attorney Rob McDuff represent the plaintiffs and were joined in the suit by the Lawyer’s Committee, the Waters Kraus law firm of Dallas., and Cleveland attorney, Ellis Turnage.

In June, three African American men who live in District 22 filed a federal lawsuit accusing the state of gerrymandering that district, which lies mostly in the majority black Delta, to intentionally dilute African-American voting strength. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves ruled that the district violates the Voting Rights Act and ordered the Legislature to redraw the district before statewide elections in November.

“As presently drawn, District 22 does not afford the plaintiffs ‘an equal opportunity to participate in the political processes and to elect candidates of their choice,'” Reeves wrote in his order, citing Supreme Court precedent.

The Legislature will get the first crack at redrawing the district in a way that complies with the mandates of the Voting Rights Act, but whatever plan they come up with is likely to have repercussions across neighboring districts.

Reeves noted that the plaintiffs had already suggested three alternate plans that comply. Two of those plans would affect only Districts 22 and 23. A third plan would affect Districts 22, 23, and 13. Those seats are held by Clark, Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, and Sen. Willie Simmons, D-Cleveland, respectively.

Clarke is not seeking reelection to the Senate in 2019 but is running for state treasurer. Hayes Dent of Yazoo County, a lobbyist and former aide to Gov. Kirk Fordice, is the only Republican who has qualified to run for the District 22 seat as currently drawn.

Senate District 22 currently covers six counties in the Delta and central Mississippi. The district is irregularly-shaped, with a wide center and two narrow arms, one that reaches north past Cleveland and another that reaches into Madison County, ending at the Barnett Reservoir. The distance between the two points is approximately 102 miles. Mississippi, which has 52 senate districts, is approximately 320 miles top to bottom.

The plaintiffs, Joseph Thomas of Yazoo County, Vernon Ayers of Washington County, and Melvin Lawson of Bolivar County, all live in District 22. Each of those counties, all located in the Delta, are predominantly African American.

The lawsuit, filed in June, alleges that state officers elongated the district, adding Madison County’s wealthy and largely white neighborhoods, to limit the district’s black voting age population to 50.8 percent. They argue that this, combined with white bloc voting and lower African American turnout, has consistently diluted the voting strength of one of the most African American parts of the state.

“Gerrymandering stands as one of the greatest threats to democracy today. The current districting plan in Mississippi’s state Senate effectively denies African American voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process,” said Kristen Clarke, President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

 

[AmazonGrace]

I have never heard of him but he seems nice

 

[AmazonGrace]

The Wikileaks candidate 

 

[SilverBeach]

Uh-oh...Butler says Gabbard has a "servants heart".

[GreyhoundFan]

"How sexist will the media’s treatment of female candidates be? Rule out ‘not at all.’"

Spoiler

If you think the media treatment of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was not seriously marred by sexism, please proceed directly to social media, Fox News, my email or wherever trolls gather.

Because the underlying idea here is that, among the many flaws of 2016 campaign coverage, was the disadvantage Clinton had because of her gender.

In her post-election book, “What Happened,” she described one of the many ways that played out — through false equivalency.

“If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day,” she wrote, the headlines would report: “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil.”

The obsession with Clinton’s voice (shrill), her laugh (witchlike), her purported lack of stamina, her marriage, her supposedly inauthentic love of hot sauce — combined with the constant analysis of how voters simply couldn’t warm up to her — is still all too fresh.

One of the reasons it’s so fresh is that we’re hearing echoes of it, already, in the early coverage of the female Democratic lawmakers who have declared their 2020 candidacies.

The long-ago love life of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) has been parsed, as has what music she partied to as a Howard University undergrad.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s uncertainty about how to eat fried chicken has been ruthlessly mocked.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy was in trouble even before she declared because of the senator from Massachusetts identifying herself as Native American. (This was a real blunder, to be sure, but not the career-ending one it’s often portrayed as.)

And there’s so much more, even a year away from the 2020 Iowa caucuses. But why?

“There is a narrow universe of acceptable behavior for women,” explained Heidi Moore, a media consultant who is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and former business editor of the Guardian U.S.

In politics — as in so many other spheres — women get bashed far more than their male counterparts for personality quirks, vulnerabilities and actions of all sorts.

Not to mention their appearance and speaking voices. Think of how far a female candidate would get if she came off like the rumpled and ranting Bernie Sanders.

“We see in coverage of women lawmakers that even minor flaws are treated as disqualifying,” Moore told me, “while men’s flaws get brief attention but are glossed over as a case of ‘nobody’s perfect.’ ”

After 2016, there is certainly more awareness of society’s bias and of the media’s role in amplifying it.

New York Times politics editor Patrick Healy wrote this month that he regrets once describing Clinton’s laugh as a “cackle,” and the Times published an enlightening story by Maggie Astor about how female candidates start off at a disadvantage.

It explored the all-important quality of “likability,” which research shows is a necessity for the success of female candidates, though not so for men.

Here’s the Catch-22. One of the qualities that makes women unlikable? Ambition. Which is, after all, hard to avoid in a candidate for president of the United States.

“Harvard researchers found in 2010 that voters regarded ‘power-seeking’ women with contempt and anger,” Astor wrote, but saw power-seeking men as strong and competent.

Unpacking those issues in a front-page Times article is progress, undoubtedly, but Healy also said in a Twitter thread that he thought campaign coverage of Clinton was fair overall. The paper was tough on her, he wrote, but also on Donald Trump.

Jay Rosen, the New York University press critic, told me that this denial of the obvious (the Times’s overblown treatment of Clinton’s email scandal) reminded him of political scientist Norman Ornstein’s well-phrased critique: “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”

Even serious issues — like the temperament of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), including her reportedly throwing office supplies in anger — are given far more attention than they would be for men. Joe Biden, the former vice president and Democratic senator from Delaware, is said to have a short fuse, too, but somehow he’s seen as affable, also known as “the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.”

So, yes, we’re a sexist society, and the media reflect and amplify this. In some cases, female voters aren’t immune — 39 percent of them preferred Trump to 54 percent for Clinton, according to Pew Research. (The president wildly distorts the results, but he still got plenty of female support.)

Still, some see hope: The sheer number of women running for president will make it easier for female candidates to succeed.

“This could be a seminal, turning-point moment,” with the number of women providing a new frame of reference, especially for younger voters just coming into the electorate, Democratic strategist Celinda Lake told Politico.

And for voters of any age, it’s harder — theoretically, at least — to say, “Sure, I’d love to vote for a woman, just not THAT woman,” when there are a half dozen female candidates to choose from.

The campaign is still in its toddlerdom. Harris declared her candidacy only weeks ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

But much has happened already to forecast an early unsettling vision of what’s ahead. That includes women in politics gleefully disrespecting each other — as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway did this month. She managed to belittle Harris, Klobuchar and Gillibrand in a single Fox & Friends interview (“I’ve yet to see presidential timber. I just see a bunch of presidential wood chips”), while praising two potential male contenders: former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City.

Granted, Conway also called Beto O’Rourke a loser, but her comments about Gillibrand, the senator from New York, for instance, were especially petty: “Apparently, it was the first time she had ever eaten fried chicken, and she waited for the cameras to roll.”

Silly? No doubt. Inconsequential? Maybe not. Ask average Americans what they know about Gillibrand — if anything — and they might just bring up a “feeling” about her elitist lack of authenticity. Call it the fried-chicken problem, brought to you by the news media.

Society and journalism conspire, Moore noted, creating an unfair standard: “While men get to be flawed and human and complex, women are mostly allowed to audition only for pedestals, for sainthood, for absolute purity.”

So far, no one in this field looks like a candidate for sainthood.

And if such a woman could be found, surely her unbearable piety would disqualify her immediately.

 

[fraurosena]

Ugh. This is not a good move. With all due respect (and I really respect a lot of his ideas), but it's time to ditch the old white fuddy-duddies. He's 77, for crying out loud. He'll be turning 80 in the year the next president is inaugurated. No, I'm not doubting his mental capacities. But good grief, there are a lot of younger politicians. Time to give them a chance. His time has passed. Be a mentor, a guide, a wise man. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

He wants you to look past race, age, gender and sexual orientation, and elect an elderly straight white male, because there are too few of those in powerful positions

[milkteeth]

I'm a young hispanic woman, and so long as Bernie is the most progressive choice, I'll support him running for president. While it would be great to have a younger politician be elected, what's most important to me is that this person support Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, 15 dollar minimum wage and stopping Wall Street before they destroy this country again with another financial crisis (along with lots of other progressive policy goals). If it's an old Jewish man who is the one saying and showing that he'll do these things, then I'm behind him. 

[Destiny]

If it comes down to it, I’ll vote for him too, because I actually agree with a pretty decent portion of his policies, but won’t be my first choice like last time. That said, I wish he had not run. I’m not eager for another divisive Bernie bros mess.

 

Edited February 19, 2019 by Destiny
Mesa and mess are not the same.

[AmazonGrace]

In 2016 it seemed to me that Trump supporters and Bernie bros were equally misogynistic assholes on Twitter.

I hope it won't be Bernie because I think  if he wins the candidacy Trump et al. will have a lot of nasty opposition research about his squiffy finances and other stuff that got sort of swept aside in the 2016 primary. But there were enough hints that it's out there and it wouldn't be pretty.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Expect very slanted election coverage on CNN: They hired a Trump shill as their political director.

 

[fraurosena]

CNN used to be my go to news outlet for American news. Then the presidential elections happened, and they were so skewed to negative news about Hillary and giving so much airtime to pro-Trumpers that I lost interest in them as a viable independent news source. They were leaning too much towards the Republican angle for my tastes.

Are they now going all in towards the right, in hopes of gaining some viewership from Faux and climbing up from their third spot (they're trailing behind Faux and MSNBC) on most viewed news channels? If so, bad move.

[AmazonGrace]

Who owns CNN and how much did they like their tax cuts?

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

I hope it won't be Bernie because I think  if he wins the candidacy Trump et al. will have a lot of nasty opposition research about his squiffy finances and other stuff that got sort of swept aside in the 2016 primary. But there were enough hints that it's out there and it wouldn't be pretty.

Yup. If Bernie ends up the candidate in 2020, he's gonna be beat over the head non-stop with stuff like that damn essay he wrote for the Vermont Freeman. 

I'll be buying antacids in bulk to get through the 2020 election season. It's going to be really nasty.

 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo did a good analysis of Bernie: "The Daily 202: The biggest challenges facing Bernie Sanders 2.0"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders share one common challenge as they both run for president again in 2020. Hillary Clinton won’t be on the ballot.

The president still routinely uses his 2016 opponent as a foil to rally his base — 27 months after he defeated her in the electoral college. Trump supporters still chant “Lock her up” during his rallies, as they did in Texas last week.

The Vermont senator, who formally announced this morning that he will again seek the Democratic nomination for president, also benefited from Clinton fatigue last time that he cannot count on again. She was perceived as so formidable that potential rivals like Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren passed on challenging her. That left Bernie as the alternative. Many of his supporters in 2016 didn’t identify as democratic socialists, but they did think Clinton was too supportive of free trade, too hawkish and too dynastic.

Sanders — who received more than 13 million votes in 2016 — enters an already crowded, and still growing, field with one of the best email lists in politics, a proven ability to raise lots of money from small-dollar donors, a huge social media following and very high name recognition. The party he seeks to lead is also lurching leftward and moving his direction on a battery of issues.

He is determined to prove that he’s more than a protest candidate or a modern-day Moses guiding liberals through the wilderness. Yet most Democratic strategists, analysts and insiders see Bernie’s quest as quixotic. As Bernie tries again, here are 10 challenges facing the political revolution:

1. Beware the ghost of Rick Santorum.

Politicians across the ideological spectrum often have unrealistic views of the loyalty they command at the grass-roots level. History shows that caucus-goers and primary voters in the early states are fickle and cruel mistresses. The former Pennsylvania senator won the Iowa caucuses in 2012 with 30,000 votes. When he ran again four years later, Santorum spent just as much time camped out in the Hawkeye State but amassed only 1,783 votes — less than one percentage point. Mike Huckabee, who won the caucuses in 2008, got less than 2 percent of the vote. Santorum and Huckabee believed they could count on their old supporters coming home. They counted wrong.

2. He’ll suffer from the burden of high expectations.

Clinton narrowly won the Iowa caucuses four years ago; it was essentially a tie. But Bernie beat her by 22 points in the New Hampshire primary a week later. This doesn’t mean he’s got a lock on the Granite State in 2020. Far from it. But it does mean that Sanders’s 2020 apparatus, fundraising and more will be constantly compared to their 2016 equivalents.

Bernie is legendary for drawing huge crowds. If he cannot turn out big numbers for his events, this will be covered as evidence of diminished enthusiasm — even if the events are larger than at this point in the cycle four years before. “In early polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he won 50 percent and 60 percent of the vote, support for the senator from Vermont has ranged from the low teens to 30 percent,” Dave Weigel notes.

3. The old band isn’t getting back together.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) worked as an organizer for the Sanders campaign in 2016, and she still has nice things to say about him, but the liberal phenom made clear that she will stay on the sidelines of the 2020 campaign. The 29-year-old suggested earlier this month that she might wait to back a horse until the eve of the New York primary, when she could play the role of kingmaker.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) was one of Bernie’s biggest surrogates in 2016. Now she’s running for president herself. Author Marianne Williamson also supported Sanders, but she’s running too. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the only senator to endorse Sanders last time, continues to explore his own bid for the nomination.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a longtime friend, didn’t endorse Sanders last time. But she’s cutting into his coalition now. She also poached Brendan Summers, the Iowa caucuses director for Sanders in 2016.

4. He’s a victim of his own success.

Sanders correctly points out that most Democratic candidates have embraced or copied his positions on Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage and debt-free college that Clinton surrogates portrayed as extreme last time. “All of these policies and more are now supported by a majority of Americans,” Bernie wrote in a 1,500-word email to supporters this morning. “Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.” The challenge is that Sanders does not have this turf to himself anymore, and just because he was first, doesn’t mean people who want Medicare-for-all will necessarily back him.

5. He’ll face more scrutiny.

Clinton herself was afraid to attack Sanders too hard, lest she alienate his supporters and push them toward Green Party nominee Jill Stein — or even Trump, who was also decrying trade deals and promising to do something about income inequality as a candidate.

Because reporters didn’t believe Sanders could actually win the nomination, and saw him mainly as a foil against Clinton, they didn’t dive as deeply into his record early on as they would have with more conventional candidates. This allowed Sanders to introduce himself to voters on his own terms.

The recent #MeToo reckoning has offered a taste of the extra scrutiny Sanders will face this time that he didn’t last time. The senator publicly apologized last month to female staffers of his 2016 campaign who say they were sexually harassed by co-workers. His apology came after news reports that Sanders’s former Iowa campaign manager had been named in a $30,000 federal discrimination settlement with two former employees. Sanders said he was unaware of the $30,000 payout.

6. He enters the race with high negatives, limiting his upside potential.

Sanders endorsed Clinton at the Democratic convention and campaigned for her in the fall, but many from the party establishment nonetheless blamed him for their defeat. “His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,” Clinton complained in her 2017 campaign memoir.

Another factor that still annoys many Democrats: He is not a registered Democrat. Sanders caucuses with them in the Senate, but he’s steadfastly refused to register as a member of the party he seeks to lead. (He and I discussed his reasoning last June.)

7. He’s four years older.

Sanders has impressive stamina, but he is 77. That would make him the oldest nominee ever for a major party, breaking the record set by Trump. He’d turn 80 during his first year in office. The opposition party very often gravitates toward someone who is the opposite of the president in power. There seems to be hunger at the activist level for fresh faces, plus women and candidates of color. History suggests that Democrats will gravitate toward someone who is younger, the way they put Barack Obama up against John McCain in 2008, Bill Clinton against George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter against Gerald Ford in 1976.

8. Democrats badly want to defeat Trump, and Sanders will face lingering questions about electability.

“A Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents wanted a candidate who will perform well against Trump, even if they disagree with that person on most issues,” Clare Malone notes on FiveThirtyEight. “What electability actually means in this context is quite vague, but if it becomes a proxy for a centrist candidate palatable to swing voters, Sanders might be out of luck. Or, even if voters decide that ‘electable’ means more left, Sanders could lose out to new faces trying to sell their pragmatic progressivism … We might be wise not to discount voters’ affinity for these new, shiny candidates: 59 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll said they would be interested in ‘someone entirely new’ as their nominee. Forty-one percent of those polled said Sanders shouldn’t even run again.”

9. He will again take heat for past apostasies on immigration and guns.

Sanders played a key role in killing a comprehensive immigration overhaul during George W. Bush’s second term because he took the side of labor unions over Latinos, something that their allies on Capitol Hill have never forgotten. The politics have changed, as have the unions, and Sanders has now staked out a position that’s in line with the rest of the party.

Gun control is another area where Sanders has worked to catch up with the zeitgeist in Democratic politics. He represents a rural state that, while liberal, has a significant gun culture. In fact, Sanders was once endorsed by the NRA. Now he brags about his bad rating.

Clinton scored points on guns and immigration in 2016, but both these issues have taken on even more outsize importance to Democratic primary voters in the ensuing years. In fact, they’ve become litmus tests.

10. He’s got his work cut out for him with African Americans.

Sanders stumbled in 2016 when he got demolished in South Carolina because he failed to make inroads with black voters, which cost him several other states in the South. African American women emerged as Clinton’s firewall in the series of primaries on March 1, 2016.

A story on the front page of Monday’s New York Times looked at why Sanders struggled to prioritize and execute a winning plan to build support in the black community. “Top aides lost faith in their African-American outreach organizers, whose leadership was replaced and whose team members were scattered across the country. Initiatives like a tour of historically black colleges and universities fizzled; Mr. Sanders even missed its kickoff event,” Sydney Ember reported. “And his campaign’s experience in 2016, as described in interviews with nearly two dozen current and former advisers and staff members, reveals a strikingly uneven commitment on the part of Mr. Sanders and his top advisers to organize and communicate effectively with black voters and leaders.”

The senator has stepped up outreach and takes the problem seriously, but this time at least two of his opponents will be African American: fellow senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

 

[candygirl200413]

Bernie won't get far because the base of the democratic party (Black women) will not allow him, plus dude refuses to reflect on how he was on a lot of topics, especially about race.

[luv2laugh]

I’m disappointed Bernie entered because this election is supposed to be about women taking the power back and helping POC, and the poor as well as the middle class... not to mention issues like healthcare for all and environmental progress.

Bernie’s cult following hurt Hillary’s chances even though I agreed with Bernie more on politics than Hillary. Ugh. I worry this will be a tough one.

Edited February 20, 2019 by luv2laugh

[HerNameIsBuffy]

I think we need an island on which to exile all these narcissists who care only about their own egos and feel entitled to the Presidency, what’s best for the country be damned.

Trump, Hillary, and Bernie can claim the first three spots.

i am still enraged that Trump forced me into s position to suppprt HRC, which I didn’t think anyone could be evil enough that she was the lesser of the two.  Bernie’s going to do it again.

his ideas are great but the math didn’t work last time.

I don’t care about race or sex - I want the person with the best policies as I see it and the least malignant narcissist in the pool.  

That said - I’d vote for literally anyone over Trump - I just really want the other choice to be something that doesn’t hurt my soul.

[KeshetParparNesicha]

3 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

 I’d vote for literally anyone over Trump - I just really want the other choice to be something that doesn’t hurt my soul.

Same, and I was a Republican until the morning after the 2016 election. Of the 10 (?) declared candidates, I would vote for any of them over Trump. I might not agree with them on many issues, but at least they're all competent, intelligent adults who aren't embarrassing the country and stoking the flames of a second civil war.

[fraurosena]

Another great idea that should be implemented by all states. Nobody, no matter their political proclivities, should be allowed to be on any presidential ballot unless they release their tax returns.