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2020 Presidential Election 2: The Primaries are upon us


GreyhoundFan

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10 minutes ago, JMarie said:

I think it's at least partly because his political experience is as a mayor, not as a governor or in Congress.  And he's on the young side. But that's just my opinion.

Before a President Trump I might have agreed with that logic, but not any more. All you need to be is a citizen over the age of 35. If Trump has proven anything, it’s that anyone can be POTUS.

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2 hours ago, Dandruff said:

I'm disgusted with them.  The assumption that an inadequately tested app might screw things up royally apparently wasn't troubling the decisionmakers.  Delays, humiliation, and questions about whether votes were properly counted should, IMO, have been avoided at all costs.  What was so wrong with the tried and trusted methods?  Now Captain Bonespur can use the debacle to his advantage and, for once, I don't blame him.  With such an important election coming up I see no excuse for this being allowed to happen.  It'll be challenging enough to win without additional self-sabotage.  Screw this garbage and the idiocy that delivered it.

 

Well it seems that the Iowa Democrats, at the advice of the DNC, decided to replace the tried and true method of calling in the caucus results due to "security concerns" with....an app. They decided to pick a company founded by Clinton campaign veterans (not including Robby Mook) and as The NY Times says "whose previous work was marked by a string of failures, including a near bankruptcy"  to build this app despite them having little experience with major tech projects and inexperienced engineers. 

Reading through this article it just gets more and more embarrassing for the Democratic leadership in charge of this entire fiasco and it's just so clear that change can't come fast enough. 

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Twitler's campaign is so corrupt:

 

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Please, everyone, check your registration, and keep on checking and checking during the coming months. The trumplicans are up to their dirty voter suppression tricks again. Of course.

 

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That’s so messed up. I loathe our current government, but one thing Australia does well is elections. The idea that I might turn up and be told I’m not ABLE to vote is horrifying.

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"Joe Walsh Ends Challenge to Trump After Getting 1% in Iowa"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Joe Walsh, the conservative radio show host and former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who was running a presidential campaign challenging President Trump’s fitness for office, announced on Friday that he was ending his bid for the Republican nomination.

That leaves Mr. Trump with only one Republican challenger, former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts.

“I am ending my candidacy for president of the United States,” Mr. Walsh said in an interview on CNN Friday morning. “I got into this because I thought it was really important that there was a Republican — a Republican — out there every day calling out this president for how unfit he is.”

Those calls, however, seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Mr. Walsh, who supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and ran as a former disciple who had seen the light, became a regular presence on cable news channels, calling Mr. Trump an “unfit con man” and a danger to the country. His hope was that he would create a permission structure for other former supporters to follow suit and change their minds about Mr. Trump.

But after spending the majority of his time campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Walsh received just 1.1 percent of the vote in the caucuses there on Monday, failing to make any dent in Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters. (He finished behind Mr. Weld, who got 1.3 percent.)

The experience, he said, left him cynical about the future of the party.

“I spoke in front of 3,000 Iowa Republicans last night,” Mr. Walsh wrote on Twitter last week. “It was like a MAGA rally. I told them we needed a president who doesn’t lie all the time. The crowd booed me. I told them we needed a president who wasn’t indecent & cruel. The crowd booed me.”

He said the experience made him realize “again that my Republican Party isn’t a Party, it’s a cult.”

Mr. Walsh, who entered the race last August, was once part of a trio of Republican challengers to Mr. Trump, who together were involved in a quixotic attempt to peel away support from a president with an iron grip on his party.

But Mr. Trump’s campaign operatives had worked for over a year to lock up support at the state level and make it impossible for any primary challenger to find sunlight. The state Republican parties in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina canceled their 2020 presidential primaries.

Even in Iowa, the state party chairman, Jeff Kaufmann, framed his caucus more as a test run for what he expects to be a competitive 2024 Republican field.

The tactics worked.

Last November, former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina dropped out of the Republican primary, just two months after announcing his run.

Speaking from the White House on Thursday as he celebrated his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, Mr. Trump dismissed his remaining challengers as “non-people,” a rare acknowledgment that he had any competitors at all.

“We have two people running, you know, and I guess they consider them non-people, but they are running,” Mr. Trump told Republican lawmakers who celebrated him in the East Room. “I mean, one was a governor. One was a congressman. They’re running. We got 98 percent of the vote.”

Mr. Weld’s campaign aides said they planned to soldier on alone.

“It’s hard to challenge a tyrant,” said R.J. Lyman, chairman of Mr. Weld’s campaign. “Joe Walsh is a very different person than Bill Weld, but is a good person and he made a good effort to explain how a Tea Party Republican could stand up to Trump. People weren’t willing to follow.”

Mr. Lyman said that Mr. Weld would stay in the race regardless of how he fares in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. “There’s no doubt that the independence and individuality of New Hampshire are traits we hope will pierce through the cultish obsession of the Trumpists,” he said.

Nobody is going to be able to oust Twitler in a primary. What we really need is a third party candidate from the right. That would split the R vote and help the Dems.

 

 

 

Edited by GreyhoundFan
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Whoa, Walsh said he'd back a socialist over Twitler:

 

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12 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Please, everyone, check your registration, and keep on checking and checking during the coming months. The trumplicans are up to their dirty voter suppression tricks again. Of course.

 

I did this on Monday! 

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1 hour ago, SilverBeach said:

Did you post a link also? Nothing is showing up

In this post & previous ones, @GreyhoundFan *has* posted direct links to various tweets & I can see them just fine.

Most of the time, such links auto-convert & then the embedded tweet should be visible. I wonder if you're experiencing some technical glitch of unknown origins causing you to see only a blank where the embedded tweet should be.

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The look Amy Klobuchar has in this picture is the look I have most days at work:

(Almost all my coworkers are male.)

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"Iowa Democratic Party projects Pete Buttigieg the winner of the delegate race, with Bernie Sanders preparing a challenge"

Spoiler

The Iowa Democratic Party on Sunday announced that Pete Buttigieg would likely receive 14 delegates to the national presidential nominating convention from last week’s chaotic caucuses, while Bernie Sanders would receive 12.

The announcement came from state party officials nearly a week after the Iowa caucuses ended in controversy amid vote-counting problems and questions about the technology used to report results from hundreds of precinct locations.

And they might not be final. Late Sunday, Sanders campaign adviser Jeff Weaver said the campaign would seek a partial recanvass — a process that the campaign believes would put the senator from Vermont on top of the delegate count.

Sanders won the popular vote, winning support from about 6,000 more caucus-goers than Buttigieg.

The delegate allocation is based on projected support for each candidate at the state convention, which is traditionally the metric used to declare a winner of the caucuses.

Both Sanders and Buttigieg, now battling at the top of the polls in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, have declared victory in Iowa.

The Iowa party also said that eight delegates would go to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Those numbers differ slightly from projections made by the Associated Press, which said Buttigieg would take 13 delegates to the national convention in Milwaukee, while Sanders would take 12. The AP also said it would not declare a winner in the contest, which was marred by reporting difficulties, delays in the release of results and mathematical irregularities.

On Thursday, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called for a recanvass, while the state party said it was obliged to conduct one only if requested by a campaign.

Instead, the three campaigns that performed best in the state — Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren — each submitted specific precincts for the party to review. A state party official confirmed that no other campaign had raised questions about precinct numbers.

Ultimately, the state party released updated figures for 55 precincts, making up about 3 percent of the total 1,765.

 

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2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Iowa Democratic Party projects Pete Buttigieg the winner of the delegate race, with Bernie Sanders preparing a challenge"

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The Iowa Democratic Party on Sunday announced that Pete Buttigieg would likely receive 14 delegates to the national presidential nominating convention from last week’s chaotic caucuses, while Bernie Sanders would receive 12.

The announcement came from state party officials nearly a week after the Iowa caucuses ended in controversy amid vote-counting problems and questions about the technology used to report results from hundreds of precinct locations.

And they might not be final. Late Sunday, Sanders campaign adviser Jeff Weaver said the campaign would seek a partial recanvass — a process that the campaign believes would put the senator from Vermont on top of the delegate count.

Sanders won the popular vote, winning support from about 6,000 more caucus-goers than Buttigieg.

The delegate allocation is based on projected support for each candidate at the state convention, which is traditionally the metric used to declare a winner of the caucuses.

Both Sanders and Buttigieg, now battling at the top of the polls in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, have declared victory in Iowa.

The Iowa party also said that eight delegates would go to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Those numbers differ slightly from projections made by the Associated Press, which said Buttigieg would take 13 delegates to the national convention in Milwaukee, while Sanders would take 12. The AP also said it would not declare a winner in the contest, which was marred by reporting difficulties, delays in the release of results and mathematical irregularities.

On Thursday, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called for a recanvass, while the state party said it was obliged to conduct one only if requested by a campaign.

Instead, the three campaigns that performed best in the state — Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren — each submitted specific precincts for the party to review. A state party official confirmed that no other campaign had raised questions about precinct numbers.

Ultimately, the state party released updated figures for 55 precincts, making up about 3 percent of the total 1,765.

 

I really don’t understand all these elections and caucuses where the person who gets the most votes does not win. What’s wrong with simply following the popular vote? One person, one vote is simple, straightforward, less easily manipulated, and above all, democratic. You’d think the party that calls it’s members Democrats would be avid proponents of democracy... 

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18 hours ago, hoipolloi said:

In this post & previous ones, @GreyhoundFan *has* posted direct links to various tweets & I can see them just fine.

Most of the time, such links auto-convert & then the embedded tweet should be visible. I wonder if you're experiencing some technical glitch of unknown origins causing you to see only a blank where the embedded tweet should be.

I'm on my laptop, Chrome browser. This is only happening with Greyhound Fan's recent posts. I am able to see some of her links but several are missing. I don't have many glitches at all, will clear my cache again, although I do that regularly. It may be somethig with Twitter links, as it isn't all of her posts. 

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38 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I really don’t understand all these elections and caucuses where the person who gets the most votes does not win. What’s wrong with simply following the popular vote? One person, one vote is simple, straightforward, less easily manipulated, and above all, democratic. You’d think the party that calls it’s members Democrats would be avid proponents of democracy... 

This is why they need to do away with the caucuses. They are unmanageable. Go and vote via ballot box. I do wish ranked-choice voting was more prevalent. Don't get me started on the electoral college...

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17 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is why they need to do away with the caucuses. They are unmanageable. Go and vote via ballot box. I do wish ranked-choice voting was more prevalent. Don't get me started on the electoral college...

They took away our state caucus this year and instead we're going to a mail-in ranked choice system. 

The thing I liked about the caucus was that there were a LOT of witnesses. It was fun and rowdy and I felt engaged. However, not everyone enjoys spending hours standing around yelling at each other, and some people were kind of drowned out. However, I left the caucus knowing exactly who won my precinct. 

With the ballots, my state has a tendency to just ... not care when ballots go missing or show up later, or if they don't print enough. We switched to a municipal mail-in election and that's been working well for us, though the conservatives think there is some liberal conspiracy because oddly enough, when you make it easy to vote, people vote. And people vote liberal. 

Edited by Maggie Mae
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I do wish that more states would follow Oregon's example and have all elections be done by mail. I can get my ballot, fill it out, and then drop it off the next time I go to the library (they have a little roll of 'I voted' stickers so you can grab one). You even get a text when your vote is counted. Everyone is automatically registered to vote when they get a government ID card and you have to purposefully opt out if you don't want to get a ballot.

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2 hours ago, milkteeth said:

I do wish that more states would follow Oregon's example and have all elections be done by mail. I can get my ballot, fill it out, and then drop it off the next time I go to the library (they have a little roll of 'I voted' stickers so you can grab one). You even get a text when your vote is counted. Everyone is automatically registered to vote when they get a government ID card and you have to purposefully opt out if you don't want to get a ballot.

I am a pollworker in my precinct and I personally opt to get my ballot in the mail, even though nowadays I turn it in at the precinct rather than mail it.  I started getting my ballot in the mail back when I sometimes traveled for work and didn't want to risk missing an election.  

I will say though that many people like the ritual of voting in person.  And I've heard another argument for in-person voting as well.  This sounds wild but I wonder if it isn't applicable to more people than we'd like to think.  That is, the idea that if the ballots are filled out at home,  some overbearing household "leaders" might insist on making sure their spouses vote the way they want them to.  Whereas the privacy of the ballot booth allows a person to vote however they like and also tell their spouse whatever they want to hear.

Crazy, but perhaps also reality for some.

I wish we didn't need to think that way.

Personally my greatest wish for the election process is that we will evolve to ranked or iterative voting, so that if your preferred candidate loses, your vote counts toward your second choice candidate.

I think I also favor going with the popular vote, though I'd have to think carefully about the reasons for the electoral college before being sure.

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Great piece: "Loving Elizabeth Warren means having a plan for when America breaks your heart"

Spoiler

KEENE, N.H. — Within three minutes of getting in line for an Elizabeth Warren rally, I’ve been handed a business card for a woman-empowerment organization called Brass Ovaries, and the founder, my linemate, has drawn me into a conversation about Warren that has begun to feel like the only conversation to have about Warren: the kind that’s about hope, and despair, and how it’s possible to love America and also want to throw it out the window.

“I went to one of her events before, and I gave her one of my Brass Ovaries pins,” Michelle Johnson says. “And I started to explain how it’s about fed-up women — but she said, ‘Oh, I get it,’ and I said, ‘I knew you would,’ because Elizabeth always gets it, doesn’t she?”

This is the first part of the Warren conversation. It involves dreaming of a version of the country where leaders are excellent at explaining certain things, such as the current shortcomings of health care and child care; and where they don’t need other things explained to them at all, like what it feels like to be an exasperated woman.

But Michelle, who plans to vote for Warren in her state’s Tuesday primary, also finds herself having a second, more maddening part of the Warren conversation. When she told her mother that she thought Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) would be a good running mate, her mother blanched. “America isn’t ready for two women on the ticket,” she said, then added that America might not even be ready for one.

That part is about fear. It’s about fearing a version of America that was certified as the real version four Novembers ago, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Or so people keep saying.

It’s a conversation that isn’t really about Elizabeth Warren at all; it’s about the rest of us.

There we were in New Hampshire, in the exhaust fumes of Iowa’s caucuses, which had been such a spectacular fiasco that Warren’s supporters in Keene now believed it was up to them to sort things out and, ideally, to sort things out for Warren. For all the chaos in Des Moines, one thing was clear: Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg were wrestling through a tie with a quarter of the votes apiece.

And Warren, who had topped polls in October, had finished a distant third.

This alone didn’t faze her New Hampshire supporters. She’d outpaced the erstwhile front-runner Joe Biden, after all, who took his fourth-place finish as a “gut punch.” Plus, while Iowa was “a bunch of people running around in a gymnasium,” as one voter here put it, their state’s election was a civilized primary, and was also in the backyard of the senator from Massachusetts.

But then a new prediction came out. It had Warren polling at 10 percent in the Granite State. Behind Sanders. Behind a rising Buttigieg. Behind even Joe Biden. (She’s fared better in other recent polls but still well behind Sanders and Buttigieg.)

Then Warren’s campaign announced that it was pulling ad dollars in Nevada and South Carolina.

Then it was time to really think about Elizabeth Warren. Which really means sorting through what version of America you believe in — the one where we are ready to vote a woman into the Oval Office, or the one where we aren’t — and whether it’s the believing, one way or another, that makes your version true.

"The thing is, I can picture her up there on the debate stage with Trump, and she's debating him to pieces," says Deb Wilson, a retired New Hampshire educator. "To pieces."

“We need her,” says Wendy Keith, a social worker. “We need her so badly. We need someone that strong and that smart.”

“I think having a woman in the White House — I think she’ll care for us,” adds Esther Scheidel, standing next to Wendy.

“Of course, I’m not voting for her because she’s a woman; I don’t even think of her as a woman,” another supporter chimes in a few minutes later, having overheard the earlier conversation, “I think of her as a candidate.”

Then this line-stander decides he doesn’t want to be quoted after all and shoos me away, but it’s a preposterous statement, right? It’s a preposterous, relatable, vexing statement. It’s impossible not to see Warren as a woman. Many of her policies were explicitly shaped by that identity, as she readily acknowledges. Is “not thinking of Warren as a woman” supposed to be a compliment?

What I think this man means is that ever since 2016, we have been trapped in a vague debate about electability, and whether it’s only men who have it. In the fog of uncertainty over Hillary Clinton’s complicated defeat (she neglected Wisconsin, she used a private email server, she was a “nasty woman” slain by weaponized misogyny, she still won the popular vote), the debate has mutated into an abstract panic about whether any woman can get elected in 2020.

Trying to ignore Elizabeth Warren’s femaleness is an attempt to neatly sidestep the whole problem. To pretend that we have the capacity to vote entirely on merits. To behave as if each election can happen in a vacuum, uninformed by the elections and the hundreds of years of history that came before it.

Can you ignore that while Pete Buttigieg might be a millennial wunderkind, a female 38-year-old mayor of a midsize town would have a hard time being taken as seriously if she up and ran for president? Can you ignore that Bernie Sanders’s shouting is seen as righteous but if Kamala Harris ever raised her voice, it was seen as anger? How did Joe Biden automatically get to wear the cloak of electability for nearly a full year before Iowa tore it off?

Warren has made some massive bungles — the DNA test, ugh — but is it ever, ever possible to scientifically determine how much “I don’t like her” is a code for “I wouldn’t like any woman”?

These days, of course, people don’t say, “I won’t vote for a woman”; they say, “I’m scared my moderate father-in-law needs a man on the ballot to motivate him to the polls.”

This isn’t progress. This is treating the election as a psychic reading.

“I’m leaning toward Warren,” says Frank Brownell, a retired editor who relocated to Keene from Upstate New York. “I’m not a big Buttigieg fan. But I want to pick someone to win.” He sighed, deeply troubled. “Women have such a burden. I actually wish women ran the world.”

If he wished women ran things, I asked him, was there a reason he was still merely leaning toward Warren? Here was a woman he liked who was offering to run the country, and he literally had the chance to give her the job.

“I’m going to vote for her,” he decided, then waffled. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

His qualms weren’t with Warren. He loved Warren. His qualms were about everyone else, everyone else who might not be ready to vote for a woman. “I’m hopeful but I’m not hopeful. I don’t think America is what I always hoped it was.”

Here are some things that happen at Elizabeth Warren events: Warren sprints onstage, much tinier and slighter than she appears on television, to Dolly Parton singing "9 to 5." She shares that she was her parents' late-in-life baby, and her mother never stopped referring to her as "the surprise." She talks about her first marriage, and then she jokes that it's never good when you have to number your marriages. She tells a story about a toaster, and the toaster becomes a metaphor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped create, and the CFBP becomes a metaphor for how things can change, but only if you are willing to believe they can change.

You have to believe; that’s the key. You have to jump into the void of possibility. Ready or not.

She is optimistic and upbeat, almost comically so, as if she is Elizabeth Warren playing SNL’s Kate McKinnon playing Elizabeth Warren. She is empathetic in a way that could feel phony if you’re not accustomed to that sort of thing in a politician.

At one event in New Hampshire, a little girl approaches the microphone, accompanied by her mother.

“My name is Elizabeth,” she says.

“Your name is Elizabeth?” Warren reels back. “Oh wow! Double Elizabeths! I feel the power.”

“I’m seven years old.”

Warren pauses, deadpan. “I’m . . . not.”

“I want to know if you will close the camps,” the 7-year-old Elizabeth asks.

Here, Warren’s response grows impossibly soft and intimate, so soft that it feels almost indecent to listen to, like this has become a private conversation. The camps in Texas where they are holding children? Warren asks. The 7-year-old nods. Those camps.

“Yes,” Warren says. “Yes.”

And then people in the audience tear up because in that moment, they did seem to believe things could change, that Warren was the best candidate, that others thought so too and just needed to be convinced that it’s safe to vote for her. That there’s nothing to fear in nominating this woman but fear itself.

“If everyone is trying to play that [electability] game,” offers Nancy Loschiavo, a Warren supporter, “then what has our country come to?”

But, Loschiavo hastens to add, she’ll absolutely vote for whomever the nominee is.

Everyone at the Warren events hastens to add that.

A survey had come out a few days before, asking each candidate’s supporters whether, assuming their own first choice dropped out, they would vote for whoever was the Democratic nominee. Some supporters professed a my-guy-or-bust attitude — nearly half of the Yang Gang said they wouldn’t vote for another Democrat. But Warren’s supporters, more than anyone else, said they’d vote for whomever they needed to vote for.

One way to read this is that Warren doesn’t have crossover appeal: She appeals only to the folks who would have voted Democratic no matter what. Another way to read this is that her supporters are as practical as they are passionate: There’s an outcome they’d prefer, but if it doesn’t happen, they’ll move on to the next best thing. They’ve got a plan for that.

After talking to enough of her fans, I think it’s the second explanation. The second explanation, mixed with something deeper:

Loving Elizabeth Warren means planning for America to break your heart.

It means watching her tweet out an optimistic message after Iowa, and then watching how all of the early replies instruct her to defer to Sanders and drop out.

It means making sure to preface your pro-Warren statements with “I don’t have anything against the male candidates,” as if the act of supporting a female one was somehow misandrist in itself.

It means listening to people complain about her schoolmarmishness and quietly wondering what was so wrong, exactly, with sounding like a schoolmarm. What’s so wrong with sounding like a grandmother? What’s so wrong with her animated hand gestures, her cardigans, her preparedness, her laugh, her husband, her brain, her work, her femaleness, her voice?

It means hoping things will break your way but accepting that they probably wouldn’t, because America never quite seems to work that way, does it?

America doesn’t just render a verdict on the acceptability of women and their clothes and laughs every four years; America does that every day, in a lot of different ways. That’s the reason Michelle Johnson feels moved to make “brass ovaries” pins, and the reason Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have to ask her to explain why.

"The biggest reluctance I hear is 'Can a woman win?' " says Ron Jones, who, along with his friend Tom Harris, has been canvassing for Warren and had come to see her speak in a Nashua community college gym. "I point out that a woman has already won," he said, referring to Clinton's popular-vote victory.

“I tell them, look at other countries with successful female leaders,” says Harris. “I tell them, look at successful female CEOs.” His mother was in the Navy and spent World War II in an airplane firing a machine gun at Japanese soldiers. Look at her. Or just look around you. “Women are the majority in the country!” says Jones.

Inside the gym, attendees filled the folding plastic chairs, and when those were full, leaned against the walls, parkas draped over their forearms. Seatmates introduced themselves to one another and talked about why they liked Warren, and why there were still reasons to be hopeful, maybe.

“I just want someone to bring energy back,” M.K. Hayes tells the fellow New Hampshirites sitting next to her. “And with her, there’s no cynicism, but there’s urgency. With her, you can say, ‘I’m liberal and I’m proud.’ ”

Her husband likes Warren, too, but he’s not here today. He likes her, she explains, but he might not vote for her; he’s not sure it’s the practical thing to do.

“I am trying to get him to vote with his heart,” Hayes says. “I am trying to get him to have the courage to risk.”

The music in the gym gets a little louder. When “9 to 5” comes on, Warren sprints onstage. She talks about her family. She talks about her toaster. She says she is running a campaign from the heart, because she believes 2020 is “our moment.”

“I believe in that America,” Elizabeth Warren says, and then she tries to convince the audience that they believe in that America, too.

 

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From Jennifer Rubin: "A warning to Democrats: Don’t let Bernie Sanders get away from you"

Spoiler

In October, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), at 78 the oldest Democrat in the field, had a heart attack. He promised to release his full medical records before primary voting started. Now, on the eve of the second presidential nominating contest, Sanders still has not released his full medical records. He insists he is “in good health.” He told NBC’s Chuck Todd he has released as much medical information as other candidates, which ignores an important point: There is no other 78-year-old who had a heart attack just months ago in the field. He says if he released his records, there will be no end to it. He says his doctor told him to walk and sleep more. (Good thing he is not running for a job where sleep may be disturbed constantly due to national crises or jet-lagged travel.) So, naturally former vice president Joe Biden runs a hard-hitting ad … against former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg. Thunk. The clear beneficiary is Sanders.

We remember all too well in 2016 that the traditional Republican candidates spent months beating up on one another as they vied to be the single one standing between Donald Trump and the nomination. As they bludgeoned one another, Trump ran away with the race.

Other than some swipes during the debates that running as a socialist will be the death knell of the party, Sanders’s competitors before Sunday had not done much to dent the Vermont senator, who has no problem going after Biden. It is not like there isn’t a wealth of material ranging from his broken promise to release his health records to his “no trade deal is ever good enough” stance.

On Sunday, we finally saw Biden launch direct attacks on Sanders’s refusal to explain how to pay for Medicare-for-all, and Buttigieg raised the electability argument, making the case it will be very hard to win with a self-labeled socialist.

Democrats cannot afford to repeat the Republicans’ mistake. If Biden continues going after Buttigieg, Buttigieg goes after Biden, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) goes after Buttigieg. Sanders will be the beneficiary. It is natural to go at the person directly ahead of you in the polls, but you cannot let the guy leading in a state get a pass. The combatants will depress each other’s share of the vote, and Sanders will sail on to victory. Over the weekend, we finally saw sustained attacks directed at the front-runner in the state, Sanders.

Rather than let Sanders build up momentum and delegates, the candidates should step up their criticism of Sanders and begin earnestly vetting him now. Klobuchar, for example, could point out that the last guy who promised to release sensitive information but never did was Trump. Biden, instead of trying to clobber Buttigieg for lack of experience (as if the voters didn’t know his highest political position has been mayor), should start hammering Sanders, who has been in Washington for decades and never accomplished what Biden and President Barack Obama did on the Affordable Care Act.

Here is where Mike Bloomberg and his millions could serve the party and the country. The former New York mayor has virtually unlimited funds, so he surely could start pointing out that down-ticket Democrats are endorsing him, not the socialist who will drag them down. Bloomberg could release every scrap of his medical history and then dare other contenders including Sanders to do the same. If he focuses purely on Trump, Bloomberg will be caught in the same trap as Sanders’s other competitors. Bloomberg should not let Sanders pick up a head of steam before Bloomberg even starts competing in primary contests.

Democrats are right to be worried that Sanders might get the nomination and then hand up four more years of Trump. They should intensify their efforts do something about it before it is too late.

 

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