2020 Presidential Election 3: We're Down To Old White Men...And Fucking Kanye.

[GreyhoundFan]

Continued from here:

 

Edited July 5, 2020 by GreyhoundFan
Updated Title

[GreyhoundFan]

I like this idea:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read: "The doubt of a ‘Bernie Bro’: A hard-charging Sanders supporter questions whether his tactics help or hurt"

Spoiler

ATHENS, Ga. — Just after waking up, Zach McDowell powered on his tablet and searched through Reddit. He picked up his cellphone and checked Twitter. Scanning through the rants of strangers praising and maligning his preferred presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), he asked himself a question: To tweet or not to tweet?

The question itself was new for McDowell, whose tweets defending Sanders used to be impulsive and unthinking. But as Sanders picked up momentum in the Democratic primaries, his critics continued to harp on the aggressive, online swarm of predominantly white male supporters that had rallied around the democratic socialist from Vermont. They called them the “Bernie Bros.”

“I prefer the term Bernard Brother,” McDowell said, because it seemed more respectable. As a white, mustachioed 23-year-old just out of college and working a $15-an-hour tutoring job, he fit the description. He acted the part too, occasionally joining in online pile-ons.

Now, McDowell was questioning his rules of online engagement. What if, for once, the pundits were right? The wrong tweet might feed into the stereotype and alienate potential supporters. Meanwhile, moderate Democrats were coalescing around former vice president Joe Biden, who was campaigning on restoring a sense of American civility.

The criticism of Sanders’s online attack squad has been harsh. As she ended her campaign Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) decried the “organized nastiness” of some of his supporters, saying he did not do enough to rein them in.

Sanders has disavowed the most abusive voices while defending the majority of his backers.

“We have over 10.6 million people on Twitter, and 99.9 percent of them are decent human beings,” Sanders said at a recent debate. “And if there are a few people who make ugly remarks, who attack trade union leaders, I disown those people. They are not part of our movement.”

McDowell applauded Sanders’s statement, but he also worried the criticism was overblown. He was just playing politics in the way he knew how.

His generation had grown up absorbing the news through “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” which intimately intertwined politics and absurdity. And political punditry on 24-hour news channels can seem as aggressive as any battle royal.

The gaming of American politics didn’t seem much different from sports or the games he played online. And if that was the way politics was being played, should it not come with the trash-talking, irreverent hyperbole that comes with any other fan base on the Internet?

“I’ve seen people be just as vicious if you have a fight between Star Wars versus Star Trek,” McDowell said.

Using a pseudonym and a private Twitter account closed to the general public, McDowell had added to a chorus of Sanders supporters who compared former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg to a rat and joked that Biden’s campaign was “elder abuse.”

When he saw a video with Warren, he searched his keyboard for the snake emoji — a common trope applied to Warren after she alleged Sanders told her that a woman couldn’t beat President Trump. “Hiss,” McDowell had typed.

On this February morning, he was scrolling through Twitter again. Up came an ad for former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, featuring a montage of the “Bernie Bros” supposedly going too far.

The ad included examples of Sanders supporters threatening to “come after” fans of other candidates. But those instances were lumped in with a picture of Sanders photoshopped to make it seem like he was aiming a cartoonish gun at the viewer. “I am no longer asking for your vote. #Bernieorbust,” it said.

McDowell laughed so uncontrollably his eyes started to water. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be threatened by this,” he said. “It’s clearly fake, unless you’re so old, and you have no glasses.”

Then came a tweet from an African American political analyst, Jason Johnson, who had referred to some Sanders supporters as “racist liberal whites” and “misfit black girls” after they attacked him for disputing the idea that Bloomberg is an oligarch.

“This guy has a PhD, and he doesn’t understand what an oligarch is?” McDowell said of Johnson.

McDowell tried to respond to Johnson. But the pundit had already blocked him.

That’s when McDowell remembered that, months ago, he had tweeted at Johnson, who complained Sanders’s supporters were taking his words out of context.

McDowell replied: “shut up nerd.”

“I was just trying to be funny,” he said. “Maybe it is a failed attempt. Twitter is not real life.”

A movement unto itself

In real life, McDowell was driving to a house on a sunny Saturday in this college town where he was meeting with a group of Sanders supporters.

“What up?” yelled a black woman with a large Afro named Mariah Parker standing on the porch.

“What up!” McDowell replied. He stepped inside a living room filled with about 15 Sanders supporters, all under 40. Two-thirds of the group were women; one-third was black.

“The Bernie Bro stuff is an erasure of the stories of people like me,” said Parker, who is 28. Sanders’s unlikely political ascent had inspired Parker to run for office herself. In 2018, she became the first black LGBTQ woman to sit on the local county commission, and now she was organizing door-knocking campaigns to drum up support for Sanders in South Carolina.

“Are you all ready to elect the first Jewish, democratic socialist president?” she asked the group to cheers.

McDowell jumped back into his Hyundai. Joining him were two friends he met in the library while he was a student at the University of Georgia.

“Would you like to sit in the front?” Lydian Brambila, a 27-year-old student, asked Ryan ­Vogel, 36.

“No way,” Vogel said. “I don’t want to be a Bernie Bro.”

The three laughed. When others used the term, it stung like a slur. But when fellow Bernie fans used it, it felt like an inside joke.

Vogel, who is white and grew up wealthy, resented the lack of empathy some of his conservative relatives had for working people. Brambila was born to Mexican immigrants who worked long hours for little pay and taught their child to believe that the American Dream could be achieved by working hard and doing well in college.

“The system didn’t work for me,” said Brambila, now a graduate student working a $15-an-hour job and sinking into debt getting treatment for debilitating migraines.

McDowell grew up upper-middle-class, the son of a commercial real estate agent and a stay-at-home mom. He was around 11 years old during the financial crisis of 2008. His father’s company went bankrupt, and his parents began to cut back.

“My dad would come home, as a shell of a person, and his friends all hated their jobs,” McDowell said. “I was terrified in college that was the only way to live, and I was just trying to figure how to mitigate that suffering. And then came Bernie.”

Sanders’s 2016 campaign gave the three a sense of relief that their family shame, their parents’ exhaustion, their inability to attain the American ideal was not their fault. They believed Sanders when he said the struggles of working people were baked into a system reliant on greedy corporations and reckless lawmakers.

As McDowell’s love for Sanders grew during the last presidential election, he became more suspicious of the Democratic establishment.

Problems counting votes during the 2016 primaries led him to believe that the Democratic National Committee and the system were working against Sanders.

“I felt like I was going insane in 2015 and 2016,” McDowell said. “All these things were happening, and we couldn’t prove it. I just internalized a lot of it, thinking something was going on. Maybe that was the point of it, to make us feel powerless.”

So he began following Sanders supporters sleuthing online for clues that the fix was in. Soon he was reading “Das Kapital” and picking up jokes about Karl Marx. He found kindred spirits in a podcast called “Chapo Trap House,” a profane political comedy show whose hosts were unabashed Sanders supporters.

They joked that Buttigieg was in the CIA (hence, the rat imagery), mocked the sexual prowess of Bloomberg and became a cultural touchstone on the Reddit pages that McDowell perused.

“It’s amazing how as crass and profane as the Chapos are, they are just as easy to show how heartfelt and sincere they are about the politics they espouse,” McDowell said. “To write that off as them being ‘Bernie Bros’ is just an oversimplification.”

This wave of young, radical support online was a movement unto itself, with a lexicon that borrowed from Chomsky and Lenin, potty humor and kink: “Chud” was the word they used for an obnoxious Trump supporter, and the “Neolibs” were the new generation of establishment Democrats. The art of applying theory to the real world was referred to as “praxis,” and to extricate oneself from the struggle was to ingest the “black pill.”

Generations of young socialists had longed for the revolution in American politics, and McDowell and his friends were eager to be a part of it, even if they worried it wouldn’t succeed.

“Sometimes, I guess I worry that just, like, I’m going to die and not see anything change,” Brambila said, as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” played in the car. “Do you think they will truly form solidarity with working people? I fear that I’ll be alone. Just me and my advanced opinions.”

“You can’t black pill yourself,” McDowell said. “You have to also take action. That’s why we’re going out today.”

Taking the conversation offline

They arrived in a working-class, majority-black area in Greenville, S.C. It was a hilly neighborhood with no sidewalks and decrepit single-family homes surrounded by oak trees.

The campaign had assigned them to knock on 31 doors, which were all highlighted on a phone app.

“Hi, I’m a volunteer with the Bernie Sanders campaign,” McDowell said when a resident answered the door. “Bernie is a candidate who believes in economic justice for all. Do you know about the primary coming up?”

The first woman who answered was a 30-year-old single mother working two jobs. She said she supported Sanders’s policies to raise the minimum wage and legalize marijuana. At another home, a medical lab technician in his 40s told them he was between tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Sanders, which McDowell said would make the decision easy because Yang had dropped out of the presidential race. “I didn’t know that,” the man said.

They continued walking along the street when a Suburu stopped in front of them. There were three older people inside.

“Can you give us some directions?” the driver said. “We keep on running into dead ends.”

The driver peered over the car window, squinting through her glasses.

“Y’all are Bernie?” the driver said.

The Sanders trio nodded.

“We are out for Biden,” the driver said. She seethed: “We goin’ beat you.”

Then, the car sped off.

“OK boomer,” Vogel joked. Political confrontation was more awkward in person.

The neighborhood was now in the rear-view mirror, and McDowell was back in his car, heading back to Georgia.

The political landscape in South Carolina was different from what they had seen online. Over the course of the afternoon, not one voter had asked about Sanders being socialist or about their tweets. Many just wanted to have a conversation.

“They wanted to be treated with dignity,” said Vogel from the back seat. “We need to talk to people like they have dignity.”

Vogel’s online presence did not always reflect that sentiment. After 2016, he stopped posting serious messages about politics on Facebook. It was ruining too many friendships, particularly when he noted sarcastically on Election Day, “Who could have anticipated that the least popular Democratic candidate ever could lose to Trump?” He didn’t cast a ballot for president that year, abstaining from choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“I remember being so mad at you,” Brambila said. “How dare you, with the privilege of not being scared, choose not to vote? I was angry and wanted you to feel shamed.”

“I feel bad about it,” Vogel said. “A lot of people still aren’t talking to me.”

This time around, Vogel tried to keep his political commentary lighter. The soft sell did not seem to work, either. After he posted a meme using a Star Trek character to criticize Warren as a faux liberal, he found himself getting into an online argument with someone who condemned him as a “cultist” for Sanders and a “Bernie Bro.”

Brambila argued that perhaps it was time to take the conversation offline. More success could be found talking in person, like they did while door-knocking. What was there to be gained by piling onto celebrities’ feeds, mocking supporters of other candidates with cheeky memes and threatening violence?

“It’s just, now that we might win, maybe we should find ways to be more welcoming,” Brambila said. “Maybe it changes our approach, to help find solidarity with more people.”

“I’ll be honest,” Vogel said. “With all this Bernie Bro stuff, I’m more hyper aware of things I do online. I just am.”

McDowell wasn’t so sure he was ready to give up social media just yet. He thought Brambila had a point and that threatening violence went too far. But he found camaraderie online. And he felt some of the criticism directed at Sanders’s supporters was not in good faith — designed more to undermine the movement than anything else.

Vogel glanced at his phone. On the Twitter feed: A New York Post headline that Judge Judy vowed to “fight the Bernie Sanders revolution to the death.” A friend of Vogel’s in Hollywood compared Sanders’s movement to Trump’s. Chris Matthews, then still an MSNBC host, likened Sanders’s victory in Nevada to the fall of France to the Nazis in World War II.

“How is saying that okay?” McDowell asked of Matthews, who had later apologized for the comments. “That boy ain’t right. He needs some milk.”

Brambila apologized to Vogel for trying to shame him for not voting in 2016.

“I’m no longer ‘vote blue no matter who,’ ” Brambila said. “These people don’t support my interests.”

“We live in Georgia,” Vogel said. “It’s not like a Democrat is going to win here anyway.”

“If our boy doesn’t win, then it probably means the DNC cheated again,” McDowell said. “I think he’s going to win. This country is going to see the bigger picture.”

It was dark by the time they returned to Georgia. After dropping off Vogel and Brambila, McDowell wrestled with himself about what to do if Sanders lost the nomination. He considered Trump to be more dangerous than Biden and worried about how a second term might affect immigrants and minorities in this country.

Twitter might not be real life, but politics was, and dogma had its limitations. Sitting out of the election was a black pill he did not want to take.

 

[nausicaa]

So Biden is up twenty points in Michigan. 538 (not a perfect site but since it was invoked when it had Sanders ahead I feel okay using it now) has Biden with an 88% chance of winning and Sanders 2%. Biden is up by 20 some points in Missouri, a state HRC beat Sanders by something like 2%. He is up by 55 (!!!) points in Mississippi. My questions:

1. Why is Sanders doing so much worse in 2020 than 2016, in another two person race? Was HRC hatred that strong she was the gas in his tank? Are ppl just not willing to take a chance because of a fear of Trump?

2. How do we fight these weird social media bubbles we all live in?

3. Will Sanders drop out after Tuesday if things go as projected? I still see people on Twitter just flat out denying the math and wonder where his mind is at.

4. I genuinely need someone to explain to me how the DNC cheated Sanders and orchestrated this. Voters just voted, right?

5. Not to get too ahead of myself but, VP picks. I'm now thinking Harris might be a good choice. I worried about her alienating younger, more progressive types. But since we've seen how little of a voting presence they are, I'm not too worried about their threats at this point. It looks like the Dems winning strategy may be leaning into being boring moderates.

[formergothardite]

5 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

boring moderates.

Boring might be best for beating Trump. People are tired of drama. 

[GreyhoundFan]

10 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

1. Why is Sanders doing so much worse in 2020 than 2016, in another two person race? Was HRC hatred that strong she was the gas in his tank? Are ppl just not willing to take a chance because of a fear of Trump?

I think that it's a combination of things. Hillary had a crapload of baggage. Many of Bernie's shortcomings weren't as public in 2016. And, yes, I think that more people see Biden as more likely to defeat the orange menace.

2. How do we fight these weird social media bubbles we all live in?

I have no idea.

3. Will Sanders drop out after Tuesday if things go as projected? I still see people on Twitter just flat out denying the math and wonder where his mind is at.

I can't see Bernie willingly giving up before the primary.

4. I genuinely need someone to explain to me how the DNC cheated Sanders and orchestrated this. Voters just voted, right?

I don't believe they cheated him. I know the things that were most questioned by Sanders supporters I know included the issue of superdelegates (who almost exclusively went for Clinton) and an appearance of favoritism in the designing of the rules for funds and debates.

5. Not to get too ahead of myself but, VP picks. I'm now thinking Harris might be a good choice. I worried about her alienating younger, more progressive types. But since we've seen how little of a voting presence they are, I'm not too worried about their threats at this point. It looks like the Dems winning strategy may be leaning into being boring moderates.

The WaPo published an article by an op-ed columnist on this topic. I'll link it outside the quote box.

 

"Biden will pick a woman as his running mate. But who?"

Spoiler

Picking a vice president is always about winning the election. If you lose, it won’t matter who goes down with you.

But for the Democratic nominee this year, good politics matches good governance as never before, because voters’ No. 1 question will be: Is this vice presidential nominee ready to be president?

And if, as seems likely today, former vice president Joe Biden heads the ticket, voters will have a second, related question: Would we want this vice presidential nominee as our standard-bearer in 2024?

Because, whether he says so aloud or not, the best outcome for Biden and the country would be a one-term presidency that restores decency to the White House and faith to U.S. alliances, and then gives way to a new generation. The person nominated for vice president in Milwaukee in July instantly becomes the front-runner in 2024.

Two consequences flow from that.

The veep choice is sometimes thought of as a way to balance the ticket ideologically and heal a party. But if Biden, or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for that matter, essentially anointed someone from the wing of the party that opposes him, the depth of his own convictions would be immediately suspect.

Second, the choice should, and almost surely will, be a woman. After watching a diverse field of promising candidates dwindle to two old white men, Democratic voters will insist on that.

But . . . which woman?

As with the vast presidential field a year ago, there is a surfeit of talent. And as with that field, when you start to examine possibilities one by one, inevitably you see weaknesses as well as strengths. That’s human nature.

You start with the senators who gained stature and name recognition competing on the presidential stage: Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.). The flip side: They all lost, and they all had time to rub at least some voters the wrong way.

Then maybe you look to the governors. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island is one of the most capable, in her second term, with a record of solving hard problems without demonizing her opponents. Flip side: Biden can probably lock down Rhode Island’s four electoral votes without Raimondo’s help.

Michelle Lujan Grisham was elected governor of New Mexico in 2018, and she knows Washington, too, having served three terms in the House. She is the first Democratic Latina to be elected as a governor, and she is a 12th-generation New Mexican from a storied political family. On the other hand, outside New Mexico she is not a household name.

Gretchen Whitmer was also elected governor in 2018, in Michigan — the heartland, where the battle between Biden and President Trump will be truly joined. Her campaign slogan was “fix the damn roads,” which isn’t all that far from Biden’s governing philosophy and won her some notice beyond Michigan. But her entire political career has been in Lansing; will voters be satisfied with a Biden understudy without foreign or national security chops?

If the answer is yes, there’s almost-governor Stacey Abrams, who lost a close election in 2018 in Georgia. Nearly everyone who knows her or hears her comes away impressed. But will voters consider six years as minority leader of the state House of Representatives in Georgia sufficient preparation?

If so, then maybe a mayor? If City Hall-to-White House was plausible for Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg, how about Washington’s Muriel E. Bowser, in her second term, or Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot? True, she was only elected last year, but she is older than some of these other candidates, with experience as a prosecutor and a leader in police accountability.

Probably the winner will be none of the above. The political universe is wide.

But there can be no compromising on a couple of fronts. John McCain seriously undermined his credibility as Republican presidential nominee in 2008 when he chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Had he won, McCain would have been 72 when sworn in — middle-aged by this year’s standards, but old enough that voters expected him to pick a running mate ready to be commander in chief. When Palin failed that test in early vetting, McCain’s own judgment was questioned.

Biden, who will turn 78 shortly after the election, will be held to the same expectation: Choose someone who is ready — and who shares your political outlook.

The promise of Biden’s campaign is to fight for progress, not revolution; to value inclusion, not whipping up the base; and to return a basic goodness to U.S. political leadership. His running mate has to embody that promise, too.

 

[Rachel333]

1 hour ago, nausicaa said:

3. Will Sanders drop out after Tuesday if things go as projected? I still see people on Twitter just flat out denying the math and wonder where his mind is at.

If the past is anything to go by, no! I hope he won't drag things out again, but I don't have much faith in him. He said yesterday that Pete and Amy were "forced" to drop out by the establishment, which I thought just showed how he doesn't understand what it is to put your own ego aside for the good of the country and drop out rather than dividing the party further.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "Sanders gets more Trumpian by the day"

Spoiler

Populist leaders present themselves as the only authentic voice of the “people.” Therefore, critics in the media are enemies of the people, for to take on the leader is to attack the people. When the leader is rejected at the polls, it cannot be an authentic expression of the people. The system must be rigged; the establishment must be out to get the candidates and, by extension, the people.

We have seen this for the three years President Trump has been in office, and previously in his 2016 campaign. The deep state, the fake news and the elites (not “real” Americans) are out to get him, he says. He insists that all these forces do not respect the people, his followers and the only real Americans.

We are reminded in watching Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as his presidential campaign fizzles, this mind-set is not limited to the right. Sanders had this exchange on ABC’s “This Week”:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: When you joined us last Sunday, you were leading in delegates, look poised for a big lead coming out of Super Tuesday. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg all still in the race. How surprised were you by Super Tuesday and how do you explain it?

SANDERS: Well, one of the things that I was kind of not surprised by is the power of establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, really worked extremely hard as well, out of the race.

What was very clear from the media narrative and what the establishment wanted was to make sure that people coalesced around [former vice president Joe] Biden and try to defeat me. So that’s not surprising.

We are taking on, George, as I think everybody knows, the establishment. We’re taking on the corporate establishment. We’re taking on the political establishment. And what you are seeing now just in the last few weeks is Wall Street, the health-care industry, the billionaire class putting a lot of money into Joe’s campaign.

This is bonkers. Other Democrats got out of the race because voters across the country did not vote for them. Sanders sneers at them as if they are puppets on a string, yanked out of the race by nefarious forces. They actually looked at the facts, saw they could not win and decided Biden had a better chance to unify the country and beat Trump than did a self-proclaimed socialist who cannot resist the urge to pick fights with his own party. This is akin to his waving off South Carolina voters, predominantly African American, and instead attributing Biden’s win to “corporate Democrats.”

Sanders’s complaint about billionaires giving to Biden’s campaign (they would be limited to $2,800 per person like all other donors) is part of the fixation with attributing opponents’ success to something other than popular opinion. Sanders had no real answer when Stephanopoulos pointed out that “you outspent him on Super Tuesday.” In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of Biden’s romp on Super Tuesday was his lack of ads and organization in states in which Sanders poured in millions and had paid people on the ground.

For an ideologue such as Sanders, there is always reason to oppose practical measures, be it the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement or President Barack Obama’s bailout to save the country from a devastating depression. Stephanopoulos pointed out that the latter was “also backed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, your own senior senator from Vermont, Pat Leahy.” Were they also wrong? Sanders responded, “That’s right.” For Sanders, no Democrat is pure or operating out of good will. They are all dupes and pawns.

One might ask how he expects to accomplish any of his extreme agenda when so many in the Democratic Party have no interest in his views or how he expects to unite a party when, he acknowledges, “we’re not going to get the support of most elected leaders. Not most governors, not most senators.”

Sanders keeps insisting he is “winning the support of grass-roots America.” That simply is not so. Biden won 10 of 14 states, driving turnout sky-high in states he won, like Virginia. Sanders’s promised onslaught of new voters has never shown up.

Perhaps he and his snarling online supporters should confront an unpleasant truth: Sanders’s problem is not the establishment or corporate Democrats or billionaires. It is the voters.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 hours ago, nausicaa said:

Was HRC hatred that strong she was the gas in his tank?

That's a huge part of it...and she refused to see past her entitlement to see it.  

 

 

[nausicaa]

1 hour ago, Rachel333 said:

... drop out rather than dividing the party further.

Not to sound too conspiratorial, but do you think he cares about dividing the party further? I mean, he's not a Democratic senator, and his rhetoric doesn't suggest there's much love lost there.

I don't think he's quite Trump (who, let's be real, would set fire to the entire GOP and take a dump on the Lincoln Memorial if he got bored one afternoon) but I don't think Sanders feels any loyalty to, or even real allyship with, the Democratic party. (I mean, I'm not a Democrat either. But I'm also not expecting the party to rally around me and support my political campaign.)

I think he just realizes it's the best vehicle for him become president and/or defeat Trump (hopefully the latter goal wins out and he steps down). 

Edited March 9, 2020 by nausicaa

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, nausicaa said:

So Biden is up twenty points in Michigan. 538 (not a perfect site but since it was invoked when it had Sanders ahead I feel okay using it now) has Biden with an 88% chance of winning and Sanders 2%. Biden is up by 20 some points in Missouri, a state HRC beat Sanders by something like 2%. He is up by 55 (!!!) points in Mississippi. My questions:

1. Why is Sanders doing so much worse in 2020 than 2016, in another two person race? Was HRC hatred that strong she was the gas in his tank? Are ppl just not willing to take a chance because of a fear of Trump?

2. How do we fight these weird social media bubbles we all live in?

3. Will Sanders drop out after Tuesday if things go as projected? I still see people on Twitter just flat out denying the math and wonder where his mind is at.

4. I genuinely need someone to explain to me how the DNC cheated Sanders and orchestrated this. Voters just voted, right?

5. Not to get too ahead of myself but, VP picks. I'm now thinking Harris might be a good choice. I worried about her alienating younger, more progressive types. But since we've seen how little of a voting presence they are, I'm not too worried about their threats at this point. It looks like the Dems winning strategy may be leaning into being boring moderates.

My 2 cents answers:

1. People saw what happened in 2016, and how Sanders divided the Democratic Party. When he lost, he left the party in a huff and became an independent. It is beyond me how he can be in the running for the Democratic presidential candidacy, when he isn't even a Democrat, but that's beside the point here. I think voters have one goal, and one goal only: to get rid of divisiveness. Trump is the face of divisiveness, but Sanders is a good second.
    
2. I have no idea. People believe what they want to believe. They stick to like minded groups, egg each other on and seek confirmation of their beliefs. Social media just puts that human trait under a microscope and zooms in.
    
3. No. He'll try for a contested convention. He knows this is his last chance at the presidency, and he's not going to give up lightly.
    
4. I think that what Sanders is saying, is that somehow (maybe even by nefarious means) the DNC convinced Buttigieg and Klobuchar to quit and to endorse Biden, because they want to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination at all costs. Which begs the question, if he hates the DNC so much, why is he running for their candidacy? To me, that is so hypocritical. He should be running as an Independent -- but he knows full well his chances of becoming president rely heavily on the Democratic votes, and so he's chosen to use the Democratic Party to get them.
    
5. Ideally I want a strong, younger woman, with some experience under her belt. If Warren were younger, I'd like it to be her. But as she's 70, making her veep would be defeating the point a little. Still, I'd rather have her despite her age, than someone who'd flounder in the role due to inexperience.

Edited March 9, 2020 by fraurosena

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

(I mean, I'm not a Democrat either. But I'm also not expecting the party to rally around me and support my political campaign.)

Ha - I'm not either.  I feel like I'm a temporary Dem by default atm,,,,for which I also blame Trump.

2 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Ideally I want a strong, younger woman, with some experience under her belt. If Warren were younger, I'd like it to be her. But as she's 70, making her veep would be defeating the point a little. Still, I'd rather have her despite her age, than someone who'd flounder in the role due to inexperience.

I agree with this, except her age doesn't bother me as much due to her energy level and apparent health.  I see her pulling a Nancy Pelosi or RBG and being around a good long time.

I think she's make a good VP, but the job is pretty toothless.  I think she could be of outstanding practical use as Sec of Education.  I don't agree with all of her plans, especially the math, but I think she has the ability to correct some wrongs and it's just a matter of putting her in the position to do it.

[Rachel333]

4 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

Not to sound too conspiratorial, but do you think he cares about dividing the party further? I mean, he's not Democratic senator, and his rhetoric doesn't suggest there's much love lost there.

Ha, no. He's been pretty clear that he sees the Democratic party as an enemy too, which would be kind of awkward if he won the nomination and became the de facto leader of the party.

I'd hope he at least sees that dividing the Democratic party only helps Trump, and I do believe that he sees defeating Trump as an important goal in itself, but it seems like he has a really hard time getting past his own ego even when the consequences are so dire.

[hoipolloi]

2 hours ago, nausicaa said:

4. I genuinely need someone to explain to me how the DNC cheated Sanders and orchestrated this. Voters just voted, right?

There were some shenanigans within the DNC  which were rightfully called out, but the bottom line in 2016 was that Sanders did not get enough votes + delegates in the D primaries. He lost to HRC, fair and square -- she simply got substantially more votes. He made a big fuss at the time about the DNC and superdelegates so they changed the procedures after the 2016 process, but now he's fussing about changing them back, because otherwise things won't go in his favor this time. In some ways, he & tRump have a lot in common.

2 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Boring might be best for beating Trump. People are tired of drama. 

There is a lot of merit to this. People are fucking sick and tired of being on edge and in deep anxiety over tRump and this administration. I mean, our anxiety gets ratcheted up not just every day, but nearly every fucking hour of every fucking day. This is in addition to the constant level of stress generated by what these fucking assholes are doing. Why can't we have leadership again who we only have to think about, say, once a week, or at most once every few days? 

 

[fraurosena]

This explains a lot.

How the Trump campaign took over the GOP

Quote

President Trump’s campaign manager and a circle of allies have seized control of the Republican Party’s voter data and fund-raising apparatus, using a network of private businesses whose operations and ownership are cloaked in secrecy, largely exempt from federal disclosure.

Working under the aegis of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, with the cooperation of Trump appointees at the Republican National Committee, the operatives have consolidated power — and made money — in a way not possible in an earlier, more transparent analog era. Since 2017, businesses associated with the group have billed roughly $75 million to the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and a range of other Republican clients.

The takeover of the Republican Party’s under-the-hood political machinery parallels the president’s domination of a party that once shunned him, reflected in his speedy impeachment trial and summary acquittal. Elected Republicans have learned the political peril of insufficient fealty. Now, by commanding the party’s repository of voter data and creating a powerful pipeline for small donations, the Trump campaign and key party officials have made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to mount modern, digital campaigns without the president’s support.

The process has not been exactly frictionless, shot through with accusations of empire-building and profiteering by the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his allies. Mr. Parscale’s flagship firm, Parscale Strategy, has billed nearly $35 million to the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and related entities since 2017 — the vast bulk of it, he says, passed along to advertising and digital firms.

What’s more, the move to consolidate voter data came at the expense of a competing data vehicle developed by the conservative activist Koch brothers, provoking resentment from Koch allies, especially in the Senate. And a fierce pressure campaign to centralize fund-raising on the new platform, a for-profit company that Mr. Trump branded WinRed, brought dissent from candidates initially reluctant to sign on, as well as competitors who believed they were being pushed aside without a fair hearing.

For all that, WinRed, created last summer, has given the party an overdue counterweight to ActBlue, the Democrats’ small-donor fund-raising juggernaut. With WinRed, donors could contribute with a few clicks, and candidates could reap windfalls through joint appeals with the president. In its first six months, capitalizing on the Republican base’s outrage over impeachment, WinRed raised $100 million, a fast start, though still well behind the roughly $1 billion raised last year by ActBlue.

“It is completely, thoroughly ironic that Trump, who ran against anything to do with the R.N.C. and the establishment, is the guy who is breathing new life into the party,” said WinRed’s chairman, Henry Barbour. Perhaps no one better represents the new outside-in reality than Mr. Barbour — nephew of the former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour — who once said it would be “very hard” to vote for Mr. Trump.

The younger Mr. Barbour is also chairman of the other central pillar of the Republican machine, Data Trust, a storehouse of personal, commercial and demographic voter data collected from state parties and voter files or bought from data brokers (or from WinRed, itself a vital source of donor information). Data Trust, a private company controlled by a board of Republican grandees, provided much of the raw material behind the Republicans’ digital-messaging advantage in 2016 — a deficit that the Democrats, after leading on tech during the Obama years, are now struggling to close amid the divisive funk of this primary season.

The Parscale-led group — including Katie Walsh Shields and her husband, Mike Shields, both former R.N.C. chiefs of staff; and the party’s former digital director, Gerrit Lansing — has also presided over the creation of a number of other political tools, from the president’s affiliated super PACs to a forthcoming party-controlled news app intended to produce cheerleading content.

Mr. Parscale declined to comment in detail for this article. But he and his associates have said that private companies give them greater operational flexibility, given the constraints of campaign-finance laws. (ActBlue, by contrast, is a nonprofit. Both entities, though, are required to disclose individual donors.) Still, the millions moving through opaque private businesses have left even the president perpetually concerned that Mr. Parscale and his team are making too much money, according to campaign and White House staff members.

The Trump family looms over the whole operation, starting with Mr. Kushner. While his White House portfolio has variously encompassed everything from immigration to the Middle East, his most consistent assignment has been informal campaign chairman, overseeing the most vital arm of the new family business: politics.

According to two people with knowledge of the matter, Parscale Strategy has also been used to make payments out of public view to Lara Trump, the wife of the president’s son Eric, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., who have been surrogates on the stump and also taken on broader advisory roles. Their presence makes for an odd dynamic between a campaign manager and a candidate’s family.

During a campaign appearance last summer in Orlando, Ms. Guilfoyle confronted Mr. Parscale: Why were her checks always late? Two people who witnessed the encounter said a contrite Mr. Parscale promised that the problem would be sorted out promptly by his wife, Candice Parscale, who handles the books on many of his ventures.

A Data Arms Race

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential run, the Republican Party released a 100-page report that many considered an autopsy. Reince Priebus, then the R.N.C. chairman, offered this blunt assessment: “Our message was weak. Our ground game was insufficient. We weren’t inclusive. We were behind in both data and digital.”

While Mr. Trump’s team shredded its core recommendation — a tolerant immigration policy and outreach to women and minorities — it embraced the call for technological change.

Previously, parties had spent heavily on television advertising, but now the R.N.C. moved to rebuild around Data Trust, which it had recently helped establish. The idea was compelling: If state and national party committees and campaigns fed information into one place, it could create a deeper understanding of voters. If that place were outside the party, fund-raising limits would not apply. Contractors were fired, and much of the R.N.C.’s data staff was moved into Data Trust, which effectively became an off-campus arm of the party.

“Naturally we faced opposition from a lot of the entrenched interests who had business models that benefited from the old way of doing things,” said Mr. Shields, the R.N.C. chief of staff in 2013 and 2014.

That included the Koch brothers and their data vehicle, i360, which built personality profiles of millions of voters and was used by a number of campaigns. They weren’t the only skeptics who worried that the committee was steering business to its pet company. Aides to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, believed that Data Trust was inferior to its competitor, and Mr. McConnell gave senators the option of using either.

The battle came to a head in mid-2016, when Mr. Priebus and Ms. Walsh-Shields, who had become R.N.C. chief of staff the previous year, visited the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She accused the committee of working against the interests of the party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Trump. From there, the meeting devolved into shouting, several Republicans with direct knowledge of the clash said.

While Ms. Walsh-Shields said in a statement that she did not recall the specific meeting, she added: “I have found that quite often when a woman in a position of power disagrees with a man, it is later referred to as a bad meeting.”

She said the Senate committee’s staff was “bizarrely very beholden to using i360 and the Koch brothers’ system,” while Mr. Priebus’s general position was that the party would help pay campaigns’ staff expenses only if those aides were “going to be using — and gathering — data that would help elect the president.”

In the end, some Senate Republicans continued to use the Koch data.

Money was another point of contention. Some Senate committee staff members chafed at a consulting contract given to Mr. Shields by Data Trust, given Ms. Walsh-Shields’s influence, though she had briefly left the R.N.C. in 2017 during the period when it was awarded. (Mr. Barbour said Mr. Shields “provided tremendous value.”) Data Trust also chronically needed to purchase new state voter files and pay its staff and vendors like Mr. Shields. The party has pumped nearly $15 million into the company since 2016, filings show.

Building relations with Senate Republicans became secondary after Mr. Trump secured the nomination. Ms. Walsh-Shields struck an unlikely alliance with Mr. Parscale, then the Trump campaign digital director, when the two began sharing a Trump Tower office.

Mr. Parscale, now 44, was a small-time San Antonio web entrepreneur with a gift for salesmanship. Ms. Walsh-Shields, 35, had worked her way up through the political ranks on the strength of her fund-raising abilities and knowledge of the party’s internal workings. With Mr. Kushner’s blessing and Data Trust’s information — and some help from the now-defunct, controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica — Mr. Parscale focused on targeting Facebook ads at voters.

Karl Rove, campaign manager and confidant to President George W. Bush, was an early backer of Data Trust and has been informally advising Mr. Parscale. He wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that technology had played a critical role in battleground states, adding, “Data Trust was a big reason why Donald Trump won the 2016 election.”

Building a Cash Machine

Just before the Republicans lost the House in 2018, Mr. Kushner convened a cadre of operatives at the Trump family’s Washington hotel to confront a rising threat to the president.

Republicans had watched with alarm as ActBlue helped Beto O’Rourke, a previously obscure Texas congressman, pull in more than $50 million for his improbably serious challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Megadonors warned Mr. Kushner that, come 2020, they would not make up for the party’s small-donor deficit.

Republicans had fund-raising tools, but by coalescing around a single vendor like ActBlue, candidates could raise money jointly and more easily share data on contributors. There were several contenders. But to Mr. Kushner and Mr. Parscale, who by then was the 2020 campaign manager, only one vendor was acceptable, according to several people with knowledge of the deliberations: a company called Revv which had already been processing payments for the campaign.

Revv had been co-founded by Mr. Lansing, who was well regarded as a tech-savvy operator and for raising alarms about ActBlue for years. But in 2017, Politico reported that, after taking over as the R.N.C.’s digital director the year before, he had encouraged Republican campaigns to use Revv, earning a $909,000 payout from the company. Some party veterans viewed this as self-dealing.

By the summer of 2019, WinRed was created atop Revv’s platform, but only after negotiations that ended with the Senate campaign committee, and R.N.C. representatives, imposing restrictions that blocked Mr. Lansing from selling WinRed in the future and tightening control of firms he could hire.

Mr. Lansing, in a statement, called WinRed “the work of seven months of lawyering to ensure every major stakeholder would be happy with all data, financial and ownership arrangements.”

The new company was a joint venture between Revv and Data Trust, with 60 percent of profits going to Revv. (WinRed charges campaigns 3.8 percent, plus 30 cents per credit card transaction.) Officials involved would not detail Mr. Lansing’s remuneration. Mr. Parscale, Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields do not own stakes, according to financial records reviewed by The New York Times.

WinRed became ascendant, and this time the Trump team and Senate Republicans joined in a pressure campaign to convert holdouts. Mr. McConnell told colleagues at a lunch in mid-2019 that his personal goal was to “shut down all the competitors,” according to one senator who was surprised at the majority leader’s directness. The party even sent a cease-and-desist letter to one of the losing contenders, Anedot, instructing it to remove G.O.P. logos from solicitations.

With or without a stake in WinRed, key aides have positioned themselves at the center of a formidable political machine. Ms. Walsh-Shields’s consulting firm receives a $25,000-a-month R.N.C. retainer and 1 to 5 percent of money it raises for the party’s 2020 convention. Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence Media, represents clients ranging from the National Republican Congressional Committee to Representative Devin Nunes of California, one of the president’s staunchest defenders against impeachment.

But it is Mr. Parscale who has most often been the focus of Mr. Trump’s complaints that those around him are making too much money from his name and brand. Mr. Parscale has not always discouraged suspicions. A few weeks before the 2016 election, the campaign staff gathered at the Whiskey Trader, a watering hole near Trump Tower, to play beer pong and brace for near-certain defeat. In walked Mr. Parscale, returning from dinner with a new campaign hire.

“I’m making so much money!” Mr. Parscale declared, inserting an expletive, according to two people who were present.

Mr. Parscale, in a statement, called their account “untrue and ridiculous,” but since his appointment as campaign manager, he has bought a $2.4 million canalside home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; two condos, owned with his family, together worth $2 million; and a Ferrari. A campaign official attributed the spending to Mr. Parscale’s relocation and divestment from businesses in Texas.

But after a rival aide left an underlined copy of a Daily Mail story detailing his spending on the president’s desk, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Parscale for a pointed lecture, according to a senior White House official.

Others in his circle have made purchases of their own. Mr. Lansing bought a $1.7 million home in Washington last year, while Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields bought a $2 million beach house in the Florida panhandle. Asked about the house, Ms. Walsh-Shields referred a reporter to her mother, who said the down payment and mortgage payments had come mostly from her. Mr. Shields had also recently sold the house he owned before their marriage.

That Ms. Walsh-Shields has endured is noteworthy. While Vice President Mike Pence said, in a statement, that “we are grateful for her hard work, loyalty and professionalism,” Mr. Trump has privately referred to her as a ‘leaker,’ blaming her for unflattering media coverage during her brief tenure as White House deputy chief of staff in 2017. He has pressed Ronna McDaniel, the party chairwoman, about Ms. Walsh-Shields’s role in recent days. And during a meeting last summer, after prodding by his longtime security consultant, Keith Schiller, the president asked if Ms. McDaniel trusted her, according to people with knowledge of the exchanges. “I do,” Ms. McDaniel replied. “She works for me.”

‘We Have the Upper Hand’

A company called Excelsior Strategies, run by employees at Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence, was contracted to rent Mr. Trump’s crown jewel, his list of some 20 million donors; Mr. Shields said that only the campaign profited from the arrangement. And Opn Sesame, a start-up run by Gary Coby, a Parscale protégé, is being paid $200,000 to $300,000 a month through the R.N.C., according to campaign filings.

When the Trump campaign’s digital operation recently moved to its own floor at the campaign’s Northern Virginia headquarters, much of it was being run by Mr. Coby, who recently merged his operations with the R.N.C.’s data team. Opn Sesame’s specialty is texting voters, a burgeoning and lightly regulated field that is expected to be a factor in the 2020 campaign.

To allay Mr. Trump’s concerns, tens of millions of dollars worth of campaign advertising that once ran through Parscale Strategy has been redirected to a new company, American Made Media, which is run by a Parscale lieutenant. There are no public records detailing the company’s financial structure; Mr. Parscale and other advisers said they did not profit from it. Mr. Parscale has declined to provide detailed accounting of his network of interlocking businesses, and has told associates he follows Mr. Trump’s directive, relayed through Ms. McDaniel, that he make no more than $700,000 or $800,000 for his campaign work.

Even to insiders, the campaign’s activities can seem opaque.

Last fall, Mr. Pence’s office scheduled his first visit to the headquarters, to get a firsthand look. But when the day came, Mr. Parscale canceled, even though the visit was already on the vice president’s official schedule. Mr. Parscale, who spends much of his time working from his Florida home — though he recently said he would relocate to Washington — told Mr. Pence’s office that the campaign’s landlord had vetoed the idea, fearing a vice-presidential visit would disrupt other tenants. Mr. Pence was puzzled not to learn sooner, and the visit has not been rescheduled, two officials with knowledge of the episode said.

For the moment, such concerns are muted as the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and other affiliated committees raised $155 million in the final three months of 2019, a 23 percent increase over the previous quarter that was buoyed by the impeachment proceedings. The digital operation overseen by Mr. Coby and Mr. Parscale has been developing a series of new products, including a news app for volunteers to dole out Trump-friendly content, republish Trump-world tweets and raffle MAGA hats. An arm of the campaign has also hired a company called Phunware, which specializes in tracking cellphone locations; a senior campaign official said the company was hired to develop an app, not track people.

The Democrats are trying to regroup, but their efforts have been scattershot. A year ago, the party installed its former chairman, Howard Dean, to create a Data Trust for the left, but the momentum around the venture has lagged.

“We’re very far behind right now,” said Mikey Dickerson, a former Obama administration official who is chief technology officer at Alloy, a nonprofit tech venture on the left. “They got motivated by the stories from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns saying that the Democrats had an insurmountable advantage,” he said, adding that it “caused our side to be complacent.”

Most Republican officeholders have succumbed to the WinRed pressure campaign. One late convert was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who learned the power of being linked to Mr. Trump’s money machine when WinRed unexpectedly sent out a joint fund-raising appeal that brought in a “six-figure sum in a single day, which is huge in a down-ballot race,” said Tim Cameron, a Tillis adviser and former digital director at the Republican senatorial committee.

Without Mr. Trump’s victory, “there’d be nothing at the scale of WinRed,” he said. “All of a sudden, it’s one election, and we have the upper hand.”

 

[Marmion]

19 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This wave of young, radical support online was a movement unto itself, with a lexicon that borrowed from Chomsky and Lenin, potty humor and kink: “Chud” was the word they used for an obnoxious Trump supporter, and the “Neolibs” were the new generation of establishment Democrats. The art of applying theory to the real world was referred to as “praxis,” and to extricate oneself from the struggle was to ingest the “black pill

For those who don't recognize the significance of this , it's describing the use of loaded language .  { https://freedomofmind.com/use-of-words-loaded-language-and-thought-control-of-believers/ , 

http://www.alexandrastein.com/warning-signs.html }   Could Bernie Sanders' political revolution turn into a political cult , such as described in this interview ?  

Well , James Carville sure thinks that it might .   

 Excerpted remarks here .  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/02/11/carville_trashes_bernie_sanders_im_not_interested_in_being_in_a_cult.html  So yes , I and many other Democrats will vote for Sanders , in he's the nominee , but I don't see him being likely to win such swing states as Florida , for instance , where even both left-wing , and left-leaning Cubans ,  in Miami , as well as in Havana , Cuba itself , feel that the socialism of both he , and the DSA , is not necessarily democratic . { https://havanatimes.org/opinion/cuban-democratic-socialists-write-to-their-peers-in-the-us/  , https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/08/28/democrat-family-escaped-socialism-ocasio-cortez-worries-me-column/1106307002/  ,https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/02/24/florida-democrats-in-uproar-after-sanders-cuba-comments-1263255 } 

[Rachel333]

The odds for Bernie aren't looking great on 538. Remember how different things were just a week ago?

He's no longer favored to win any more contests. Some are close so I'd expect him to win a couple. And it could still change for him, but it's looking very unlikely.

And despite Bernie supporters' anger at Elizabeth Warren for supposedly hurting Bernie by not dropping out before Super Tuesday (they're currently angry at her for going on SNL and not endorsing Bernie, and mad at AOC for tweeting positively about Warren's SNL appearance), polling shows that her exit has helped Biden more than Sanders.

Also, what the fuck guys? How do you go from voting for Bernie to voting for Trump?

Quote

The poll also found that about six in 10 Sanders supporters said they would vote for Biden if he ended up winning the party’s nomination to take on Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election. Three in 10 said they either would not vote, vote for a third-party candidate or did not yet know what they would do.

One in 10 Sanders supporters would vote for Trump if Biden is nominated. 

 

[CatFriend]

1 hour ago, Rachel333 said:

The odds for Bernie aren't looking great on 538. Remember how different things were just a week ago?

He's no longer favored to win any more contests. Some are close so I'd expect him to win a couple. And it could still change for him, but it's looking very unlikely.

And despite Bernie supporters' anger at Elizabeth Warren for supposedly hurting Bernie by not dropping out before Super Tuesday (they're currently angry at her for going on SNL and not endorsing Bernie, and mad at AOC for tweeting positively about Warren's SNL appearance), polling shows that her exit has helped Biden more than Sanders.

Also, what the fuck guys? How do you go from voting for Bernie to voting for Trump?

 

I follow some hardcore Bernie fans on Facebook (they are mostly people I went to high school with) and I think the biggest reason that some of them would vote for Trump is that they believe that the DNC does not represent them. Some of these people are libertarian leaning, who decided that they liked some of the social welfare programs that Bernie offers but are very staunchly against Biden. Some of these people I think just want an outsider, that's one of the reasons the people I know who support Trump like him as well. One reason why they don't like Biden is that it feels like he does not have many plans for his presidency (I've seen a lot of people say that the only thing they know about his campaign is that he would beat Donald Trump) while Bernie does. Although many of the same people don't realize the difficulties that he will have once he's elected. I've even seen memes on Facebook comparing the two that are honestly sort of offensive (I've included one hopefully in the spoiler below, this is my first post hopefully it works!) I have seen some of these people say they will not vote in the election or vote for Trump if Bernie does not win.  It's kind of crazy. 

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

I saw this posted on three separate Facebook within the last few days. 

I like Bernie and if he makes it to my state I plan to vote for him in the primary (I'm an idealist at heart). However, I am worried about the possibility of people refusing to vote for Biden if he wins the nomination. A lot of young people don't seem to realize that even if they don't like Biden, he is at least a step in the right direction, unlike Trump who has caused a dumpster fire. 

It seems like these thread skew older (I've been lurking for a while), what advice would people have for encouraging young people (early 20s) to support the Democratic nominee even if they are not super excited? I live in a swing state, so I worry that if people do not vote Trump will be able to win my state again. 

[Smee]

2 hours ago, CatFriend said:

Spoiler

 

 

It seems like these thread skew older (I've been lurking for a while), what advice would people have for encouraging young people (early 20s) to support the Democratic nominee even if they are not super excited? I live in a swing state, so I worry that if people do not vote Trump will be able to win my state again. 

I’ve been thinking about this a bit, because it does seem like many don’t want to vote for Biden and voter turnout is so important. Here’s the argument I’d want to make to young progressives who are disappointed by Bernie’s lack of success:

1. I empathise. Biden isn’t the nominee I wanted either. For me personally, living in a country with compulsory voting, I find it so incredibly emotionally upsetting after each election when I’m faced with the ugly reality that it’s not just the wrong people showing up, the MAJORITY of people didn’t want what I want. Maybe it’s propaganda, and money, and strategy, and gerrymandering. Having something to blame gives me a place to direct the anger and sadness, but it doesn’t help further my cause. So please, mourn as you need, and know that you’re not mourning alone. Then get strategic about beating the bastards at their own game.

2. There are people who have a very similar platform to the one you want, who weren’t in this presidential race. They didn’t have the support or money or experience this time around, but if you want them next time around, you’ve gotta use your vote now to get them in Congress and the Senate, or in mayoral positions or governorships. Bernie’s rise didn’t start in 2016; he was only able to get as far as he did because the people of Vermont supported him many years ago. Find the progressives in other races and VOTE FOR THEM. Who knows where AOC might be in another decade, for example.

3. If you want Medicare-for-all, what you need is congressional representatives to introduce bills for it, and senators to pass them. And then, yeah, a president who’ll sign off. But without the first two, a president’s power is limited. And WITH the first two, it’s much easier to convince whoever is President. So, again: find the progressives in your local races and VOTE FOR THEM. Your voice is not limited to presidential campaigns. Use it continually, and use it wisely.

4. While you’re at the polling booth, voting for the next generation of politicians who excite you and will bring the change you want, vote for president. Pick the one who is less likely to get in the way of your progressive representatives in Congress and the Senate. That isn’t Trump.

[Rachel333]

7 hours ago, CatFriend said:

I like Bernie and if he makes it to my state I plan to vote for him in the primary (I'm an idealist at heart). However, I am worried about the possibility of people refusing to vote for Biden if he wins the nomination. A lot of young people don't seem to realize that even if they don't like Biden, he is at least a step in the right direction, unlike Trump who has caused a dumpster fire. 

It seems like these thread skew older (I've been lurking for a while), what advice would people have for encouraging young people (early 20s) to support the Democratic nominee even if they are not super excited? I live in a swing state, so I worry that if people do not vote Trump will be able to win my state again. 

Yeah, I'm also in the 18-29 voter bracket, and it can feel sometimes like I'm the only one my age not completely enamored of Bernie!

Biden wasn't my first choice, but I've warmed to him a lot. I really like seeing his more empathetic side. There are so many stories of him just being incredibly kind and even giving his personal phone number to people who say they're going through things he understands, like losing a child.

I don't know if this would be seen as a good thing to the people on the left who rejoiced in McCain's death, but I really liked this clip from a couple years ago of Joe Biden comforting Meghan McCain. He's just such a kind person.

Spoiler

 

And of course this moment in the South Carolina town hall where he talked to the pastor who had lost his wife in the Charleston shooting.

Spoiler

 

And I've been seeing this going around as an explanation of why he has been doing so well with black voters.

[nausicaa]

9 hours ago, CatFriend said:

It seems like these thread skew older (I've been lurking for a while), what advice would people have for encouraging young people (early 20s) to support the Democratic nominee even if they are not super excited? I live in a swing state, so I worry that if people do not vote Trump will be able to win my state again. 

I'd just say, you don't always get everything you want. Sometimes you have to pick the less disastrous nominee. If someone offers you a plate of Chef Boyardee or a plate of moldy bread for dinner, you can stomp your feet all you want about wanting a steak dinner, it won't make a steak dinner appear.

And if they say Biden is just establishment and it will be business as usual, I'd say, isn't business as usual preferable to disaster? It's also easier to build the change they want from a less divided, stable country than one that is even more divided and chaotic. 

From a purely strategic perspective, I'm not worrying about losing the youth vote and having it affect anything at this point. They couldn't even be bothered to vote in the primaries when their guy was in it. And I think the ones saying they'll never vote for Biden are a small minority, and many are just making noise and will still pull the lever for him when staring the possibility of a second Trump term in the face.

 

ETA: One more thing to remind Bernie or bust people of: the president nominates Supreme Court justices. Ginsburg ain't gonna live forever, and very likely will pass during the next presidential term. A lifetime court appointment (or even more than one) is going to have a huge effect on the law in this country. This was one of the main reasons that was going to get me to vote for Sanders in the gen if I needed to. 

Edited March 10, 2020 by nausicaa

[CatFriend]

Thanks everyone for the advice, I'm going to have to save it for after the convention if things stay the way they look now. I don't understand the Biden hate that some people around me have. I like Biden and agree that he is incredibly empathetic and wouldn't mind voting for him in November. I tend to be pretty quiet about politics with people I know but I will try to make a difference and encourage my fellow young people to as well. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Biden wasn't in my top five choices when this all began. However, I will gladly vote for him to get rid of the orange shit stain. I don't know how good he would be at the job, but I do think he'll surround himself with knowledgeable and able people who can get the country on a better track.

[fraurosena]

First of all, welcome, @CatFriend! It's always nice to have fresh opinions in these threads. I'll be looking forward to reading your perspectives.

Second of all, I want to repeat @Smee's point, because in my view, it is the singular most important point of all: 

8 hours ago, Smee said:

3. If you want Medicare-for-all, what you need is congressional representatives to introduce bills for it, and senators to pass them. And then, yeah, a president who’ll sign off. But without the first two, a president’s power is limited. And WITH the first two, it’s much easier to convince whoever is President. So, again: find the progressives in your local races and VOTE FOR THEM. Your voice is not limited to presidential campaigns. Use it continually, and use it wisely.

Although I would place the caveat that this point doesn't only count for Medicare for all. It counts for each and every law, each and every subject you find important. Congress is the entity that makes the laws. So fill it with people who stand for what you believe is most important. 

A president is the face of the nation to the rest of the world. But whilst the president is the face, Congress is the neck.

And a face can only look to the side where the neck turns it towards. 

[milkteeth]

11 hours ago, CatFriend said:

I follow some hardcore Bernie fans on Facebook (they are mostly people I went to high school with) and I think the biggest reason that some of them would vote for Trump is that they believe that the DNC does not represent them. Some of these people are libertarian leaning, who decided that they liked some of the social welfare programs that Bernie offers but are very staunchly against Biden. Some of these people I think just want an outsider, that's one of the reasons the people I know who support Trump like him as well. One reason why they don't like Biden is that it feels like he does not have many plans for his presidency (I've seen a lot of people say that the only thing they know about his campaign is that he would beat Donald Trump) while Bernie does. Although many of the same people don't realize the difficulties that he will have once he's elected. I've even seen memes on Facebook comparing the two that are honestly sort of offensive (I've included one hopefully in the spoiler below, this is my first post hopefully it works!) I have seen some of these people say they will not vote in the election or vote for Trump if Bernie does not win.  It's kind of crazy. 

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I saw this posted on three separate Facebook within the last few days. 

I like Bernie and if he makes it to my state I plan to vote for him in the primary (I'm an idealist at heart). However, I am worried about the possibility of people refusing to vote for Biden if he wins the nomination. A lot of young people don't seem to realize that even if they don't like Biden, he is at least a step in the right direction, unlike Trump who has caused a dumpster fire. 

It seems like these thread skew older (I've been lurking for a while), what advice would people have for encouraging young people (early 20s) to support the Democratic nominee even if they are not super excited? I live in a swing state, so I worry that if people do not vote Trump will be able to win my state again. 

 

Haven't you heard? Turns out Biden isn't going to need young or progressive voters to win in November. The only voters he needs or that matter are moderates over the age of 60 and Trump will be sent packing. It's a tried and true strategy Democrats love coming back to election after election. 

In all seriousness, the best way to engage anyone is to listen more than you speak, take their concerns seriously and try to meet them where they are at. Don't try to bully or shame people by telling them that things that would allow them to live a life with dignity means they're being childish or "wishing for a pony" and tell them they should be grateful for what they get. That is the ticket to just alienate people from the political process altogether.  I agree with @Smee to identify progressive candidates and causes at the state and local level that they can throw their support behind.

Also the most tried and true method that has been emphasized during every campaign I've volunteered for is help them make a plan for Election Day for them to get out the vote. Ask them how they plan on getting to the polls (are you driving? Do you need a ride?), what time they plan to go, if they have a plan for if there are long lines etc. I've gotten my friends to vote on Election Day by offering them a ride and then making a plan to go get pizza or something afterward.