Sanders just said that we're going to show Bloomberg that in this country you can't buy elections. Impromptu fact check, Bernie: 5 pinocchios, pants on fire
The Democratic Primary is Upon Us! - Biden is the Presumptive Nominee
- Thread starter Tireseas_v1legacy
- Start date
So California is already called for Bernie Sanders and they haven't even counted the votes yet, how big is his lead in the state?
Some (MSNBC and AP) are calling it for Sanders while others (CNN) are holding back. According to CNN, it's 25.6% Sanders, 21.1% Bloomberg, and 17.4% Biden, though I think the count is slower reporting online than on TV.tf2godz said:
Some other calls:
Utah is being called for Sanders
Massachusetts is being called for Biden
Minnesota is being called for Biden
Oklahoma is being called for Biden
Texas is the last big one tonight that remains too close to call. I'm heading off to bed, so I'll check in in the morning on results.
Yeah, Bloombergs looking great with his *Checks notes* one outright victory in one of the smallest primary contests and maybe a few second-place finishes that more ate into Biden's potential lead (though California isn't anything to sneeze at).Seanchaidh said:
Look, money buys ads, poster, venue rentals, and campaign workers. Sanders is the third biggest spender in the 2020 Primary after the two self-funded billionaires [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/2020-presidential-candidates-campaign-spending-january/?arc404=true]. Even on the local level, try running a campaign without having to order signs from Kinkos.
Money can't buy much (the higher the office, the more diminishing the returns), but, if nothing else, Bloomberg showed paid media can easily earn you a few points when you most need it. Sanders would be wise to be willing to allow that money hose to be spent to get him elected, because so far tonight the "expand the electorate" theory has been breaking heavily in favor of Biden.
I think Biden is who Trump wants to be his opponent. He doesn't really know how to deal with Bernie other than the "he's a communist, lookout!" thing, but with Biden he can get personal and dirty in the way that makes his supporters cheer.
Of course Trump wants Biden, any opposing candidate would want Biden. Just schedule every debate late in the day and his brain will be fried and he'll forget what state he's in. Trump just gets extra points since Biden is everything Trump rallies against, which is his only real strength.Kwak said:
"The key issue of the candidacy is electability!"crimson5pheonix said:
"Let's choose the least electable candidate!"
"Brilliant!"
Man, I really thought for a couple of weeks that Dems had wised up to the sentient wet toiletpaper roll that Biden was, but I guess they'd rather get absolutely destroyed this time instead of barely like last time.
Voter suppression in Texas:
[tweet t="https://twitter.com/TracyMoonchild/status/1235034572527722497"]
2)He's not the only one with money, and money manifestly does buy elections in the United States. Not every election, but many.
[tweet t="https://twitter.com/TracyMoonchild/status/1235034572527722497"]
1)What is a joke?Tireseas said:
2)He's not the only one with money, and money manifestly does buy elections in the United States. Not every election, but many.
Oh no, I still think it'll be a coinflip. Trump is pretty damn bad. But man are the Dems stacking the deck against themselves as hard as they can. All I can think is they want him in office since they can just put whatever they want in front of him and he'll sign it. More than being bought, I don't think he has it in him for being an independent politician.SupahEwok said:
As far as I can see, Sanders is a fairly standard social democrat, which puts him around the conventional European centre-left.tstorm823 said:
There are several important reasons to tax corporations, such as that:
1) As independent entities that have a legal status equivalent to individual human beings, they use state-supported infrastructure (physical, legal, political, etc.) and thus should be expected to contribute to their upkeep.
2) Undermining corporate taxes enables tax avoidance, making it attractive for some individuals with the ability to redsignate their earnings from personal income into corporate income for taxation purposes.
That said, I don't have any particular feelings about where corporation tax rates should be. 20%? 30%? Whatever. I would agree with you that what matters is the overall state of where taxation falls, and there are much more efficient ways to tax the rich if that is the desire. What makes me suspicious is that this sort of holistic consideration often doesn't seem to much in evidence: corporations lobby for tax cuts (often at the behest of the major beneficiaries, wealthy shareholders) and politicians don't make any effort to rebalance the taxation.
As a digression, the claim that the top 10% pay 70% of income tax is deeply problematic. What about all the other taxes? Local government taxes? Sales taxes? Duties and tariffs? In the UK, for instance, income taxes (income tax and national insurance) contribute under 50% of government revenue. Whilst income tax tends to be progressive, a lot of these other taxes are not: so to say that the top 10% pay 70% of income tax suggests their contribution to the entire tax burden is lower.
You're talking about forms of local (sub-national) taxation. States (intra- or international) will vary on how they collect this. It's not useful to put it entirely in terms of income taxes without consideration of how other taxes are collected at a local level elsewhere. 10% income tax in California might less tax than somewhere else's rates, sales taxes, etc.
If by "cooking" you mean tax avoidance, sure. Let's imagine tax is 30%. Pay someone a salary of $10M, they get $7M after tax. Pay them $5M in salary and $5M in shares, they've got $8.5M after tax. So what if $5M isn't immediately liquid - do you really think that's a problem for them, or somehow doesn't count towards their wealth? Jeff Bezos is still worth $150 billion: the fact he can't spend it all at once isn't the same thing as him somehow not having that wealth.
Sure.
Let's also bear in mind, though, part of the reason the rich pay so much tax is that they earn so much. That's what inequality translates to: the rich necessarily end up paying increasing proportions of tax because they own increasing proportions of income and wealth.
Downward pressure on incomes have almost entirely hit the low end of earners. We can ask them to suck it up, or we can consider redistribution. I would argue from a simple point of societal justice that if we have asked the poor to take the biggest hit from our nations' development, we compensate them for it: i.e. welfare. I would also suggest that there's also an element of self-protection for the rich in it: don't make it up to the poor and one day they might get fed up enough to blow the system up.
Then you don't know Sanders. He seems like a fairly standard social democrat at the moment because that's what is just left of the Democratic Party he's running against. In my best attempts at understanding the man, I've concluded that he picks his positions based on what is just left of everyone else in the conversation. When he was running for mayor in a basically communist party, he was for nationalizing major industries because that's what it took to be most left. When Kamala Harris says Medicare for All, Bernie says he'll do that without copays, because that put him furthest left in the conversation. If you approach him about communist dictatorships, he looks for good things to say about them, so he can stay on the left of the conversation. When asked about population controls to fight climate change, he said the US needs to fund more abortion, especially in poor countries, because that is how you answer that question from even further left. This is why I keep asking for specific examples of him pushing back on something that's too far left for him, because I've never seen it. I don't think the man is an ideologue at all, I don't think he has firmer convictions than any other politician, I think he just has a really unique strategy to make himself important. Always be left.Agema said:
Corporations pay plenty of tax other than corporate income tax. They pay payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. That is the contribution toward the state-supported infrastructure.
Tax avoidance is a different problem, but again, I really don't see any benefit of doing high corporate tax and low capital gains (capital gains taxes would also counter their ability to designate their earnings business profit and then pay themselves out of it). I don't get why we would want our taxes aligned in such a way as to discourage actually doing business while encouraging investment in them.
This isn't deeply problematic, this is exactly the consideration we should be making when deciding what to tax more. Different taxes hit different segments of the population. Pointing out that a progressive income tax is better for keeping burden off the poor than corporate taxes is the right thought process.
So with Biden's big win I guess the corporate Democrats have decided it'd be easier for 4 more years of Trump rather then let Bernie enact any real changes.
Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out shows commitment to the cause. Not my cause, unfortunately, and worse, it seems to have worked. Biden is ahead in delegates after super Tuesday. (from what I saw the projections are that it's about 370 to 300 in Bidens favor with 1100 being the goal) His polling has shot back up too. And now Bloomberg just dropped out too, endorsing Biden. It's still possible and worth fighting for that Bernie takes it, but I'm pessimistic. I don't understand why democrats are lining up to vote for a rightwinger with dementia but it is what it is. He's managed to present himself as the electable one (you can see his polls going down as he loses states and up as he wins, people really are with him as long as he wins, strange mindset imo, but I guess many democrats really want to beat Trump, with whomever it takes), and has managed to keep his record on things like social security and civil asset forfeiture out of the narrative. I don't have a lot of trust that Biden can beat Trump, but he's looking decent in head to head polls (about the same as Bernie) so maybe he can pull it of. He doesn't rub people up the wrong way in the way that Hillary did and that might be enough. Even among left-wingers, though Biden has consistently been the bigger threat, most scorn was reserved for Buttigieg and Bloomberg as they are just so much more dislikable, so he has that going for him. Warren didn't even get second in Massachusetts. She should show the spine that Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg showed, drop out and endorse another candidate, but she might be too selfish or bitter for that, or perhaps she prefers Biden over Bernie.
Also, some funny facts to lighten the mood (or make it even better, if you like Biden): Warren is doing so poorly she is projected to have less delegates than Buttigieg even after super Tuesday where he did not participate. Also, congresswoman Tusli Gabbard is still in the race and has gotten her first and so far only delegate.
Also, some funny facts to lighten the mood (or make it even better, if you like Biden): Warren is doing so poorly she is projected to have less delegates than Buttigieg even after super Tuesday where he did not participate. Also, congresswoman Tusli Gabbard is still in the race and has gotten her first and so far only delegate.
Do you still stand by your earlier predictions? Incidentally, when I wrote my thoughts on your predictions I pretty much agreed with you on point 1. At the current time though it looks like that will turn out to be incorrect, and if so the domino effect makes several of the other predictions you made probably no longer relevant.tstorm823 said:
Things not helping Sanders:Pseudonym said:
1) Sanders spending 5 years bashing a nebulous "establishment" while doing almost no reaching out to try and build the bridges with less-ideologically aligned power centers necessary to secure the nomination and unify the party. This essentially painted him in the eyes of the average center-left democrat as someone not interested in unifying the party in a way to secure a nomination, which makes him look less electable because Democrats need more unity to beat Republicans in presidential general election than visa-versa.
2) Taking a rigid ideological approach further alienates those who have serious concerns about his approach to politics, even if on brand for him. After years of GOP dogma, the last thing they want is something similar on the left side, especially when the electoral math still shifts the median point to the right. Things like praising Cuba and Nicaragua's communist regimes, deserved or otherwise, really fucking scares voters for whom "Florida 2000" remains a trauma point, as those stances are seen as serious liability for securing one of the largest swing states.[footnote]Recent polls in Flordia, which are over a week old so take them with a massive grain of salt, routinely have Sanders at around 15% in the Primary [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/florida_democratic_presidential_primary-6847.html#polls].[/footnote]
3) An army of trolls (some of whom work for or are surrogates for the campaign) who tout his message that actively turn off potentially persuadable voters through insults and divisive statements. A regular drip of stories like this aren't just not helping, but likely actively hurting him moving forward [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/03/04/marianne-williamson-candidates-endorsement-biden-coup/4949415002/].
4) A general familiarity with the now-main moderate in the race. Biden, for his all his faults, maintained strong enough ties and reputation with essential voting blocks (notably black and older voters with a higher propensity to turn out) that he was considered a known quantity among a group of voters that tends to vote strategically for moderates to favor victory over hail-Mary candidates that could better represent them but have the perception of likely loosing in the general election. Sanders has not shed that reputation among voters who remember McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis who were painted and too liberal by the GOP and lost and his theory of the case for his candidacy has not borne fruit in the way necessary to proceed (Hell, Virginia, which was considered a toss-up favoring Sanders going in [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-what-our-forecast-says-about-every-super-tuesday-state/] nearly doubled the 2016 turnout and it broke heavily for Biden, not Sanders).
5) Perceived hypocrisy for calling for more-aligned candidates to drop out of the race. A lot of people, particularly female supporters of Warren, feel insulted by Sanders' supporter's calls for Warren to drop out of the race after he actively ignored such calls in 2016 and did little to reign in his supporters ugly attacks against Clinton even when it was abundantly clear there was no means of securing the nomination. 2016 will likely haunt this election until the first Wednesday in November.
Some good news: Most of these are essentially perception issues that, while heavily baked in, are also not irreversible. He's only down about 60 delegates from Biden [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/17/democratic-primary-delegates/?arc404=true], so he's not in the mathematical impossibility range he was in in 2016 yet, but if he can't pick up more delegates than he looses, then he's in serious trouble. A pretty big yellow flag right now is that last night he went from 86.1% in Vemront in 2016 to a hair over 50% last night, and while the circumstances are certainly different (more candidates means more splintering), that's a huge drop in support for a home state.
Another problem of his? It's not clear Warren dropping out would actually help him as much as people think it will. While Sander's clearly get's the lion's share of Warren's support if she drops out [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/02/bernie-sanderss-elizabeth-warren-problem/], the data also shows that it's less than half (33% as of a month ago, so, again, grain of salt), which means they're going somewhere else and right now "Somewhere else" almost exclusively points to Biden.
To wrap this up: Sander's is wounded, but not mortally, but he also has very little room for error and needs to at least shift his strategy if he hopes to go into the convention with at least a plurality of delegates and/or votes. Warren dropping out would likely only help him marginally and there is little motivation for her to do so.
Aye, but "somewhere else" didn't exclusively point to Biden when that first poll was taken. When it was, there were a lot more options.Tireseas said:
I think that it'll be a good deal higher than 33 if its between Biden and Sanders. I can see Warren voters switching to Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Harris before Biden, so I think they made up most of the remaining 66, not Biden (or Bloomberg).
This is just plainly false. What they need are independents and others who are sick of the DNC's shit.Tireseas said:
Like I said, "grain of salt." The point is that the theory that Warren, who sits in between Sanders and the moderates, would have her support shift more towards Sanders as opposed to Biden or stay home is mostly theoretical and likely no where near enough to make the difference where it counts.Silvanus said:
Except that doesn't get rid of those "establishment" moderate and center-left voters who identify with the democratic party. It, at best, displaces them slightly and dilutes their vote, not eliminate it. So he does actually need to make inroads with them if he hopes to win the nomination.Seanchaidh said: