Year: 2020

COVID-19, which is somewhat inaccurately currently being referred to as “coronavirus”. Just so that you know, coronavirus is a term that refers to a specific type of virus that was first detected in the 60s. It refers to a group of RNA viruses. RNA virus are really bad because they evolve quickly. I’m not going to get much more into the scientific because for one thing, I don’t totally have a grip on it since I’m not a scientist and this is not my wheelhouse.

I mention this because social media has been abuzz with posts of pictures of Lysol cans that say it kills coronavirus. Yeah, not this coronavirus.

Anyway, back to the point I want to make. We currently have the highest coronavirus mortality rate in the world.

This is largely true because of how woefully unprepared the Trump administration has been, and continues to be in responding. South Korea has so far tested 140,000 people, and are testing 10,000 people per day. The US has only tested a total of 2,000 people.

Do these numbers mean that COVID-19 is more lethal in the US than anywhere else? No. What they tell me is that the number of cases being discovered is grossly underrepresented due to lack of testing, which artificially inflates the mortality rate. I suspect the mortality rate is going to be much closer to what South Korea is reporting, than what the US, China, Italy, and Iran are reporting. Italy seems to have been ambushed by this very contagious virus because it’s a very big tourist destination. I suspect their mortality rate is going to plummet now that they’ve detected the virus.

The good news is that the mortality rate for the flu is .6% so it’s possible that COVID-19 isn’t much more deadly than the flu. It’s too soon to tell, but it’s not really possible to artificially deflate the mortality rate (without intentionally cooking the books) so I’m optimistic about the figures coming out of South Korea.

I think it’s safe to assume that we have COVID-19 cases all across the country, and not just in states where cases have been confirmed. The shortage of testing that’s happening is a giant problem right now, but we also have other problems that will keep us near the top of the mortality rate in perpetuity.

The only effective way to stop the spread of the virus is quarantine. Even if you get tested and are confirmed to have it, there isn’t much of anything that doctors can do in the way of treatment. They can put you in a ventilator if you’re very sick, but there’s not much else they can do. Literally the only way to save lives, is to minimize exposure.

Your local emergency room still does not have the ability to test you. Only state labs have those testing kits and labs set up to do the testing. They’re being rolled out slowly, and I’m hearing that they’re going to start getting to hospitals by next week. A few NYC hospitals are starting to get the testing kits, but it’s going to be a week or so before they can get their facilities set up to use them. NY state, which is fertile ground for pandemics is only testing 500 people per day. We have 16 million people living in just NYC. So what they’re doing is only sending high risk people to get tested because they don’t have the capacity to test everyone. That means that there are probably hundreds or even thousands of 20 – 50 year olds who have the virus and are walking around, and infecting others.

But even if we get testing rates up to where they should be, we’re still America. We’re still a culture where almost 30 million people don’t have health insurance. On top of that, the average deductible in the US is $1,655 per year. If you’re on an ACA plan (that’s about another 15 million people), your premiums are subsidized, but your deductible is $4,358 per year so that’s basically like having no insurance.

Our shit insurance system has created a culture where people don’t go to the doctor. Over half of Americans don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it. So if we have a vaccine next year, a huge percentage of Americans won’t go to get tested because they can’t afford it.

If you don’t think that we need Medicare For All right now, you haven’t really thought things through. And keeping this crap ACA program in place isn’t cutting it unless you’re a shareholder in a health insurance or pharmaceutical company in which case, it hasn’t dipped into your profit margin at all.

On top of the healthcare issues, a huge chunk of our work force can’t self quarantine even if they do get sick because they don’t get paid time off. Japan is now paying parents $80 a day to keep their kids home from school. That makes sense. Nothing like that will ever be implemented in America cause, SOCIALISM!

So to summarize: The good news is that COVID-19 is probably not as bad as you think it is. The bad news is that these viruses and antibiotic resistant bacteria are increasingly going to turn into global health issues and America is always going to be a petri dish that never really gets sanitized.

We all know that if Biden wins the primary, we’re going to be treated to months of Hunter talk and investigations. I’m hearing a lot of people advocating for congress to start investigations into Ivanka, Jared, and Fredo Jr.

I just want to express my opinion on this. I think this would be a bad idea. To low information voters (which is the vast majority of the electorate), this is just going to put the Hunter situation on par with the Trump crime family and elevate the shadiness of the whole thing. It’s just going to end up being a tit for tat.

I don’t think this is a winning strategy, and it’s going to validate the “both sides” narrative. Yes, both sides are shady but both sides aren’t the same. Investing the Trump family is going to make it seem as if they are.

There isn’t a great strategy to combat the Hunter shadiness, but a tit for tat is a very bad one. So is denying the shadiness of the Hunter situation. I wouldn’t do that if you’re trying to convince people to come out and vote in November. It makes you sound like you have no credibility. No, you have to admit that it’s shady and keep asking, “Yeah, but what did Burisma actually get from Joe in exchange for hiring Hunter?” To the extent that there’s a winning argument, you have to admit that it’s shady and get the person you’re speaking with to agree that the kind of institutionalized shadiness that we’ve come to accept must stop, and that defending exponentially more of that kind of behavior isn’t how we get there.

Trying to make the distinction between “illegal” and shady is likewise, in my opinion not a winning strategy. We saw how that worked with Hillary’s emails last time.

No, we have to acknowledge that something stinks here and try and unite against corruption.

That’s just my take and unlike most of my posts, I don’t have data to show you. This one is purely an opinion piece.

So Twitter was abuzz with #RiggedPrimary talk this morning. I am not in that camp and I’m very careful when I use the word “rigged”. So that everyone is clear on my position, I never claimed that the 2016 primary was rigged, and I shut that talk down whenever I come across it. Yes, the DNC set up their primary assuming that Hillary was going to be the nominee. They didn’t “rig” the primary against Bernie. They didn’t think he was going to be a factor, and they were preparing for a coronation. I don’t use it when it’s strictly speaking, not true because I don’t want to be the bitch who cried wolf. When I use it, I want you to know that I’m not being hyperbolic. Republicans have thrown “socialist” around for so long, that it no longer packs any punch. People don’t take you seriously when you’re playing it fast and loose with your language so let me repeat: this primary was not rigged.

Here’s what happened. The DNC freaked the fuck out about where this primary was going and they decided that they had to spring into action to prop up a very weak candidate. Stay with me Biden supporters, because I’m talking to you, and I need for you to hear me if we have any hope of winning the general election. They coordinated a group drop-out and endorsement to try and turn this ship around in order to stop the candidate who promises to tax their donors and hurt the military industry complex, prison industrial complex, big pharma, big oil, and all of the other companies who have been investing in democratic politicians for 30 years. So they decided that a former VP to a wildly popular president who came in:

4th in the 1st primary

5th in the 2nd primary

2nd (with less than half the votes of the winner) in the 3rd primary

And FINALLY win the 5th primary.

was their best candidate to go into the general with.

I have never seen either party do this before. Not republicans and not democrats. They cleared the path for a 3rd place (average) nominee. Biden lost the white working class in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. “Amtrak Joe” has been his shtick for 40 years. These are his people. He got pummeled with Latinos in Nevada. And this is the guy that the DNC has decided will be the nominee? For context, in 2008 Hillary and Obama knocked all of the other candidates out of the primary after Nevada. Why? Because it was clear that none of the other candidates were strong enough to win the general. This time around, the DNC cleared the path for a 3rd place candidate who would have been out in any other primary season. So they orchestrated a drop-out and endorsement on the eve of Super Tuesday to prop up a weak candidate. Make no mistake: he’s weak. Denying Hillary’s weaknesses is how we got Trump in ’16. Please don’t do that again.

No one drops out right before Super Tuesday, after they’ve made their ad buys. No one. Please don’t deny that this was a coordinated effort. And for FFS, please don’t deny that Biden is a weak candidate. He still lost Latinos all across the country, even after the DNC’s wipeout strategy. We can’t afford the kind of complacency and delusion that we had in ’16. Hillary was a weak candidate, and no one was willing to acknowledge that so they assumed she would win with ease. Michael Moore was the only one sounding the alarm bells. I could clearly see the path to Trump’s victory, the week before the election. Even I didn’t really believe that he was going to win, but I could see the path and I was sounding the alarms.

I am not trying to bash Joe here. I’m trying to sound the alarms because I’m terrified of four more years of Trump.

We can’t have that again. We need to acknowledge his weakness and be prepared to deal with it. The DNC deployed an effective strategy to prop up Joe and now we might be stuck with what we’re stuck with. If you voted for Joe or plan on voting for Joe, you own this now and you need to spring into action come July.

I am not going to spoon feed you all of Joe’s problems because again, I’m not trying to bash Joe. And people get testy when I try to present them with facts that they don’t like, so I’m urging you to do your own research and get ahead of these problems before the general. You need to prepare compelling arguments in favor of voting for Joe in November, and you need to do it soon.

Social Security is no longer a quiver in our arsenal and you’d better get ahead of familiarizing yourself with the audio and video of Joe advocating for cutting social security or “putting it on the table” because it’s going to be in a lot of Trump commercials. I’m not going to post it here because my goal isn’t to bash Joe. It’s to scare you into action because I’m terrified of four more years of Trump.

You’re going to have to mount a defense for Biden’t bankruptcy bill because Trump is going to use that, so do your research and educate yourself on what it was, and what it did to working class Americans. You need to be prepared to face that head on, and not just deny it because it’s inconvenient.

The cost of prescription drugs is also no longer an issue that we can use, since Joe Biden blocked an amendment by Bernie that would have stopped Gilead Pharmaceuticals (just to provide one example of hundreds) from charging $1750 a month for PrEP, when we paid for the R&D of that drug. Guess who is developing the Novel Coronavirus vaccine? Right, Gilead. Trump is going to use that, as he lies about how much he’s done to bring down prescription costs down. His voters don’t care that he’s lying, but Biden’s record is going to suppress some democratic enthusiasm. That’s not the only time Joe voted to protect big pharma, so do your research and be prepared.

You need to be prepared for all of this.

You need to be prepared to convince white working class voters that the Obama years weren’t that bad for them, and that Joe’s promise to get us back to that is a good thing for them.

Get your arguments ready.

You need to be prepared for the Hunter investigations. Do not assume that since Joe didn’t do anything illegal, that it’s not going to be a factor. We did that with Hillary’s emails (which I also sounded the alarms over) and it was a factor. Not illegal and not shady aren’t the same thing. Speaking of Hunter, Ivanka and Fredo Jr’s corruption are no longer on the table as a weapon to highlight Trump’s corruption so you’re going to have to use other arguments about how much bigger Trump’s swamp is than previous swamps.

You need to prepare your arguments now, or you’re going to be ambushed in September. You need to be prepared to mount these defenses to people who hate Trump, but aren’t motivated to actually vote. These aren’t arguments you need to craft to convince republicans. That’s never going to happen. These are arguments you’re going to have to craft to convince democrats or left leaners to show up.

You need to take three people who didn’t vote in 2016 to vote with you. Bribe them with a lavish seven course meal, drive them to their polling location if it’s different than yours, do whatever you have to do, but you need three people. I am terrified that Trump is going to win again, I really am.

Come September, you need to get some comfortable shoes on and go door knocking. If you can fly to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to convince white working class voters to come back to the democratic party you have to do that. These are places where Biden doesn’t poll as well against Trump as Bernie does so even if the DNC consolidation strategy wins Joe those primaries, you need to understand that he’s weak in those states and you need to work your asses off in those places to ensure turnout in November.

I’m still hoping that Bernie can outsmart the DNC, so I’m with him until the end. For my part, I won’t post all of the readily searchable “oppo research” on Joe. Unlike all of that mythical oppo research that some of you have convinced yourselves exists on Bernie, but has thus far eluded Hillary, Biden, Bloomberg, and everyone else he knocked out of this primary, Joe’s problems are public record and easily found. And come July, if we’re stuck with this, I will help by highlighting some of the good things he’s done.

But right now Biden supporters, it’s on you to be prepared to get out the vote for your candidate in November. Please do not convince yourselves that he’s got this. We can’t repeat every single mistake from 2016 and expect different results. We have a very flawed candidate. Be prepared to advocate for him.

It’s a fact of human nature, but it’s a huge problem in this primary. It’s a much bigger problem than it ever has been because we don’t all agree on who the tribes actually are. Older people still think that the tribes are democrat versus republican. Younger people (by younger, I mean those under 50) know that the tribes are actually rich vs everyone else. It’s not even rich vs poor anymore. If you make low or mid six figures, you’re part of the “everyone else” tribe, especially if you’re in NY, SF, or LA when a stock market dive and a layoff can bury you financially.

Tribalism is what makes people blame W for the 2007 economic crash, when Bill Clinton’s decision to let banks take your money and gamble it away in risky “financial products” like subprime mortgages was really the problem. He killed Glass Steagell on his way out of office and that’s why Nancy Pelosi had to give banks your taxpayer money with no strings attached to keep them from folding. She had to mitigate Bill Clinton’s giant fuck up. But it was an understandable mistake, since it’s not like Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar in economics or anything.

And because the financial industry funds campaigns for both democrats and republicans, it never occurred to our legislators to give the same amount of money directly to homeowners so that they could keep their homes and inject cash into the economy from the bottom up.

Tribalism is why Trump’s “lock her up” thugs have no problems with his family using private emails and encrypted messaging apps to conduct “government” affairs. Personally, I was outraged when W used private emails and lost them (oopsie). My outrage and concern didn’t evaporate when Hillary did it, and they’re still present while the Trump crime family does it.

Tribalism is why people were outraged when W created a mass surveillance program to capture everything all Americans do with technology, but suddenly didn’t care so much when Obama continued and expanded that program (Edward Snowden is a traitor!)

Do you see how we’ve fucked ourselves with this republican vs democrat tribalism? We get much of the same shit from both parties, and are somehow okay with it when it’s our party fucking us. Tax cuts for the rich are bad unless Obama makes 82% of W’s tax cuts permanent, in which case, they’re good!

This game has been going on for forty years. Prior to that, we had one party who protected corporate interests, and another party who fought for the working class. That all ended when Bill Clinton put up a “for lease” sign and created the DCCC so that lobbyists could funnel money to the democratic party. Anyone remember this?

That was when Bill Clinton put the “government is bad” rhetoric into overdrive, effectively dismantling the democratic party’s decades long message that government is best suited to provide essential services to the public.

Most people don’t know all of this stuff and haven’t chronicled every vote that has made their lives harder, but they do know that something has gone horribly wrong in America. Nearly half of Americans don’t want to be associated with either party.

I was at a friend’s house a few weeks ago. He’s convinced himself that Bernie can’t win the general. He’s bounced from Biden to Bloomberg, and I’m guessing back to Biden again. He told me that he wished that there were more candidates running. When I pointed out that at one time, there were 29 people running I realized that what he was actually saying is that he wished that an Obama or a Clinton was running.

I’ve made this point before, but democrats have to run a preternaturally charismatic candidate to win the presidency. Republicans win by running actual human garbage. This is not winning. We need magnetic personalities to trick us into thinking that neoliberalism is going to finally work for us. Obama ran on hope and change. He promised to fundamentally change the system. And then his first hire was Rahm “never let a good crisis go to waste” Emmanuel. His second hire was Tim Geithner, a Larry Summers disciple.

I know we’re not allowed to say anything bad about Obama, but can anyone honestly believe that Trump would have happened if 95% of the gains of the recovery hadn’t gone to the top 1%? Does anyone think that one of Hillary’s big problems might have been that she was pretending that things were great under Obama and promising not to change anything? Tens of millions of people lost their homes and their jobs. Obama comes in and a few years later, those people were able to get jobs back (for a lower salary). Bank Of America took their homes and destroyed their credit, and they’re supposed to be happy about what Obama did for them?

We have to keep it real here, sans the tribalism. America is not working for working people. It doesn’t matter who controls the house or the executive branch. It’s been 40 years of flat wages and the rich getting richer. Much richer.

And now we have the establishment creating a narrative of viability for Joe Biden, who is promising to get us back to the Obama era. The man has run for president three times, just won his first primary a few days ago, and we’re being told that he’s got the best chance against Trump? Seriously? I am terrified that we’re going to make the same mistake that we made in 2016. Not a slightly different version of that mistake, but precisely the same one. The older people who don’t understand who the tribes actually are letting the establishment convince them that Biden has the best chance of winning is actually going to depress voter turnout. I cannot see a single demographic group that Biden is going to turn out that Hillary didn’t. There’s no new, strong coalition behind him like there was for Obama and [vomiting in my mouth] Trump. Biden isn’t as polarizing as Hillary, so maybe he won’t have the same undervote surge that happened last time, but that still makes for a razor thin margin. For those not familiar, undervoting is when people take time out of their day to show up and vote, but they’re so disgusted with their choices, they leave (usually) the top of the ticket blank.

Old people are making a giant mistake in not understanding that most people under the age of 50 aren’t seeing the same tribes they are. I was sounding precisely the same alarm bells during the 2016 primary, but boomers did what they’re doing now, and falsely blamed Bernie voters and Russia for Trump. Conveniently, that narrative means they didn’t make a mistake. And when we get a second Trump term, they won’t have made the same mistake again.

I am genuinely terrified.

Anyone who has ever run a campaign knows what the term “high propensity voters” means. Each party has their lists of registered voters and their reliability of showing up on election day. High propensity voters are the ones who can be relied on to show up for every election, whether it’s a primary, midterm, local election, or (of course) presidential election. I think that you can probably figure out what mid and low propensity voters are.

The common wisdom from establishment campaign officials is that they key to winning an election is to focus on getting those high propensity voters out, and turning out enough mid propensity voters to make the difference. The high propensity voters get all the love (by love, I mean annoying phone calls and door knocks to keep them fired up). If you Google the term “high propensity voter”, you will see that this is still the commonly held belief. But I think this belief has been nonsense since 2008. It might have been true before then, but it hasn’t been true since.

Barack Obama built a new kind of coalition in 2008. He brought in a shitload of first time voters. He in fact brought in so many first time voters, that he was able to lose one out four Hillary primary supporters and still beat John McCain by fourteen million votes. That was a whopping seven point victory, which is yuuuuuuggggge in a presidential election. He won freaking Indiana, which went blue for the first (and last) time since 1968. That’s how fucking strong his new coalition was.

Trump did the same thing in 2016. He stitched together a new coalition of independent and first time alt white voters (who never vote) and won Pennsylvania for the first time since 1989. He flipped blue collar voters in that state. Take a look at the differences between the 2008 and 2016 electoral maps:

These are some pretty massive swings, and they were accomplished by yes – getting the high propensity voters out, but more importantly – bringing new voters into the fold.

In the past 3 presidential elections, you could see giant waves of new voters coming a mile away, just by paying attention to each candidates’ rallies. The excitement wasn’t something that you had to predict. It was right there in front of you, in the form of rallies that attracted tens of thousands of people.

In addition to the giant rallies, there was another important factor that came into the 2018 midterm elections. Age. it was the 18 – 44 demographic that saved us in 2018. Republicans had a pretty big surge in turnout over 2014, but not as big as democrats.

The college vote doubled in 2018. In fact, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z outvoted Boomers in 2018.

There’s absolutely no reason to believe that they’re not going to be the majority of the electorate in a presidential election. So even in the last midterm, high propensity voters aren’t where the game changers. Not even close. Thirty percent of eligible Gen Z voters showed up in 2018. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it blew away Gen X and Millennials who came in at around 22% when it was their turn to vote in midterms as youngsters.

And guess what? Both Millennials (who are now in their 40s, btw) and Gen Z are really fucking liberal. I have my theories as to why.

So where am I going with all this? People online keep telling me that we have to vote for a candidate who isn’t going to scare moderates. No one that’s made that argument has been able to provide me with a single shred of empirical evidence to support that claim so it’s always, “trust me, I live among them”. Long time followers of mine know how little regard I have for anecdotal evidence.

My position is that it’s insane to advocate for electing a primary candidate that hasn’t managed to muster up any enthusiasm because you think that there are a group of people (who can’t be fucked to show up at a political rally) who are going to be turned off by the person drawing the big crowds. I have never witnessed logic being tortured this badly in my entire life. You’re going to give up birds in the hand for the birds you imagine are in the bush? Based on what? If you’re going to make that claim to me, show me something.

The democratic electorate went with the “safe” choice in 2016. How did that turn out for us? Bernie and Trump’s rallies were held in places where Beyonce and The Rolling Stones performed, and Hillary’s rallies were attended by a few hundred people. That was pretty fucking telling. Excitement happens around a candidate, not a party. In fact, Americans are running away from both parties in droves. Let me assure you that republicans are going to see some huge turnout numbers this year. We need to make damned sure that we have another exciting candidate because voting for ho-hum is a giant fucking gamble that I don’t feel like making right now.

Your own lying eyes have told you where the excitement in this primary lies. Warren and Sanders are the only ones who have packed their rallies with tens of thousands of people. I’m going to confess that they were the only two candidates who were likely to make my short list coming out of the gate, although I did keep an open mind. That said, the fact that no one else is attracting the kinds of numbers that Warren and Sanders are at their rallies should make them all a nonstarter for everyone. If the former vice president to a wildly popular president couldn’t bring in big crows from the moment he announced, he’s extremely likely to beat Trump.

So now let’s look at the demographics supporting the only two viable candidates.

I have numbers for Warren that are from October, when her poll numbers were the highest they had ever been. I don’t believe that she can’t win back anyone she’s lost, so let’s look at those numbers.

Warren has consistently been very strong with white college educated voters. The higher the level of education, the higher her slice of that support goes. In terms of age, she has a consistent 25% – 29% support across all demos. She only has 18% support with people who make less than 50k per year. That goes way up to 35% and 36% with people who make 50k – 100k and 100k+ (respectively). She’s also doing very well with women (much better than Hillary did). She has the second strongest support among older black voters at 53% (remember, older black voters are high propensity voters). She’s trailing behind Sanders with Latinos, but her numbers there are far ahead of Biden’s.

Now let’s move on to Bernie. Let me start by dispelling a myth: Bernie did very well with people of color in 2016. The dividing line was by age, not by race. He tied Hillary with people of color from ages 18 – 44 and he did it with no comb, no tailor, and no millions of dollars in corporate cash. So let’s look at the numbers in this race.

Bernie is doing very well with just about everyone who isn’t in his generation. Since that data came out, Bernie took the lead among all black voters.

Simply put, Bernie is the strongest candidate in the race by any measure you use, except for the moderate voter you’re afraid of but can’t show me.

Bernie was my candidate in the 16 primary. He was not automatically my pick this time around. I wanted to weigh my options and see how this election cycle was going to unfold. I fully expected that a lot of his support in 16 was because he was the only “not Hillary” candidate in the race. That concern was immediately knocked out when I saw how many unique donors he had to his campaign in the first month. And those numbers have only grown. He’s dominating with individual donors all across the country. Yes, even in those “moderate” states.

The other resistance I had to Bernie was that I really felt that he’s been incredibly effective at redefining what our core issues are as a candidate. Bernie and Bernie alone is the sole reason why Medicare For All is at the center of the conversation. Bernie is the reason why the whole country is talking about a $15 minimum wage. Obama was for a $9 minimum wage, while Hillary was aiming for $12 (while trying to take credit for $15). Occupy Wall Street gave us the term “the top 1%”, but Bernie is the one who pushed that message of grotesque inequality into out political debates in earnest.

I was concerned that Bernie wasn’t going to be as effective as president. Truth be told, I still am but he’s clearly the strongest candidate to beat Trump and that’s my immediate concern right now. I cannot let myself fall into a rabbit hole where I talk myself out of acknowledging the obvious fact before me: Bernie is by far the strongest candidate to beat Trump.

He has all of the excitement among every group under the age of 45. That’s where the motherland of mid and low propensity voters are, and that’s the logical tranche of new voters are. That’s where they were in the last midterm, and that’s where they’re most definitely going to be in this presidential election.

No one else in this race has built anything resembling a new kind of coalition. Biden was initially strong in the polls due to name recognition and because polls always target high propensity voters. They can’t ever see a new coalition coming so that’s something to keep in mind with polls. But when it came time to vote, he came in 4th, 5th and then finally 2nd. That is terrible for a former VP for a wildly popular president. He didn’t bring in anyone new.

By the way, even though the turnout wasn’t massively higher in the 1st three states than it was in 2016, the youth vote shot up by about 30% in each state.

Warren looked like she might be able to turn out some new voters, but her polls tanked in October when she released her fakakta M4A plan, and they’re not likely to come back up. Losing New Hampshire as badly as she did was really bad because NH and Massachusetts share the same media market. That whole “neighboring state” thing is bullshit, except in cases where two states share a media market. It’s not likely at this stage, that she’s going to be able to create a new coalition. She’s just lost too much of her support. Once voting has actually started, it’s very difficult to turn things around. That’s why Mayo Pete spent all of his money in the first three primaries. He thought that early state momentum would breed into more victories.

But Mayo Pete has virtually no support with millennials or with the black community so he’s a nonstarter. There is no possible coalition he can stitch together to win. He’s down to his last 25k to spend on Super Tuesday, which isn’t enough to do any kind of media buy in California. He spent all of his money on the first three states, and then Bloomberg came in and choked off the rich guy money flow to everyone in the race by telling his rich friends that he and he alone is going to fund the democratic presidential campaign. So Pete miscalculated on the wine cave game and he didn’t get any support from the places where democrats need support.

That leaves us with Bloomberg. He doesn’t have a ground game, large tranche of volunteers, or has even bothered to do any events. I literally don’t see how he’s going to turn out new voters. I certainly don’t see young people of color coming out in droves to vote if Bloomberg is the top of the ticket. I actually don’t see young people of any color turning out in big numbers. Remember, it’s all about the excitement and Bloomberg doesn’t seem to have any. This is a campaign that is only basing on high propensity voters showing up to vote, and I just don’t feel like gambling that there are enough of them to win is a good idea. He’s the candidate that high propensity voters are falling back on, now that Biden has imploded.

Now let me address the “moderate candidates combined have gotten more votes than Bernie” fallacy. Actually, it’s a fantasy because that’s not how elections work. The vast majority of voters don’t vote for an ideology or even a platform. They vote for a personality so assuming that if Amy, Pete, and Bloomberg get out of the way, Biden will win the nomination is absurd. Wanna know how I know? I’ve been paying attention to second choice polls for years and they’re psychotic. The strongest second choice candidate for Biden supporters is Bernie (to the tune of 33%). Only 24% have Bloomberg as their second choice. The second choice of Bloomberg supporters is Biden, who gets 28% of his supporters. That’s only 8 points more than Bernie gets. Mayo Pete supporters are pretty evenly split between Bloomberg, Klobuchar, and Sanders. Supporters of moderate candidates aren’t automatically going to go to the next moderate in line because that’s not the criteria they’re necessarily using to pick their candidates.

I didn’t settle on Bernie as my primary candidate until November. As I said, I was resistant to Bernie even though his platform aligns with my priorities most closely. I wasn’t sure he could win (which is my #1 priority), and I still have some concerns about his ability to affect policy. But at the end of the day, all of the data that I’ve been studying over the past few months makes it clear that Bernie is the strongest candidate against Trump. That’s the bottom line here.

I will address other concerns about Bernie in future posts. This one is about propensity voters so I don’t want to veer off course too much.

That is a question that I never, ever want to hear asked of a democrat. I don’t want to hear a reporter ask it, I don’t want to hear a democratic primary opponent ask it, and I don’t want to hear a democratic voter ask it.

This question stopped being asked of republicans decades ago, when Reagan started the practice of not giving a shit about how to pay for things. Every republican president and congress since Reagan has had no shits to give about how they’re going to pay for tax cuts or their beloved rampant military toy spending.

I’m tired of democrats being held to that standard, and I don’t want to hear it anymore. I’m particularly perplexed by democratic voters who ask this question. Please stop. You’re helping to perpetuate the double standard by accepting it.

The only acceptable answer to this question is, “I’m going to pay for it by employing every fiscally conservative practice that republicans have employed for the past 40 years.” Full stop.

Democrats have put themselves in this ridiculous position of lowering republican deficits while they’re in office, thereby rendering themselves incapable of executing on their own stated agendas. And in return, the public and media has continued to label republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility.

Part of this is by design, since democrats are funded by the same corporations and billionaires that republicans are funded by so the money is always going to flow to them.

But why is the democratic electorate going along with this? Have you not been paying attention to history? Once a sweeping universal social program like Medicare is enacted, dismantling it becomes nearly impossible because the people won’t stand for it. So let’s stop trying to set up road blocks to making things like child care, free college, Medicare For All, and paid family leave happen.

Our freaking treasury is going to be emptied out in perpetuity no matter who we elect, so let’s empty it out onto the working class instead of the billionaire class.

And for fuck’s sake, please stop helping republicans by referring to those things as “free stuff”. Pooling taxpayer money to provide essential services is the most efficient and cost effective way to provide those things. Far more efficient than subsidizing private industry. This is true all over the world, so stop with the ill-informed talking point designed to fuck you out of your money so that it can get sent to Blue Cross to provide you with health care. Stop it!

This is a ridiculous cycle that we need to break once and for all.

In a few hours, Trump is going to get a pass from the senate for committing the most impeachable offenses that a president can commit. And we’re all rightfully enraged at republicans, but they didn’t do this alone.

I know that no one wants to hear what I’m about to say, but it’s important and you need to hear it so that this doesn’t happen again.

For the past 50 years, republicans have been on a mission to expand presidential powers. By definition, this means they take power away from congress. And you know what? Congress has been fine with that. Regardless of who has control of congress, they’ve ceded power for decades. I’m going to go through the big ones over the past 40 years.

Iran Contra. For those who aren’t familiar with that situation, I’m going to give you the broad strokes, but here’s a detailed chronicle of what happened. In brief, the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran in order to fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. They did this, even though congress passed The Boland Amendment specifically prohibiting this type of interference in foreign conflicts. This was a president defying a law passed by congress, and there was never any serious talk of impeaching Reagan for it. Not ever. In fact, of the handful of people who were convicted of crimes for their involvement were subsequently pardoned by George HW Bush with the help of Bill Barr (yes, that Bill Barr).

Next came the George HW Bush presidency. He and he alone authorized an invasion of Panama in 1989, completely absent congress’ approval to go to war. He also deployed troops to Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War to push Saddam and his forces out of Kuwait. Congress didn’t do a fucking thing to push back and assert their powers of advice and consent even though democrats controlled the house for both the Reagan and Bush presidencies and had the senate for most of those years.

And then we go to George W Bush, for whom congress just straight up gave up their powers by passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force bill. That basically gave Bush the power to do whatever the fuck he wanted abroad without troubling congress with it, as long as we were still scared of terrorism (no, really). And then they gave him The Patriot Act, which enabled him to do whatever the fuck he wanted domestically, including unprecedented surveillance of American citizens. All American citizens, not just suspected terrorists. No warrants or judges were ever asked for, or reviewed or weighed in on that process.

Democrats had control of congress for Bush’s final year, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to “look back” at any of Bush’s crimes so all of those unprecedented expansions of presidential power went unchallenged, which meant that they were now precedent and basically codified into law. She failed us in a spectacular way, and set the stage for everything that’s happened under Trump. I will get to that later.

Obama came in and thoroughly made use of the powers Bush handed him. He continued the mass surveillance of Americans, but liberals were suddenly not outraged by this anymore. We had a republican congress through most of his presidency, so they pushed back on shit that would resemble invading Panama but he really took executive orders to a whole new level. He also assassinated a US citizen with a drone strike. That should have been really fucking disturbing to liberals, but it wasn’t because this shit is okay as long as the president doing it belongs to your tribe. Republicans didn’t push back because they just like this sort of crap and the victim was named Anwar al-Awlaki and that sounds super brown so who gives a shit? Plus, Obama hid behind that pesky Authorization for Use of Military Force bill.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? Each president takes all of the power that the previous president has garnered for them plus a little more. In the case of republicans, it’s a lot more, but it’s always more. And congress never, ever does anything to take those powers back.

Does anyone really think we would be here if one or two of the last 3 criminal presidents had been impeached?

And now we have Trump, a mind boggling unintelligent malignant narcissist and career criminal in the white house. He has all of the power that Reagan, Bush, Bush and Obama handed him, and he’s taken even more with the help of Bill Barr who has been a cornerstone of building a unitary executive. Lev Parnas was right, Trump didn’t really have power until he got Bill Barr on his side. He had the power, but he was surrounded by clowns and amateurs who didn’t know how to use it. Bill Barr came in to finish the job he started, not necessarily to cover for Trump and he knows that his legacy will outlive both he and Trump.

When Pelosi failed to address all of the obstruction that Mueller handed her, she paved the way for more obstruction by allowing a precedent for obstruction to be set. That’s a new power on top of all of the other power that she allowed Trump to take from Bush. Do you realize that congress still hasn’t seen all of the underlying evidence behind Mueller’s report? Did you know that? Why? Because Nancy hasn’t taken to the courts to fight Barr for it, thereby increasing presidential powers more. And Barr knew that the no consequences Trump suffered from the first round of obstruction was going to be a winning strategy for him again. Thanks Nancy!

I know that a lot of democrats are on the Pelosi train, but she has played a significant part in getting us to where we are now. I can’t think of anyone who has benefitted from the soft bigotry of low expectations more than Nancy Pelosi. I really can’t. She needs to be stopped, and we can stop her by electing better democrats. It’s time to stop blaming the other party for mess we’re in, and start taking a good hard look at our party. This team mentality that the country has had for the past 40 years has created an endless loop where shitty things happen, and everyone blames the other party.

Guess what? It’s easier to clean your own house, than it is to clean someone else’s. Republicans will never do anything to stop funneling power away from congress, and into one single person’s hands. Yes, they will curtail democratic presidents, but not by making systemic changes. They will challenge democratic presidents in a very narrow way that stops the immediate problem at hand without diminishing executive power. Personally, I want a system where hundreds of people are involved in making the big decisions. Hundreds of people who (in a perfect world) are accountable to their constituents every 2 or 6 years. But the electorate has to wake the fuck up.

We need to elect better democrats. We need principled democrats who aren’t working for the same corporations that republicans are working for. We need democrats who believe that the American people should have more power than we do in our elections. We need “unlikeable” democrats like Ilhan Omar, and Rashida “we’re going to impeach the motherfucker” Tlaib. We need democrats who are a thorn in the establishment democrats’ side like Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez. We need more of the kinds of democrats that Nancy Pelosi has pushed back more forcefully than she’s ever pushed back on any republican. Fortunately, we have primaries happening right now. I’m not talking about the presidential election. I’m talking about democratic primaries in your state for house, senate, and state level positions.

For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to focus on telling you about some excellent democratic candidates who are challenging shitty incumbent democrats like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar, who vote with republicans more often than they vote with democrats. In Cuellar’s case, he’s voting squarely against his constituents’ wishes but he has a “d” behind his name so he’s been flying under the radar in a very blue district.

It’s time to end this vicious cycle, and the only way to do that is to elect better democrats.

Okay, I just realized this title sounds like the name of a Big Bang Theory episode, but it fits so I’m not going to change it.

I’m seeing a lot of dead wrong punditry around republican senators and their incentives to do the right thing. I’m specifically referring to the analysis of the vulnerable 5: McSally, Gardner, Collins, Ernst, and Tillis. 3 of those are almost certainly going to lose their seats (Collins, Gardner, and McSally). Now, they’re not certain they’re going to lose their seats but they are, and it doesn’t matter anyway. They’re just trying to make it to November.

The vulnerable 5 know that they will face democratic challengers in November. They also know that democrats aren’t going to vote for them under any circumstances. There’s nothing they can do about that, and that’s not what they’re thinking about in terms of their impeachment ruling decisions.

They’re thinking about primary challenges from the right. That’s all they’re thinking about. The filing deadlines to run for a US senate seat are in March. So for the next approximately 6 weeks, that’s what’s top of mind for vulnerable republican senators.

So the ones that everyone thinks we have the most leverage over, are actually the ones we have the least leverage on.

I don’t want to be a downer, or to kill hope but we don’t have any leverage here. Thinking that we do, and expending energy on this is a waste of time.

Our efforts should be focused on primary races, particularly in Colorado where Gardner is almost certainly going to lose. We have control over who he’s going to lose to. There are 2 people running on the democratic side.

There’s John Hickenlooper who decided to settle for the Colorado senate seat when no one in America was interested in hearing his corporate loving pitch in the presidential primary. John Hickenlooper is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fracking industry. His nickname is actually John Frackenlooper. Don’t believe me? Believe him:

Trust me when I tell you that electing Hickenlooper isn’t going to be much of an improvement over Gardner.

But there is a really good progressive in the race. His name is Andrew Romanoff. He was killing it in the polls against Gardner before Frackenlooper came in with all of his fracking industry money and establishment democratic support.

Please take a hard look at him if you live in Colorado. If you don’t, take a look at him and consider making a donation to his campaign. He’s getting killed by corporate money.

Just flipping the seat isn’t enough, as we’ve all learned from the Joe Manchin debacle (Brett Kavanaugh was very grateful for that flip). We need to flip the seat in a way that’s actually going to help working class Americans, and I truly believe that Romanoff is the candidate for that job. I am certain that Hickenlooper will be another Manchin, who we now apparently pat on the head when he actually does the right thing.

I will be posting a list of primary candidates and links to their websites for your perusal in the next few days. These primary races are very important, as AOC taught us that. They should not go unnoticed.

I published part I of my vet a few weeks ago. That one was focused on his history in South Bend. This piece will be focused solely on his campaign.

I’m going to start with his core value proposition. He insists that he’s the only candidate who can unite us because he managed to win in a deep red state like Indiana. In fact, he loves to say that, “I won an election as a ‘Gay Dude’ in ‘Mike Pence’s Indiana”. Here are the actual facts. When he won his first term in South Bend, he received fewer than 11,000 votes. I live in New York City. We have more than 11,000 residents on some city blocks here so this is hardly impressive. He was reelected with 8,400 votes. Impressive.To claim what he claims based in 10,992 votes is comical enough if we don’t have a state wide election that he ran in to look at. He ran for state treasurer the year before he ran for mayor of South Bend. In that election, he lost the state by 25 points. So he got his ass handed to him “in Mike Pence’s Indiana”. By the way, Obama won Indiana in 2008.

So his core value proposition; the reason he gives for why he’s the best candidate in this race is 100% rectally generated bullshit. It’s not a stretch, he’s not looking at the situation through the rosiest of rose colored glasses, and he didn’t embellish. No, he’s just straight up full of shit and his previous election results clearly demonstrate that.

When Pete started his campaign in January of 2019, he was really in “introduction” mode meaning that he wasn’t rolling out any policies or staking any ground in terms of a platform. He was really just putting out some information about who he is. That was fine for a few months but as spring came and went and summer came and went, I was still waiting to hear anything resembling a policy position from him. It seemed to me like he was being deliberately ambiguous. Why? And the things that he did tell us about himself were really vapid and trivial. He’s gay, he learned to read Norwegian so that he could read a book he was interested in, and he served in the military. Okay, but what about your record? That’s usually what I expect to see during the introductory phase. He didn’t really talk about his record in South Bend much. When he started to, he embellished and presented his record in the best possible light. That part didn’t bother me, since that’s what almost every politician in the world does. But that initial period of not talking about his record started tingling my spidey sense and telling me that there was something horribly off about this guy.

Everything that I published in part I of my vetting of Pete, I knew in the spring of 2019 so he was already a hard no for me, but I wanted to see where he was going with all of this. He participated in the June and July debates and managed to roll out not one single substantive policy proposal. He stood on those stages with Bernie and Warren, who were trying to convince voters that the path forward is to make sweeping changes. He was also standing next to Bennett, Delaney, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, and Biden who were trying to convince voters that the path forward is to make incremental changes and not rock the boat too much. He stood there and didn’t make a stand either way. This was again an odd strategy, and very suspicious. Finally, in September he came out as a centrist. Why so secretive? Why didn’t he do what the other centrists in this race were doing: convincing democratic voters that their way was the best way?

It’s no secret that I’m a progressive because I believe that we need to make all of the sweeping changes that we’ve been sweeping under the rug for the past 40 years. But my position doesn’t mean that I don’t have respect for people like Klobuchar, who is making the case for centrism in earnest. I happen to think she’s wrong, but I admire the straight forward way that she’s making her case. Pete on the other hand, thought that the winning strategy for him was to keep his centrism a secret for as long as possible. Again, why? Do you not believe that centrism is the best path forward? Why did he choose to hide what he was instead of promoting it and convincing people that he’s on the right track? Because oily is always his default position.

His platform (which is still the most ambiguous of all the candidates left in the face) isn’t the only thing he tried to keep secret. He also tried to hide his donors, his work at McKinsey, and what he actually did in Afghanistan. This guy doesn’t seem to realize that he’s applying for a job, and that we actually need to see a detailed resume.

Instead of coming up with ideas to solve the issues that Americans face, he spends most of his time using republican talking points to tell us how everyone else’s ideas suck.

Bernie’s free college tuition plan sucks because Pete doesn’t want to spend taxpayer money sending rich kids to college. Seriously? Does Pete think that Betsy Devos is going to send her kids to Ohio State instead of Harvard because it’s free? That’s not even anything resembling a legitimate argument, and it’s one that republicans have been making for decades. Republicans always tell you that you can’t have nice things because they’re “afraid” of giving your money to the rich. Does this sound familiar? The 400 richest families in American own more wealth than the bottom one hundred and fifty million Americans. So one hundred and fifty million can’t have access to a free education because (I’m ball parking here) 1,200 rich kids (per generation) are all going to be clamoring to take advantage of that?

Pete thinks you’re stupid.

Pete thinks that you don’t know that the two most popular programs in America (Medicare and Social Security) aren’t means tested and that rich people participate in those programs too. Pete thinks that you’re too stupid to figure out that not means testing programs is the best way to ensure that they’re never referred to as “welfare” programs, and that they will never be dismantled because Americans won’t stand for it. Once you means test a program, it becomes much more vulnerable to attack and people become much more susceptible to disinformation campaigns that make you feel like you’re being robbed by somebody else instead of realizing that you’re the beneficiary.

He does the same thing with Medicare For All. He uses the republican (and to be fair, also neoliberal) talking point that Americans love their health insurance companies so much, that taking that away from them would be too big a shock to the system. Let me show you what Pete really thinks about his plan. Go to the 5:26 mark on this video:

That’s Pete telling you that Pete is pushing a republican talking point and plan.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? Everything is framed the way republicans frame things, and then the challenges are challenges that republicans have created.

This is amazing. It’s 18 year old Pete telling you why Bernie is so amazing, while denouncing everything that 38 year old Pete has become. I honestly can’t close this piece more eloquently than with Pete’s own words so please click on that link.

We can all agree that the 2016 election results were bad, right? And that none of us wants to repeat those mistakes? We agree, right?

Great! I strongly believe that the best way to do that is to understand what happened in 2016 so that we don’t do it again. Because it’s election season again, the old false narratives about what happened in 2016 are back in full force so let me walk you through what happened.

First, I have to go back to 2008. In the 2008 general election, one out of four Hillary primary voters ended up voting for McCain. You read that correctly, 75% of Hillary primary voters voted for Obama in the general election. Hillary supporters said that they were going to do exactly what they ended up doing. The polls that asked about future behavior lined up almost perfectly with the polls that asked about past behavior so there’s absolutely no reason to doubt their accuracy. Those links I provided include a lot of interesting information that I’m not going to get into, so I highly suggest you take a look at them.

That first link I shared shows us that in a giant poll of over 64,000 people in a study found that 87% of Bernie primary voters voted for Hillary in the general. Polls are considered to be accurate when they use sound, unbiased methodology and gather around 1,000 responses. A poll of 64,000 is so massive that it’s hard to dispute. The lowest number I’ve seen in any poll is 85%, and that was a much smaller poll but let’s go with that number since it’s the worst case scenario. That still means that twice as many Hillary voters defected in 2008 than Bernie voters did in 2016. I’m not lying to you. That’s really what happened, and I’m pretty confident in this data after having sifted through the methodology.

Here’s another interesting thing.

It looks to me, like Sanders support was about 50% democrats, 40% independents, and 10% straight up republicans. More of those independents were democratic leaning, but a big chunk were republican leaning. Most of his voters who voted for Trump were never going to vote for Hillary.

I don’t share this data with you because I want to relitigate 2016. I don’t share this data with you because I want to take a swipe at Hillary. She’s not running this time, so I don’t have any interest in Hillary one way or another. I don’t share this data with you to defend Bernie. He didn’t do anything, and he’s not my daddy anyway so I don’t have an emotional urge to elevate him.

I share this with you for the reason I stated in the opening paragraph: I do not want to repeat 2016.

In 2008, we elected a candidate who set the world on fire. He was attracting tens of thousands of people to his rallies. The excitement was palpable. In 2016, we elected a candidate who was holding events at local YMCAs. She never once filled an arena. The excitement simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t able to build a strong enough coalition to win the general election.

You can blame the Russians if you want, but that doesn’t explain why Obama was able to win the general with twice attrition numbers that Hillary had. I strongly believe that propaganda only works on people who are willing to receive it. I don’t believe that a single Russian bot changed a single Hillary supporter’s mind. The propaganda just reinforced feelings that people already had.

We have to pick a candidate that inspires. Every single election is about turning out your base. No election has ever been won by trying to change anyone’s mind. That’s why, if you’ve ever done door knocking for a candidate, you get sent to knock on doors of people who are registered to the party of the candidate that you’re door knocking for. If you’re volunteering for a democrat, you’re only going to call or knock on doors of democrats. I know the person who ran the analytics operation for Obama in 2008. We’ve discussed this at length. She never spent a minute of her time figuring out how to get republicans to vote for Obama. You have to vote for a candidate who inspires and excites the democratic base. If you’re voting based on who you think can get the most disgruntled republicans, you’ve made a horrible miscalculation based on literally no historical precedent whatsoever. And we are so polarized that, in order to get republicans, you’re most certainly not exciting the democratic base. There’s no way I can see to thread that needle, so it’s a fakakta strategy all the way around.

2004 and 2016 should have been unlose-able elections. We lost them because we elected the YMCA candidate, instead of the candidates who were attracting thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to their events.

Please, I’m begging you – let’s not do that again. No republican strategist or voter for that matter, has never thought about electing a candidate that democrats can vote for. Why do democrats insist on playing that game?