Sunday polling from South Carolina (Post and Courier):
Warren, Buttigieg surge in SC 2020 Democratic presidential poll as Biden still leads
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg have emerged as the next two choices after Biden in the early voting state, according to a new Post and Courier-Change Research Poll of likely Democratic primary voters released Sunday.
They supplanted Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Sen. Kamala Harris, who have been trending down in recent national polls.
A gentle reminder that if you‘re a Bernie supporter, Warren isn’t your enemy. Harris isn’t your enemy. (Actually none of the Democrats are, and that applies to all supporters, but that is another story). But we are rapidly reaching the point where some candidate of some supporter will not do well, beyond denial. When that happens, turn on the Republicans, not the Democrats, anti Trumpers or anyone willing to vote against Trump.
Yeah, I know, no one will heed me (“and you were never a supporter of...”, I remember it so well from Howard Dean days). But still. It’s always waiting to start just under the surface.
Also note that Biden dropped but still leads by a lot. We’ll see if trends continue.
Sunday polling from CBS:
CBS News Battleground Tracker poll: Biden leads, with Warren, Harris, Sanders close behind
The belief that he could fare best against President Trump is currently propelling Joe Biden in the early Democratic nomination race by two measures — vote preference, and the delegates that would come with them. But others — including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — are in the mix, at least in terms of the candidates voters are considering.
This study looked at the Democratic contest across the places it will matter first: the entirety of 18 states that will shape the initial 2020 fight through Super Tuesday, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. And CBS News converted Democrats' vote choices across all those states into delegates, because that's the count that will ultimately matter — that is, the nomination contest selects delegates to the Democratic convention next year….
Biden is the most effective at translating consideration into a first-choice vote. He leads across the early states in vote preference with 31% of Democratic primary voters, compared to Warren's 17%, Sanders' 16%, and Harris' 10%. Biden converts most of those considering him into picking him as their first choice when pressed, but fewer of those considering Warren or Sanders — roughly a third – pick those candidates as their first choice.
Where we stand. Note that at the moment the Warren surge is less than the Biden bump. Note also the three tiers: Biden then Bernie then everyone else. This will change.
Ryan took a lot of flak for this, but he’s right.
No they are not predictive, yes they are amazing:
Cas Mudde/Guardian:
Why copying the populist right isn’t going to save the left
Social democratic parties have been losing ground for more than two decades – but pandering to rightwing anxieties about immigration is not the solution.
Among the old stalwarts of the centre-left, there is a simple explanation for the decline of the parties they used to lead: immigration. In recent interviews with the Guardian, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi all sounded the same note, declaring that Europe must “get a handle on migration” to stop right wing populism. Hardly a week passes without some candidate or columnist declaring that liberals will only regain power when they lock down the borders...
The argument that a tougher stand on immigration will revive the social democratic parties – and arrest the rise of the radical right – is based on two basic errors, which together reflect a larger misunderstanding about the historic role of centre-left parties.
The first mistake is the widespread assumption that the rise of right wing populism and the decline of traditional centre-left parties are two sides of the same coin – both caused by working-class voters abandoning the old social democrats for the nativist message of the new populist radical right. The second misperception, closely related to the first, is that the voters who now support the populist radical right are largely the white working class that used to vote reliably for social democratic parties.
McClatchy:
Why Trump may have an unexpected weakness with rural voters in 2020
The findings were startling: When comparing the 2016 presidential election to 2018 House races, the biggest increase of support for Democrats came not in the suburbs (which received the most attention) but in rural areas.
According to the analysis, Democrats recovered slightly more than half the vote in rural areas that they lost between 2012 and 2016, a net gain of about six percentage points in the region. By comparison, Democratic gains in suburban areas were roughly a point or two lower.
“Rural America has become heavily Republican in recent years, but the 2018 results do offer a glimmer of hope for Democrats,” said Yair Ghitza, who wrote the study and is Catalist’s chief scientist.
Crucially, in data Catalist provided to McClatchy, the shift in rural America was in large part because voters who didn’t support Democrats in 2016 switched their allegiance two years later, a dynamic present in other parts of the country as well, the analysis found. The party’s vote share increased by five points, from 30 percent to 35 percent, among rural voters who voted in both elections, gains that were concentrated among younger and single white voters.
This is data I’ve presented in a variety of stories, because I don’t think you can overestimate its importance. This small sliver of voters (5-8%) is up for grabs, and who would not want an extra 5-8% in their column in, e.g., MI, WI, and PA.
Jonathan Capehart/WaPo;
Trump, ‘respect’ and toilet paper
“In the past, and under the Obama administration, our politicians let other countries push us around, treat us badly, treat our country with no respect,” the president said. “And you see that with Biden. We would never be treated with respect because people don’t respect him, even the people that he’s running against.”
I laughed because Trump’s dig at Biden reminded me of a hilarious observation on respect and the president from comedian Wanda Sykes.
“The moment that I saw him board Air Force One with toilet paper on the back of his shoe, I said, ‘They don’t like him.’ Everyone around him who works with him, they cannot stand him. They have no respect for this man,” Sykes told me at the 92nd Street Y in New York this month during a conversation about her new stand-up special on Netflix. “I mean, you would stop a stranger to get toilet paper off their shoe. I’ve almost missed a flight because I’m at my gate and I see someone walking by with toilet paper [on their shoe], and I’m like ‘I can’t let that happen’ and I run down and get the toilet paper off.”
Sometimes the message is simple.
MediaITE:
MSNBC Host Confronts Sean Spicer Over Sarah Sanders: ‘Do You Regret Setting the Precedent For Dishonesty?
The former White House press secretary joined the MSNBC host to talk about Sarah Sanders’ legacy as Spicer’s successor, now that she is about to take her own leave from the White House. As the two discussed the administration’s relationship with the White House press corps, Jackson brought up publiccriticisms of Sanders’ level of truthfulness and honesty.
“Sarah Sanders did not always tell the truth to reporters,” Jackson said. “Do you regret setting the precedent for dishonesty when you were at the podium?”
“No,” Spicer answered with a chuckle.
Carl Pope/Salon:
Democrats are seriously tackling the climate crisis: No more half-measures or neoliberal compromises
At least seven 2020 candidates have serious climate plans — and they're not bowing to fossil-fuel interests
But from a climate perspective, what’s revealing (and fascinating) is the degree to which the candidates and their plans are, at heart, indistinguishable. As a group, none of these climate planks harken back to Barack Obama’s “all of the above” genuflection to the enduring political power of fossil fuels. Nor do they resemble Hillary Clinton’s 2016 proposals, which focused almost entirely on renewable power — ambitious but narrow. They eschew the carbon-pricing emphasis of many Beltway economists and policy mavens. And they avoid the austerity frame that climate deniers have for so long used to dampen public support for clean energy.
Taken as a group, this year’s presidential climate proffers are far broader — and more economically and politically sophisticated — than four years ago. If they have a 2016 antecedent, it is Bernie Sanders’ approach, which culminated in Sanders’ successful effort to buttress the Democratic platform on climate by including ambitious greenhouse emission targets.
But the Democratic candidates have also introduced some new ingredients, drawn heavily from the Green New Deal. Here’s what the emerging Democratic climate platform looks like, and why it’s important.
Brad McLaren/USA Today:
Is it Christian or illegal to aid migrants? A hung Tucson jury, a fork in the road of faith
“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to those wandering in the desert?”
Prosecuting attorney: “I suppose it was the one who showed them mercy.”
Witness: “Go and do likewise.”
A question for all Americans: What can Christians on the left and right do about the evil of our world?
The compassionate citizen in our parable, and the defendant in the very real trial that ended last week, is geography teacher Scott Warren, 36, a volunteer with the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths. He faced a lengthy federal prison sentence for “doing likewise.” …
For some Christians, religious liberty means freedom from transacting business with a gay couple, or freedom from providing health care to employees with preexisting conditions if doing so gives them access to certain contraceptives. For other Christians, religious liberty means the freedom to save refugees in the desert.
This divergence has a long history in the United States. At the height of lynching in the early 20th century, for example, most white American Christians were in an uproar — not about lynchings, but about the Scopes Monkey Trials and the teaching of evolution in public schools. When Native Americans were being forced on death marches and herded into death camps in the early 19th century, many white Christians began organizing … to make alcohol illegal. Across generations spanning four centuries, white American Christians have organized on opposite sides of almost every issue of religious liberty and conscience — from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration to Muslim bans to giving a cup of water in Christ's name.
Isaac Edward-Dovere/Atlantic:
This Isn’t Going to Plan for Kirsten Gillibrand
We were standing in Blazing Saddle, a gay bar in the East Village neighborhood here. Rosenberg had on a white top exposing a bare midriff, and a flowing white skirt that people in the crowd had to be careful not to step on. Rosenberg is better known as the drag queen Vana, and is one of the senator’s biggest fans in Iowa.
Or, at least at this point, one of her very few big fans in Iowa.
This isn’t going well for Gillibrand. She has failed at some basics. For someone who’s always been a voracious fundraiser, she raised just $3 million in the first quarter of the year, less than half of what South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised. And she was weeks behind the self-help author Marianne Williamson and the automation alarmist Andrew Yang in getting the 65,000 donors needed to guarantee her a spot on the Democratic debate stage later this month. (Her campaign announced she finally passed that mark last weekend.)
Oh, and Fox:
Important because they’ll hear about it on Fox.