Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC:
'Electability' is the most important, least understood word in the 2020 race
Biden's electability is based on his popularity with working-class white men in the Midwest, whose lack of support helped cost Clinton the 2016 election.
But Allison and others argue his represents only one path to victory for Democrat. They say Democrats would actually do better by focusing on their most loyal voters — by boosting turnout in Midwest cities like Detroit, where African-Americans voted in lower numbers for Clinton than they did for Barack Obama.
With a different electoral strategy for taking on Trump, the picture of the most electable candidate changes.
The most electable candidate is the one who wins.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
An important read from Patrick Murray/Monmouth poll:
It’s All About Name Recognition, Folks!
You have to be especially careful when looking at polls of potential general election match-ups. …
The bottom line is that most Democratic voters will not really tune into this race until the fall. This week’s debates will be a step toward introducing them to a field of candidates they barely know. Of course, it goes without saying that pundits will seek to immediately declare whose campaign is sunk and who is inexorably on the rise because of their debate performances. But as far as most voters are concerned, this will be a first look – and for many just a fleeting glance – at a race that still has many laps to go.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
What to Look for in This Week’s Democratic Debates
Polling surges, phony feuds and other things to consider in a wide-open race.
What about going negative? Despite some criticism of Biden over his friendly remarks about old-time southern senators, there really hasn’t been too much. Not enough, I’d say, for debate moderators to feed an ongoing confrontation. I still think a couple of the one-percenters should’ve staged a phony feud to draw attention to themselves.
The last question I asked concerned what was happening in the policy primary, and the answer is: a whole lot. Warren’s policy proposals have been the most prominent, but Senator Bernie Sanders, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, and others have been aggressive in rolling out fairly detailed plans. If one goal of having debates is to force candidates to set out positions on public policy, then this one is already a big success.
UnHerd book review on those McDonald’s Trump voters and their economic anxiety:
The backdrop for Dignity is a kind of film-set noir. Rotting buildings hide under huge skies. Everywhere there are empty roads, petrol stations and McDonald’s restaurants and sinister looking clapboard churches, and in amongst all this rotting infrastructure: broken people. Often sad, spaced out on cheap drugs, but afflicted too by fits of the giggles, by shyness, by coyness, by the ability to jump in the air to bring life to some desiccated corrugated-iron strewn yard; even sometimes a haughty hauteur that says, “fuck you, I’m gonna be ok.”
But they are not going to be ok. This is not a sentimental journey. It’s a deeply unsettling examination of the pathology of what Donald Trump referred to in his inauguration speech as ‘American carnage’.
At the time, that phrase seemed so coarse, so jarring. Didn’t even George W. Bush turn to Hillary Clinton and say, “that was some weird shit”? Didn’t everyone who smelled nice from sea to shining sea raise his or her eyes to the skies and wonder what The Donald was smoking?
Well: hello polite America. This is what he meant….
Arnade nails it with almost the last words of the book: “We have said that education is the way out of pain and the way to success, implying that those who don’t make it are dumb, or lazy, or stupid. This has ensured that all those at the bottom, black, white, gay, straight, men and women, are guaranteed to feel excluded, rejected, and most of all, humiliated.”
Will anyone take any notice? Probably not. But for a brief moment, in these pages, an awful wrong is righted. Respect is restored to those from whom it should never have been robbed.
The anxiety is clear. The racism and xenophobia isn’t so clear. But it is an effective critique of elites who think ‘just go to college you can’t afford and don’t want and aren’t prepared for’. And yes, some may well vote for Biden if they vote at all.
It’s a straw poll. Biggest takeaway is Warren doing well, Biden stable.
Joe Trippi/USA Today:
First, fire all the pollsters? Trump doesn't get it. Bad news can save a campaign
Bad news comes from many places in a campaign. But when bad news comes from your own pollsters, listening is far better than firing them.
Presidential campaigns typically ignore public polling and rely nearly completely on their own internal polling to make important decisions. The internal polls conducted for a presidential campaign go well beyond the horse race results we see reported on cable TV. An internal campaign poll dives much deeper in order to give the candidate and the campaign a better understanding of what is working or not working, what is causing any movement in the race, and why.
The last place you want to hear bad news from is your pollster. But when a pollster delivers bad news, it’s what you do with it that matters — if there is anything you can do.
Sean Sullivan/WaPo:
Bernie Sanders faces a new kind of threat in Elizabeth Warren
The Bernie Sanders campaign, facing a new challenge in the rise of Elizabeth Warren, has settled for now on a careful if sometimes awkward strategy: emphasizing Sanders’s unique position in the liberal movement, while avoiding direct attacks on Warren and rolling out plans that overlap with her attention-grabbing ideas.
That approach was on display Monday as Sanders introduced a proposal to cancel all student debt across the country. His plan came about two months after Warren announced her own idea for scrapping student debt, one that would cover fewer people than Sanders’s would. “Under the proposal we introduced today, all student debt would be canceled in six months,” Sanders said.
But doubling down on his ideological purity and socialist credentials carries risks for the senator from Vermont, other Democrats say. It’s enabled Warren to position herself as impassioned but reasonable, while Sanders holds down the leftward flank of the Democratic Party and serves as the ideological outlier in the race.
Bernie is struggling. Still, Thursday is a great opportunity, and it’s early.
Columbia Journalism Review:
E. Jean Carroll’s Trump rape claim did not get enough coverage
Despite the litany of claims against Trump, Carroll is only the second woman to publicly accuse him of rape. Her account is graphic and detailed; was corroborated by two friends who recall Carroll telling them about it at the time; and echoes what Trump told Billy Bush, in the Access Hollywood tape, about grabbing women “by the pussy.” You’d think, then, that it would have been a much bigger story over the weekend. Many commentators were furious that it was not.
Michael J Stern/USA Today:
The Trump Justice Department has turned 'religious liberty' into a license to discriminate
While the Trump Justice Department has bent over backwards to protect the “religious liberty” of countless Christian organizations, its efforts have been less charitable to non-Christians. When a Native American tribe raised religious objections to a South Dakota pipeline that would infringe on sacred lands, DOJ offered no support.
And in a pivotal case pending before the Supreme Court, the Justice Department contradicted the Obama administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s position that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of LGBT status. The Justice Department has backed employers who want to fire their employees for being gay.
Since formation of the religious liberty task force, a pattern has emerged in which DOJ uses claims of religious liberty to further Trump administration political goals. Daniel Mach, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on freedom of religion and belief, aptly described the Trump Justice Department: "It supports an unfounded, unprecedented religious license to discriminate; and at the same (time), the administration is indifferent or outright hostile to faiths and religious individuals with which it disagrees."
This Business Insider story is notable because of the bailouts the Feds are paying to the meatpacking industry:
The DOJ is reportedly probing Tyson and other major processors over poultry price-fixing claims — and chicken stocks are sinking
Shares of the major US chicken processors fell sharply Tuesday afternoon after Bloomberg reported the Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into claims over whether companies including Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride, and Sanderson Farms conspired to fix poultry prices.
The probe was disclosed Friday in a court filing in Chicago, where civil lawsuits against more than 12 companies in the industry are pending, Bloomberg reported.
The civil lawsuits allege the poultry processors conspired to raise prices on broiler chickens, Bloomberg found. The companies allegedly "reduced the supply of broiler chickens and then manipulated prices on a weekly benchmark compiled by the Georgia Department of Agriculture," according to court papers viewed by Bloomberg.
Finally, what appears to be a win win for this town, from the Hill:
German residents buy all the beer in town to keep it away from far-right event
Residents of Ostritz, Germany, bought up hundreds of crates of beer to keep it out of the hands of neo-Nazis descending on the town for a music festival, according to the BBC.
A Dresden court imposed a ban on the sale and possession of alcohol at the Shield and Sword Festival, prompting police in the state of Saxony to confiscate more than 1,000 gallons of beer Friday and Saturday.
Suspecting the festival attendees would seek to buy alcohol at the local supermarkets instead, town residents reportedly bought more than 200 crates.
My kind of volk.