Super Tuesday Part Two

This has been a terribly gut-wrenching week, with disappointing Super Tuesday results and Liz Warren dropping out. See Amanda Terkel, Elizabeth Warren Could Never Escape The Baggage Of Being A ‘Female Candidate’.

And once again, we’re seeing that younger people just don’t turn out to vote in the same numbers as older people, and this killed Sanders’s momentum. See Jack Holmes, The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere to Be Found on Super Tuesday.

Next Tuesday there will be primaries in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington state. In 2016 Sanders won the primaries in Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota, and Washington. If he doesn’t win at least a couple of those, especially the critical state of Michigan, it’s going to be really hard to argue he’s got a path to the nomination or a claim to being the best person to take on Trump.

So that leaves us with Joe Biden. Paul Waldman wrote,

There is little or no evidence, anecdotally or in data, that Biden’s momentum is built on a groundswell of passionate enthusiasm for the former vice president. Even before last week, the heart of Biden’s argument was a pragmatic one. I’m the electable candidate, he said, and many of the voters who supported him said that though they might have liked someone else better, their only concern was beating Trump, and Biden seems like the best one to do it.

There’s a lot going on in that “seems,” however. As I argued repeatedly (to no avail), making your primary choice on electability is a fool’s errand, because you’re almost certainly wrong about what makes someone electable; again and again in recent history, we’ve seen electable candidates like Mitt Romney or John F. Kerry lose, and supposedly unelectable candidates like Barack Obama or Donald Trump win.

Trying to figure out who other people will like inevitably leads you to gravitate toward candidates that talking heads in the media tell you other people will like, and their thinking is dominated by conservative, establishment ideas (e.g. that what you need is a moderate older white man).

To be clear, that doesn’t mean Biden can’t or won’t win, should he be the nominee. He can and he might. It’s not that encouraging, however, that he has fallen into such a strong position despite his campaign being characterized by a weak organization, mediocre fundraising and a candidate whose performance on the trail has been erratic at best.

So it wasn’t Biden’s shrewd strategy or blinding charisma that put him where he is today. It was a collective decision on the part of voters to do what they decided was the pragmatic thing — especially black voters, who tend to be the most pragmatic of all.

He really is something like Hillary Clinton 2.0, in some ways, although Joe is generally more likeable. If he’s the one who can get the suburban and black votes, maybe he is the best person to beat Trump. He’s going to need a lot of surrogates to help him in the general election campaign, because I’m not sure he’s got much fight in him. And the campaign against him will be unimaginably dirty. But maybe desire to get rid of Trump will be enough.

But then we’ll be saddled with Joe Biden as POTUS. I’m hearing a lot of people say they may start to focus more on helping Democrats take the Senate, because a Republican Senate and a Joe Biden administration is not something they want to even imagine. Probably a good idea.

Super Tuesday Part One

I’m waiting to see more voter demographic information, and for the final results in California and Maine, before writing much about the Super Tuesday primaries. I have seen commentary saying that where Biden won big, he did so with a combination of suburban and black votes, which certainly is a combination that Democrats need. It’s also the case that, in at least some of yesterday’s primaries, the young folks just didn’t show up. That hurt Sanders. But I don’t know if that’s true everywhere.

Mike Bloomberg has dropped out, at least. He spent more than $500 million on his campaign and earned 12 whole delegates, last I saw. Money can’t buy you love. Liz Warren’s campaign seems to be going nowhere also, and I wonder what she’s going to do.

I’m annoyed with the coverage of California. The Associated Press called California for Sanders as soon as the polls closed. The Los Angeles Times has called California for Sanders. Sanders has a significant lead with 86 percent of precincts reporting. He’s ahead of Biden by 260,856 votes. Yet most major news outlets — WaPo, the New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc. — haven’t called California, and most of its 415 delegates remain unallocated. And I’m wondering if that’s to give more time for Joe Biden to claim to be the front runner, since he might still be behind Bernie in delegates once the matter is settled. But maybe I’m just getting overheated.

Waiting for the Votes

Of course Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were persuaded to drop out before Super Tuesday so that Joe Biden could get more votes. Polls suggest it is working, and that there has been a considerable swing to Biden in the Super Tuesday states over the past couple of days. It appears that the not-Sanders voters are moving rapidly to Biden. If that appearance holds up in today’s results, we’re probably looking at a Biden nomination. Damn.

This could very well be a replay of 2016. Biden is supposed to be the “safe,” establishment choice, so the sheeple dutifully vote for him. I’m saying right now that if Biden is the nominee and he loses to Trump, we all go to Washington and absolutely trash the DNC headquarters on South Capitol St SE. And then we march on the MSNBC studios in Rockefeller Center. I’ll stop short of calling for tar and feathers, for now. See also Paul Waldman, Sanders is a terribly risky nominee. But so is Biden.

Young folks, you’d damn well better get your butts out to vote today. It may be your last chance.

I was looking forward to the Super Tuesday returns, thinking it should be a good night for Sanders, and now I am bummed. At least we don’t have to listen to Chris “Tweety” Matthews any more. See Margaret Sullivan on the real reason Matthews had to go.

How Not to Respond to a Pandemic

Assuming we had a competent federal government, what would it be doing now to prepare for the spread of Covid-19? Julia Belluz of Vox interviewed an actual expert, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is a veteran epidemiologist and also an assistant director general of the World Health Organization. He has been in China to observe and study what the Chinese are doing. China must be doing something right, because the number of new cases has dropped dramatically. Aylward believes from his own observations that this decrease in cases is real and not just Chinese government propaganda.

So what did the Chinese do that we ought to be doing? Dr. Aylward said that the first most important thing is to identify new cases, isolate them, and trace who they’ve been incontact with. This must be done quickly. Dr. Aylward said,

So, No. 1, if you want to get speed of response, your population has to know this disease. You find any population in the West and ask them what are the two presenting signs you have to be alert to. What would you say?

It turns out the two presenting signs are dry cough and fever. I didn’t know that either.

Your population is your surveillance system. Everybody has got a smartphone, everybody can get a thermometer. That is your surveillance system. Don’t rely on this hitting your health system, because then it’s going to infect it. You’ve got this great surveillance system out there — make sure the surveillance system is primed. Make sure you’re ready to act on the signals that come in from that surveillance system. You’ve got to be set up to rapidly assess whether or not they really have those symptoms, test those people, and, if necessary, isolate and trace their contacts.

In other words, everyone needs to know that if they develop a fever and dry cough, get yourself tested immediately. But Dr. Aylward doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have everyone go to their GPs for this, especially since infected people are likely to infect everyone else in the waiting room.

China set up a separate health network that dealt only with testing and treating infected patients.

In China, they have set up a giant network of fever hospitals. In some areas, a team can go to you and swab you and have an answer for you in four to seven hours. But you’ve got to be set up — speed is everything.

So make sure your people know [about the virus]. Make sure you have mechanisms for working with them very quickly through your health system. Then enough public health infrastructure to investigate cases, identify the close contacts, and then make sure they remain under surveillance. That’s 90 percent of the Chinese response.

Yeah, not gonna happen here. What are we doing, in fact?

Our so-called Covid-19 point man, Mike Pence, has announced more travel restrictions affecting Iran, Italy and South Korea. Okay, but what are we doing about the growing number of cases here? Pence also said that large numbers of test kits are being mailed to state and local clinics. Okay, but which clinics? Some of the kits are going to state public health labs, but I don’t know where my state public health lab is, either.

Say I’m an average citizen and I develop a fever and dry cough. Or I develop a rash and stomach ache; nobody is telling me what signs to look for. Anyway, if I think I should be tested, where do I go? We’re not getting any directions. And will it cost me anything? What if I don’t have insurance? What if I’m in the country illegally?

The only advice I’ve seen so far is that if you are worried you have the coronavirus, call your health care provider. So we’re not following the Chinese protocols explained by Dr. Aylward.

It may be that some states will step in and create an effective response apparatus for their citizens, but since I’m living in Missouri, there’s no hope that’s going to happen here.

Health and Human Services Officials respond to the Covid-19 virus.

Stuff to Read

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appears to have orchestrated many of the government’s early screwups regarding Covid-19. See Azar in the crosshairs for delays in virus tests.

Paul Waldman writes that If coronavirus hurts the economy, Trump will go nuts.

To be clear, we have no idea at this point how bad things will get. Maybe this will all be over in a matter of weeks (though that’s not what the experts are saying), and maybe the economic impact will be minor.

But we do know that the president is intensely worried about the potential that the virus could cause even a temporary economic slowdown. Which is why the administration is contemplating “Tax Cuts 2.0,” with benefits focused on the neediest among us, i.e., corporations and rich people.

You really can’t make this shit up. Also in WaPo, see Inside Trump’s frantic attempts to minimize the coronavirus crisis.

My favorite headline of the day: Trump says it’s safe to hold rallies amid coronavirus outbreak. Oh, absolutely. Please do. The more the better.

For Democrats, It’s the Past Versus the Future

Last summer I would not have guessed that the race for the nomination would come down to a contest between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Yet here we are.

The nerds at Five Thirty Eight have either Biden or Sanders winning all of the Super Tuesday states with the exception of Minnesota, which is expected to go to Amy Klobuchar. (Sanders is polling second in Minnesota.) The Super Tuesday states represent 40 percent of the U.S. population, I have read. Note that all of these states divide up delegates proportionately, so that second- and third- and sometimes fourth-place winners can pick up some delegates. Just not as many.

It’s interesting, though, that Sanders is winning in blue states and Biden in red ones, with a couple of exceptions. Who is ahead in the Super Tuesday polling (other than Minnesota) —

Sanders is currently polling ahead of Biden in these states (or territory):

  • American Samoa (caucus)
  • California
  • Colorado
  • Maine
  • Massachusetts (Warren polling second)
  • Texas (but within the margin of error; this one is a coin toss)
  • Utah (Warren polling second)
  • Vermont (Buttigieg and Warren are close to a tie for second)

Biden is currently polling ahead of Sanders in these states:

  • Alabama
  • Arkansas
  • North Carolina
  • Oklahoma (Bloomberg polling second)
  • Tennessee
  • Virginia

If the voting matches the polls, Sanders still will be ahead in delegates after Super Tuesday. There will be several more primaries on May 10, and the polling follows the same pattern — Sanders is ahead in bluer states; Biden in redder ones; no one else looks to be a major factor.

Side notes: Bloomberg was counting on winning some Super Tuesday states to make a claim for the nomination, and it doesn’t appear he will win any of them. He may pick up only a handful of delegates.

Indiana doesn’t vote until May, but poor Pete Buttigieg currently is trailing both Sanders (in first place) and Biden (in second) in his own state. Buttigieg is not doing well anywhere, as far as I can see. He may pick up one delegate in California this week. It occurs to me that Buttigieg has been running to appeal to older voters with policy ideas that are barely distinguishable from Biden’s. But the old folks are much less likely to vote for a young, gay man than younger ones. He might have done a lot better with much more progressive positions.

(Update: Buttigieg just announced he is ending his presidential bid.)

Back to Biden-Sanders: The most notable thing about a Biden-Sanders contest is that it amounts to a contest between generations, even though the candidates themselves are both septuagenarians. I wrote last November about the Democratic voter generation gap that put Biden way ahead with voters over 45 and Sanders way ahead with voters under 45. That hasn’t changed. Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight wrote last week that “In fact, age might be the most important fault line in the 2020 Democratic primary.” In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, the percentage of under-45 voters who voted for Biden was in single digits. But in Iowa and Nevada, at least, Biden came in first among over-45 voters. Sanders did slightly better with the old folks than Biden did with the young ones, but he slaughtered the rest of the field with under-45 voters.

Bacon continues,

Indeed, the Democratic Party appears to be in the midst of a generational fight that started in 2016 and is continuing now. For example, the left-leaning but gray-haired commentators on MSNBC have been deeply frustrated by the rise of Sanders. Conversely, it’s hard to find much Biden support on Twitter, which tends to be used by younger people and more liberal DemocratsButtigieg and Warren, while not as liberal or as anti-establishment as Sanders, are also to the left of Biden, which in part explains why the ex-vice president isn’t the clear second-favorite of younger Democrats either.

It’s significant to me that Biden isn’t even trying to win younger voters:

In 2019, the former vice president and his team seemed to deeply internalize the conventional wisdom among many establishment and center-left figures: that “Twitter is not real life” and that Democrats should not be too “woke.” Biden has seemed very frustrated at times with young liberal activists who have confronted him at rallies and argued that he was too conservative on some issues. He was fairly dismissive of criticisms of his handling of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his touching of women in ways that some of them considered inappropriate. He suggested the views of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t represent those of many other Democrats. His campaign aides downplayed the power of “Pod Save America” and did little to court the “black left.”

This all looked fairly savvy (or at least somewhat harmless) … until voting started. And you wonder now whether the Biden campaign could have at least competed for young voters by taking a different approach.

This is the same kind of tunnel vision that killed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. She, and now Biden, are weirdly blind and deaf to younger voters and can’t address their concerns without sounding condescending. And it’s also the case, Bacon continues, that younger voters are not at all interested in a replay of the Obama Administration, so Biden’s appeal to Obama nostalgia just doesn’t work with them.

My sympathies are with the young folks, who are facing obstacles us geezers didn’t have to deal with. The “revolution” they seek is not a violent one, but one in which the resources and priorities of government are significantly realigned. They want major changes to long-standing policies — on climate change, health care, student loans, economic inequality, the cost of housing. Most of the people running for the nominations have instead brushed off the possibility of big change with the usual platitudes about practicality and what’s “do-able” and real solutions to real problems. The exceptions are Sanders and Warren, and for some reason the young voters appear to have abandoned Warren and are standing with Sanders. I am not sure why that happened, but there it is.

And of course, as soon as Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary, he was all over television talk shows with the line “I think people aren’t looking for revolution. They’re looking for results.” And we all know that “results” mean “tweaks to the status quo so minor you may not even notice them.”

For older Americans, for whom the old status quo worked reasonably well, big change may seem frightening. For younger people, it’s the status quo that is frightening. Because it’s not working for them.

But that status quo is awfully entrenched. And it really, really wants Biden to win the nomination.

Last week Paul Waldman wrote,

To date I’ve yet to see a persuasive case for why Sanders is certain to have less of a chance of winning than an uninspiring “moderate” candidate like former vice president Joe Biden or former New York Mike Bloomberg, both of whom have shown themselves to be weak campaigners of the kind who have lost presidential elections many times before.

The idea that establishment Democrats are horrified about a Sanders nomination solely because of their concerns about the outcome on November 3 is awfully hard to swallow. What seems more likely is that Sanders challenges, disparages and dismisses the entire political structure of which they are a part.  …

… So when either a Never Trumper or an establishment Democrat considers the world Sanders would make, they aren’t sure what their place in it would be. And that may be what has them really scared.

This is turning into a contest between the past versus the future.

It seems clear to me that the old political order that emerged from the chaos of the 1960s has run its course and is not sustainable. It is time for it to give way to something new. Only the Democratic Party in a position to lean into that change and benefit from it, while the Republicans have painted themselves into a corrupt, backward, xenophobic corner. The Democratic Party rejected change in 2016, and lost. Will it do so again?

Oh, and young folks? Please vote. Biden won big in South Carolina because two-thirds of the people who showed up to vote were over 45. If you stay home from primaries, don’t gripe because the geezer who gets the nomination isn’t the one you wanted.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Elise Amendola/AP/Shutterstock (10551224k)
Former Vice President Joe Biden, left, embraces Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a Democratic presidential primary debate, hosted by ABC News, Apple News, and WMUR-TV at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H
Election 2020 Debate, Manchester, USA – 07 Feb 2020