Progressives (Liberals)

If you’re a centrist worried about the gigantic spending increases Sanders has proposed, calm down, because they won’t happen. If you’re a progressive worried that Biden might govern like a Republican, you should also calm down, because he wouldn’t.

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But my main point is that Democrats should unify, enthusiastically, behind whoever gets the nomination. Any moderate tempted to become a Never Bernie type should realize that even if you find Sanders too radical, his actual policies would be far more tempered. Any Sanders enthusiast tempted to become a Bernie or Bust type should realize that these days even centrist Dems are pretty progressive, and that there’s a huge gap between them and Trump’s G.O.P.

I have no idea. Do they have a chance to win money or is it just to gain bragging rights? I've never understood that phenomenon.

I can see analyzing the probable trajectory of events and making concrete efforts to prepare yourself (and possibly benefit from those preparations) should those things come to pass, but just pretending to foretell the future seems sort of meaningless when there's really no consequence to your prediction whatever happens.

A Billings Republican legislator said Saturday he believes the U.S. Constitution calls for the shooting or jailing of those who identify as socialists.

State Rep. Rodney Garcia, from House District 52 on the South Side, first made a statement in the form of an unprompted question at a state party gathering in Helena Friday meant to kick off election season and offer training for party members and candidates.

In his question after a speech by former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who was Montana’s representative in the U.S. House for two years, Garcia said he was concerned about socialists “entering our government” and socialists “everywhere” in Billings, before saying the Constitution says to either shoot socialists or put them in jail.

This is a Trumpism that bothers me. So there ya go. 1 thing.

Impeach Clinton to Bar Her from Holding Federal Office. It’s Constitutional.

The GOP doesn’t deserve to survive this debacle

I was recently asked if I would ever rejoin the Republican Party after having registered as an independent the day after President Trump’s election in 2016. The answer is an emphatic no. Trump will leave office some day (I hope!), but he will leave behind a quasi-authoritarian party that is as corrupt as he is. The failure to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial revealed the GOP’s moral failure.

Donald Trump is not a Caesar; he does not bestride our narrow world like a colossus, undefeatable save by desperate or underhanded means. He is an instinct-driven chancer who has exploited the decadence of his party and the larger system to grasp and hold a certain kind of power.

...For a long time during Trump’s ascent I wrote columns demanding that the leaders of the Republican Party do something to keep this obviously unfit, chaotic, cruel man from becoming their nominee for president. Those columns were morally correct but structurally naïve, based on theories of party decision-making that no longer obtain in our era of institutional decay.

DES MOINES — A highly anticipated poll of Iowa Democrats, set to be released two days before the presidential caucuses, was shelved on Saturday night because of concerns about irregularities in the methodology.

The apparent problem, raised by aides to Pete Buttigieg, prompted CNN to cancel an hourlong special organized to release the results of their survey, conducted with The Des Moines Register.

The results were held back after the Buttigieg campaign said that an Iowa supporter received a poll phone call from an operator working for the polling operation, but that the name of the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., was not listed on the menu of options,

Lis Smith, a senior adviser to the Buttigieg campaign, said they shared the information with the media organizations, which conducted an internal investigation. “We applaud CNN and the Des Moines Register for their integrity,” she wrote on Twitter.

The poll is conducted by telephone from a call center, where operators read from a prepared script of candidates’ names to determine who a voter plans to support. One operator had apparently enlarged the font size on their computer screen, perhaps cutting off Mr. Buttigieg’s name from the list of options, according to two people familiar with the incident who did not have permission to speak about it publicly.

After every phone call, the list of candidates’ names is randomly reordered, so Mr. Buttigieg may not have been uniquely affected by the error, one of the people said. But the poll’s overseers were unable to determine if the mistake was an isolated incident.

The survey, published by The Des Moines Register for 76 years, is considered the gold standard for polling in the notoriously hard-to-predict state and is carefully watched as an early indicator of strength in the caucuses.

David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said on-air that CNN and The Register decided “out of an abundance of caution” not to release the poll after the network learned of a potential problem with the way the survey was conducted.

It was brought to CNN’s attention earlier this evening that somebody who was questioned for the survey raised an issue with how their interview was conducted,” Mr. Chalian said. “We weren’t able to determine exactly what happened during this person’s interview and we don’t know whether it was an isolated incident.”

This supporter then relayed what had happened to Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign, which contacted J. Ann Selzer, a respected Iowa-based pollster whose company conducts the poll, about it. But the Buttigieg aide, who requested anonymity to discuss a private conversation, said the pollster offered little information about how many surveys the one-time Iowa front-runner was left off.

Carol Hunter, the executive editor of The Des Moines Register, said the newspaper could not confirm “with certainty” that the polling irregularities were limited to one respondent.

“It is imperative whenever an Iowa Poll is released that there is confidence that the data accurately reflects Iowans’ opinions,” she wrote, in a statement on the paper’s website.

Iowans typically finalize their choice late in the campaign, often deciding in the days before the caucuses occur. The late-breaking nature of the state’s political culture lends the poll outsized influence, with the power to fuel a last-minute surge in the state or can be an early dirge for candidates struggling.

Ms. Selzer called the cancellation “heart-wrenching.”

“Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll,” she said in a statement on Saturday night. “The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.”

The front story in your mind might be Buttigieg didn't like the results, but it is a deception.

The failure to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial revealed the GOP’s moral failure.

In Crucial Pennsylvania, Democrats Worry a Fracking Ban Could Sink Them

Iowa and New Hampshire. Here they come again, reliably in grim tandem, like the flu and gastroenteritis. Two small, unrepresentative states will set the terms of the Democratic presidential campaign, exerting far more influence over the nominating process than states that rank 32nd and 42nd in population have any right to.

This must end for Democrats. Everyone knows it. Everyone argues it. But then, everyone throws up their hands. Iowa has been first for nearly 50 years now, a position to which the Democratic Party has given its tacit assent. And New Hampshire — why, New Hampshire has a law stating that it must be the first primary. So there.

To which I say: So what? What the Democrats must do is simple. Stop giving the assent, and break the law. We need a little Democratic Party civil disobedience.

Let’s quickly review how Iowa came to have this position. After the calamity of 1968 (the convention riots, the Vietnam War schism), the party opened up the nominating process. States were encouraged to have primaries and caucuses.

Iowa adopted a cumbersome, four-stage nominating process, of which the caucuses were the first step. So it had to go early. Kathie Obradovich, a former opinion editor for The Des Moines Register, said last year that “the old story is that they figured out how long it would take to print all the paperwork on their elderly mimeograph machine.” Mimeograph machine!

So that’s how Iowa got the first vote.

To Iowa’s half-century, New Hampshire goes back a full century. It has held the first primary since 1920. But it was, again, after 1968, when state politicians saw the nominating system was being changed, potentially threatening New Hampshire’s primacy, that they passed a law saying it had to have the first primary.

As is often observed, the Democratic National Committee can’t do much about these dates. It’s the Constitution itself (Article I, Section 4) that says that states “shall” decide on the “time, place and manner” of their elections. So the committee can’t change the dates.

It can, however, do something else. It can ignore the two states.

That’s right. Let Iowa and New Hampshire hold their caucus and primary, but don’t participate. Make all the candidates agree that they won’t seek a spot on the ballot.

Impossible? That’s what everyone will say. But it’s not. Oh, I’m sure it’s all very complicated with respect to the committee’s bylaws. But bylaws can be changed, by people who want to change them.

The problem with Iowa and New Hampshire, as David Leonhardt laid out in detail in The Times, is that they are horribly unrepresentative of a party that is now, according to the 2017 Pew Typology Survey, 54 percent white, 19 percent each African-American and Latino, and 9 percent other. Iowa is 85 percent white non-Hispanic, and New Hampshire is 90 percent.

So what the Democratic National Committee needs to do is choose two other, more representative states. I would suggest Florida and Michigan. Florida is more diverse than the country as whole. The United States is 60 percent white non-Hispanic, 13 percent African-American, and 18 percent Latino; Florida is 54, 17 and 26. Michigan is somewhat less diverse than the country, at 75, 14 and 5, but at least the black population is representative, and there are other strong arguments for making an important Rust Belt state an early test.

These states are diverse in other important ways. They have major cities, smaller cities, suburbs, university towns and farms. They have economic diversity. And of course both are swing states with lots of electoral votes (29 and 16, respectively). They matter in a way Iowa and New Hampshire (six and four) do not.

I say Florida and Michigan, but take your pick. The point is, the Democrats should pick two large and diverse states — or it could be four states that are rotated, to add to the geographic diversity — and tell them to move their primary dates (and yes, primaries would be far, far preferable to caucuses) forward.

And then, let Iowa and New Hampshire do what they want, but just ignore them. The committee has some leverage here. It schedules debates. It should schedule them in Florida cities like Orlando, Tampa and Gainesville, and Michigan cities like Detroit, Lansing and Ann Arbor. Never in Ames or Manchester.

That’s a carrot. Now, here’s a stick. Impose a debate qualification that any candidate who seeks a ballot position in either state or spends more than three days campaigning there will be barred from the debate stage. Problem solved.

Yes, it’s hardball. But at this point, hardball is what’s needed. There is no rational argument against it. Well, maybe there’s one. Some will raise the possibility that treating the two states like this will ensure that the next Democrat running for president will lose the states and their electoral votes.

A generation ago, I would have believed this argument. But now, in this polarized country, I don’t. In the heat of a partisan general election campaign, given all the big things that are at stake now in every presidential election, Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats aren’t going to vote against their standard-bearer over a procedural move that many will know in their bones was justified. And my guess is that both states would object forcefully the first go-round, but after that would see they’d lost and just run up the flag and choose later dates.

Some traditions are oppressive, and some laws are bad. Democrats and liberals admire the Americans who’ve challenged them. I’m not saying the committee chair who takes on Iowa and New Hampshire will go down in history with Rosa Parks. But she or he will be lauded as the person who ended an anachronistic duopoly and brought the nominating process into the 21st century.