They are in your backyard.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

A study just came out on this from the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy out of UW Madison.

Highlights:

Wisconsin doesn't have a coverage gap. Those who would move to Medicaid already have access to subsidized coverage.

Expanding Medicaid will increase the cost of healthcare on Wisconsinites with private insurance, on average, by $177 per year – up to $700 for a family of four.

Emergency room visits would actually increase in Wisconsin, by over 52,000 visits per year.

In total, Medicaid expansion is expected to cost Wisconsin over $1 billion per year – borne in large part by increases in private sector healthcare costs.

Even when ‘savings’ to the state are included – Medicaid expansion will cost Wisconsin $600 million per year.

More than 5%, or more specifically - post Black Friday if a person wants to play in online poker, he or she should be able to provide some proof that they actually exist as a human. I was somewhat surprised at how many were unable to do this, in any way, a few years ago, but perhaps you believe that is fine, and that is a lifestyle option if one is not trying to sign up for an online poker room with the expectation of doing a withdrawal at some point.

I say all of that with the awareness that nearly everyone in this forum has nothing to do with the online poker industry currently, but the ID comment did bring back some fond memories of poker players wondering if a utility bill in their ex-girlfriends name would work. After that, many of those without any ID decided it was too much effort to get one, so they chose to stay on Lock Poker where they were happier.

This is Murrica, bro. We don't leave the Motherland.

Nor drive in it with a license apparently.

Good. Hopefully Bernie is on this as well. We need a policy that takes all of people like awval/Inso's money and gives it directly to people who they voted to harm in elections.

I don't know if this has been discussed or not in this thread, but I'd really be surprised if the Democratic ticket didn't include two of the current (or soon-to-be announced) candidates. Maybe like a moderate/progressive combo. Anyway, I think the last time that an opponent turned into a running mate was back in 1980 when George Bush was picked by Reagan. Seems like a no-brainer for this to happen in 2020, but I dunno, it has been 40 years.

Edwards was an opponent of Kerry in 2004, and Biden an opponent of Obama in 2008.

Yikes. My memory must be going. Thanks for the correction.

How do you do reparations for blacks? We need massive changes in public policy towards poor people but are they going to spin that as reparations?

Am I right in expecting the Democratic ticket (president/VP) will be very likely male+female and white+non-white in some combination? I hope/don't think they will make the same mistake again and go "well, Tim Kaine speaks Spanish. That should be enough to turn out the Hispanic vote".

An easy first step (and it is only a first step) is to make all public colleges and universities free for all blacks. Many of them were built by slave labor and it's a very minor reparation to allow them to attend those schools for free that their ancestors built.

Would love to make private colleges/universities built by slave labor free as well, but I don't think that the government can mandate that.

Side note: it should go without saying that those schools should be free for everyone.

I don't know about exactly that combination, but it's 99+% sure to not be two straight white guys.

This sounds stupid but I wonder what would happen if all blue chip/5* black high school athletes in southern states went to college out of state as a protest.

Can you imagine no top black recruits going to Alabama to play football?

"No, sorry sir, I'm not interested in UGA until the state fixes its systematic racism when it comes to voter suppression."

"Sorry, Duke and UNC, the gerrymandering in your state causes me enough concern I'm taking my talents to the University of Delaware"

Doesn't sound stupid at all.

Remember those protests at the University of Missouri a few years ago? There was a guy doing a hunger strike until the president resigned and nothing happened.

A few days later, the football team said that they weren't playing the bowl game or even practicing until the president stepped down. He was out in less than 24 hours.

High level college sports is an enormous deal.

Wealth distribution in America doesn't work that way. You'd have to give like half of this money to Oprah.

That's the perfect position to have though. Now he can avoid being asked about it 10,000 more times and continue to stay on message and be the most popular politician in the country. He's the only candidate that won't take the bait which is why he would be the best choice to stop Trump.

The Kaine choice for VP might have been one of the all-time bad choices in the history of politics. Hillary might be president right now if she picked Booker as VP.

Being pro reparations seems like a hugely toxic stance for the general election. Could the Dems possibly do anything more than that to motivate Trump voters to turn out?

There are reports that Harris is supporting reparations too, but I'm skeptical based on the reporting:

OK, but that just sounds like standard issue meaningless boilerplate. "Change policies and structures to empower communities to provide opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty", that kind of thing.

I think this is a tough claim to make. I mean, I'm not saying Kaine was a great VP choice... But is your thought that Booker gives her a boost among African-Americans? She already won the black vote by 80 points, which is pretty standard for Dems - not quite Obama levels. Going back over her short list, if I could pick anyone from the short list, my rankings would be:

1. Sherrod Brown
2. Tim Ryan
3. Cory Booker
4. Tim Kaine

Like, I think if you ran a sim out with Kaine versus any of the others on the short list, you have a better chance of winning with him than say Warren, Castro, Perez, Garcetti, Becerra, Vilsack, etc.

But given the razor-thin margins throughout the rust belt, I think going with a prominent rust belt Dem would be the strategy in hindsight. Out of people that were speculated about but never considered, Bernie, Klobuchar and Franken might all get her the win. Of course, this is Al Franken pre MeToo allegations, I'm basing this on who these people were in 2016. Obviously I wouldn't advocate for him as a VP pick now with what we know.

Kaine was chosen mostly to shore up the swing state of Virginia, and Clinton did win that state by 5 points while losing virtually every other swing state in the eastern half of the country, so you could argue it achieved what it set out to do. It speaks to the incompetence of the Clinton campaign that they thought that an affluent state like Virginia was the best place to give themselves this helping hand, like they clearly had no idea what the profile of voters they were in danger of losing looked like.

Not really the point, the aim is to help turnout. You can use the running mate in communities where they are well known and liked as the figurehead of the GOTV effort.

The bolded is the key, and it all comes back to what we discuss whenever we re-re-re-re-re-litigate 2016. HRC's campaign ignored states they needed to be in, and they failed to understand how Trump and his different base was challenging them in areas they weren't expecting.

Yeah, I get that and I agree, but black turnout overall was only down 4.7% from 2012, and some of that was probably due to voter suppression... So I guess my questions (and I don't know that these answers are readily available) would be how much was it down in states that voters weren't suppressed that were in play, and how much does Booker as VP change that?

Of course, this also all relies on Clinton's team sending him to Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Detroit instead of Atlanta, Charlotte, Tallahassee and Richmond. I suspect they would have used him poorly in terms of the electoral map.

Just gonna drop this here because it blows my mind every time I think about it:

I mean, I can't even come up with a worse prediction of the 2016 election than that after I already know what happened. It belongs in the annals of quotes like "Stocks have reached a new and permanently high plateau".