Ojeda went on Dean Obeidallah’s show tonight (SiriusXM Progress show). Pretty good interview. I hope he makes it to the debates. He’ll really expose the finger waving pillow fight energy of the big candidates and force them left on labor.

He called out Beto for how much in campaign contributions he takes from big industries and Harris/Booker for talking tough on opiods, but taking donations from big pharma. Ojeda also came out in full support of the New Green Deal.

There are more than that to be worried about.

Decent article.

Right, EXACTLY. I've tried to make this point, less succinctly, in a million posts. The people in America who are swinging voters are not in some Goldilocks zone between left and right. They're people who don't have a coherent political ideology and have a random hodgepodge of beliefs. When people say things like "Dems can't run on universal healthcare because it's too far to the left and will alienate moderates" it's just totally nonsensical. But at the same time, people who are like "there are no swinging voters" are also wrong. There are, they are just not centrists.

Yeah, I dunno. I think you have to get a sense for how a person is going to perform getting put through the wringer of the campaign process. It's easy to forget now but everyone assumed Jeb? was going to be a serious contender, then after the debates started it was almost immediately clear that he was done for.

David Axelrod thinks the first debate will be in the first quarter of 2019. I'll make my bold predictions after that.

Edit: I get what you're saying about matching up against Trump, but I think Jeb?'s implosion would certainly have altered opinions on how he would do in a general election. Same thing with Marco Roboto. I think it's obvious O'Rourke is a solid choice vis a vis electability, I think Warren is no good, Biden is Biden and Bernie is Bernie. Gotta wait for a debate before saying too much about the others.

i'm not sure exactly what it is but something just feels off about warren's campaign, like she's trying to force it after missing her chance in 2016, when everything was naturally aligned for her to run. she had all the grassroots hoping, some even begging for her to be the one to fight for us and take on the machine, but when she declined her spot was filled by a senator from vermont.

2020 could actually be the election that should have been but never was, bernie vs trump, two olds battling it out over policy while right-wing dems join the party to call progressives sexists, racists, russian operatives, ageists, and new and original names not yet invented while a good time is had by all. plus we could settle once and for all the re-re-re-litigations of the 2016 election.

of course this matchup is a huge long shot since the corporate media and dem establishment are going to use all their resources to produce a bland candidate who will promise "universal access" to healthcare (yet won't support medicare for all), denounce citizen's united (yet take money from the fossil fuel industry), and say everyone deserves a "clean environment" (yet won't back the green new deal).

this person will of course be easy to spot since he or she will be the identity candidate, devoid of all policy and running solely on likability while using 'a return to normalcy' message to justify bipartisanship, tradition, and civility- formalities which will ultimately lead to watered-down stances on trump's policies, a scenario which risks dems normalizing trump's america as the new status quo.

love what i have seen from Ojeda but my instincts are skeptical.

Paging the ghost of Huey Long!

JFC enough with this Ojeda nonsense.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...bility-774196/

electability is a crock.

Nah. It's only a crock if you define "electability" the way Taibbi is doing here -- establishment Democrats pushing for moderate, Very Serious, their-turn candidates.

Electability is a real thing but people completely confuse what is actually electable. It has very little to do with where you fall on the left-right spectrum. It's mainly about personality.

(Edit to add: Taibbi is also doing that thing where people use Trump as an example of a successful candidate. He wasn't! He only received 46% of the vote in an era of insane partisanship. That's bad. He was unlikable and performed poorly.)

Exactly. And luckily for us, Bernie has the best personality

"Personality," "likability," whatever as an electoral metric is also bs reading of tea leaves. Nixon, he of the famous flop sweat on the first televised Pres debate, essentially tied Kennedy in the popular vote. Even Obama 08, imo one of the most likable and inspiring candidates of all time, running in a terrible environment for Republicans, won the popular by only 7 points (less than the Dems House popular vote margin this cycle). Does anyone think Hillary Clinton would've won by less than 5? If this mystical, as-yet-unmeasurable quality is a factor, it is a tiny factor.

In case anyone needs to know why Biden sucks: Feinstein says she would back Biden in 2020

Biden/Feinstein 2020 imo. I've already drawn up a campaign logo for them:

Kinda promised myself that I wouldn't harp on about this again, but what is it that makes you think Beto is so likable? Is it just that he looks like a Kennedy? Are you sure that is what people want? Why?

Yes? I think she would have lost. McCain was very likable. Winning by 7 points against McCain in a highly partisan era is an absolutely enormous margin.

He's charismatic, authentic, good looking, personable, a great speaker... should I go on?

Yes, I'm sure that's what people want. It's also borne out by the data so far. He did exceptionally well in freaking Texas and he's doing very well in the early 2020 polls despite low name recognition.

I understand, but he is the President. I think 'winning the election' is ~all she wrote, vis-a-vis successful candidacy. You mean something like he wasn't especially or amazingly successful, right?

Which goes to the point I bring up whenever this conversation pops up again: Twice in very recent electoral history, the winning candidate has lost the popular vote. Every variation of 'likability trumps all' fails to account for this, in my view just has no way of accounting for it. If likability is gets votes, then how come two of the last five winners got fewer votes than the loser? Doesn't make sense.

Likability or charisma or whatever is of course extremely useful in an election. But it's clearly not everything.

I always assumed Obama being black cost him a lot of votes. If he was white or Hillary was a man that would improve their "likability" in a country full of bigots.

Sorry for using such loose definitions of these words but hopefully you get my point

And yeah I could easily see Hillary winning by less than 5. There are tons of morons out there that think women are too emotional to govern

Hey so let's check in on how the whole corporate money thing is going with D contenders:


https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1081280618481307648

oh

GG Kirsten 2020.

That's absolutely disqualifying.

This is an insane opinion imo. Economy in the ****ter, Bush net approval at literally -45, lower than Nixon at his lowest. Hillary Clinton had comparable support to Obama among the Dem voting base, but even a literal yellow dog could have beaten the Republican.

Obama being black also gained him historic black turnout. I don't think race was a net negative for Obama. He won Florida despite it being very well populated with racists.

Nathan J. Robinson on law professors and presidents, noting that if Warren wins in 2020, she would be the third straight Dem president to have been a law professor:

Maybe she wins but I think it would have been close. McCain was a good candidate. I do agree that political environment is very important, though.

My argument is that personality is by far the most important factor in determining the rest of the equation. There's nothing the candidates can do to influence the political environment. But the parties can pick better candidates.