Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog
Gravel is out, Creepy Porn Lawyer threatens a return, the Biden bunch banks big bucks, Ryan hits the showers, and Michelle says no (yet again). It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Harris 10, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2.
Harvard CAPS/Harris: Biden 34, Sanders 17, Harris 9, Warren 8, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2.
Real Clear Politics
538 polls
Election betting markets
Pundits, etc.
Who all has qualified for the September debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders and Warren. Castro, Gabbard and Yang have hit the fundraising threshold, but not the polling threshold.
Matt Tabbi of Rolling Stone watches the Democrats wander around Iowa and is not impressed:
Traveling hundreds of miles across Iowa, passing cornfields and covered bridges, visiting quaint small town after quaint small town, listening to the stump speeches of Democrat after would-be Donald Trump-combating Democrat, only one thought comes to mind:
They’re gonna blow this again.
Imagine how it looks to Republicans. If that’s too difficult or unpalatable, just look at the swarm of 24 Democratic candidates in high school terms.
The front-runner — the front-runner! — is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,†with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum†challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .†on national TV.
A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that†argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis — another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.
A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.
The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas†quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=41403
