[ Posted Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 – 16:40 UTC ]
The first authentic polling trend of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest may now be happening. By "authentic," what I mean is a polling trend that is not merely an "announcement bump." Every candidate (well... every viable candidate) has seen some sort of boost in their polling immediately after making their official announcement, but most of these have since subsided. Now that the field is full, there will be no more such announcements to skew the polling, and any trends must thus be due to actual campaign successes or failures by the candidates. And we're seeing at least the beginnings of the first of these trends: Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to be enjoying a surge.
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[ Posted Friday, June 14th, 2019 – 17:51 UTC ]
We have to begin by first ignoring all the rampant criminality spewing forth from the White House -- just for the moment, mind you -- to concentrate instead on looking forward, not back. Because we're less than two weeks away from the first round of Democratic 2020 presidential primary debates, and the Democratic National Committee just announced the lineup for the two nights.
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[ Posted Monday, June 10th, 2019 – 17:43 UTC ]
The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.
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[ Posted Friday, June 7th, 2019 – 18:00 UTC ]
Well, we certainly never thought we'd use that particular lyric as a headline, but it's just too tempting to pass up this week. Because President Donald Trump just tweeted the following bit of wisdom:
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 16:49 UTC ]
Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 4th, 2019 – 16:37 UTC ]
The 2020 Democratic primary calendar has experience a shift of Biblical proportions since this time around "the last shall be first," at least out here in California. I know that's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough. In 2016, California was one of the last states to hold its primaries, on June 7. This time around, the guaranteed early-voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) will technically be first, but California will now be among those states in the "first among all the others" category, voting on Super Tuesday in early March. Since California is somewhat of an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to the sheer number of delegates, this is going to shake up the campaign strategies of all the Democrats running. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation, though.
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[ Posted Monday, June 3rd, 2019 – 16:14 UTC ]
Although it is still pretty early in the process, the first phase of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest is going to hinge on one simple question: Can anybody beat Joe Biden? At this point, the former vice president has such a commanding lead that the race could wind up resembling the last hotly contested primary race -- that of the Republicans in 2016. Back then, even though most of the media refused to acknowledge it until far too late, there was one clear frontrunner all along who was challenged -- unsuccessfully -- numerous times by the underdogs. Donald Trump, of course, won that race because his support never really faltered all that much and the rest of the field was busy bickering with each other. Again, it's far too early to predict such an outcome for the 2020 Democrats, but at this point it seems pretty probable that much of the beginning of the race is going to see a lot of jockeying among the underdogs, all arguing that they'd be better than Biden in the general election.
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[ Posted Friday, May 31st, 2019 – 18:03 UTC ]
Robert Mueller broke his two-year silence this week, as he strode boldly to the podium and loudly announced: "ITMFA!" and then withdrew. 'This caused the term to spike in Google searches to a level never seen before on any subject, ever.
Well, no. That's not what happened. Many now think that's what should have happened, but unfortunately it did not.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 30th, 2019 – 17:13 UTC ]
I generally try to avoid writing more than one article per week on any given subject, and although official Democratic debate rules is a wonky thing to write about to begin with, it is going to be critical to how the 2020 presidential nominating contest plays out. So I thought it was worth a second look, because the debate surrounding the Democratic debates just got a little more intense.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 28th, 2019 – 16:46 UTC ]
Last week, the Democratic National Committee quietly instituted a new rule for their first debate, which was created to avoid having a "kiddie table" debate on either of the two scheduled nights. This was a smart move, given that the entire random selection scheme was set up in the first place to avoid lumping all the leading candidates together in one debate, leaving all the struggling candidates to compete with each other in the other debate. It will still be a random selection process, but there will now be two tiers.
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