Democratic senator Kamala Harris of California listens during a meeting in Los Angeles, April 21, 2017 (Office of Senator Kamala Harris)
Joe Biden has tapped California senator Kamala Harris as his vice presidential candidate for the election in November.
It’s a good choice. Elite-educated, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, a former prosecutor and incumbent senator, Harris ticks many of the right boxes.
When she herself ran for president earlier this year, I argued Harris was “ideologically right where many Democrats want their candidate to be.” She could appeal to key Democratic constituencies: “women, voters of color, party loyalists and West Coast progressives.” (more…)
Donald Trump is disliked by so many Americans that Democrats could win not just the presidency but the Senate in November.
Longer term, however, Republicans have baked-in advantages that make Democratic control of the upper chamber elusive.
The solution: turn America’s overseas dependencies into states. That would give 3.5 million Americans the federal representation they deserve and add ten more seats to the Senate, most of which would lean Democratic. (more…)
Stagnant wages, restrictive building codes and underinvestment in construction have caused home prices to rise faster than wages in eight out of ten metro areas in the United States.
I like the Dutch system, which is a combination of government-built social housing rented out at below-market prices and rental subsidies, which can reach up to a third of the average private rent, and for which about one in five households qualify.
Turns out that’s close to Joe Biden’s plan. (more…)
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, July 18, 2015 (Gage Skidmore)
Bernie Sanders has ended his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the United States.
It’s the right decision.
Sanders had virtually no chance of defeating former vice president Joe Biden anymore. Prolonging the contest would only delay the reconciliation of Sanders’ supporters with a Biden candidacy and make it harder for Democrats to decide whether to vote at all amid the outbreak of coronavirus. (more…)
American vice president Joe Biden listens during a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House in Washington DC, February 2, 2015 (White House/Pete Souza)
Media reports commonly describe American presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “centrist”. He’s not.
Michael Bloomberg is a centrist. Biden may be moderate compared to his Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders. But compared to the more likely alternative, Donald Trump, Biden is decidedly center-left.
This is not just semantics. If a centrist wins the Democratic nomination, some of Sanders’ supporters may be reluctant to vote for him. A center-left candidate, which Biden is, deserves their support. (more…)
Joe Biden has become the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States.
Delegates: Biden has won 642 pledged delegates against 566 for Bernie Sanders so far. 1,991 are needed to win the nomination outright.
States: Biden won ten of the fourteen states that held primaries on “Super Tuesday” and he is polling in first place in Michigan, Mississippi and Missouri, which vote next Tuesday. Sanders is ahead in Washington state.
Popular support: Biden’s national support has shot up from under 20 percent to an average of 34 percent since he won the South Carolina primary a week ago.
Party support: Sixty more prominent Democrats have endorsed Biden in the wake of his South Carolina victory.
Competitors: All other major candidates have quit, most recently Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren. (more…)
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, October 30, 2015 (Michael Vadon)
Bernie Sanders argues he can defeat Donald Trump by convincing more Americans to vote. A self-declared socialist may lose some swing voters by campaigning on nationalizing health insurance and raising middle-class taxes, but he can make up for it, Sanders argues, by mobilizing young and working voters.
It’s always seemed unwise to me to bet on potential voters rather than actual voters. Now that skepticism has been substantiated. (more…)
Former vice president Joe Biden won ten of the fourteen states that held Democratic presidential primaries on “Super Tuesday”, including Elizabeth Warren’s home state Massachusetts and delegate-rich Virginia and Texas.
His socialist rival, Bernie Sanders, won in California, Colorado, Utah and Vermont.
Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ended his presidential campaign after failing to win any contest except the caucuses on American Samoa.
1,344 pledged delegates were at stake, a third of the total (3,979) and two-thirds of the delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot (1,991). (more…)
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Brooklyn, New York, April 8, 2016 (Timothy Krause)
Why is the Democratic Party establishment in the United States scared of Bernie Sanders? Polls suggest the socialist from Vermont would do about as well against Donald Trump in a general election as his rival, Joe Biden.
I suspect there are three reasons:
Democrats don’t trust the polls.
They worry that, even if Sanders might defeat Trump, he would hurt down-ballot Democrats.
They don’t want their party to be taken over by an outsider, like the Republican Party was in 2016. (more…)
Delegates listen to a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 25, 2016 (DNCC/Chris Frommann)
The New York Times asked 93 of the 771 Democratic Party officials who will be automatically seated at the convention in July — the so-called “superdelegates” — if they would vote for Bernie Sanders if the socialist emerged with a plurality, but not a majority, of the pledged delegates.
Only nine said they would.
Sanders’ supporters are predictably up in arms, arguing the party “establishment” is conspiring to overturn “the will of the people”.
Some are threatening to sit out the election in November if their man doesn’t prevail.
Imagine being so safe and comfortable that you could stomach another four years of children being separated from their parents at the border and killed in detention, American citizens of color being harassed by immigration authorities, institutions being demolished, the rule of law turned into a dead letter and the liberal world order torn to shreds in the service of Vladimir Putin if the only alternative is voting for your second-best candidate. I’m not terribly well-versed in the rhetoric of the social-justice left, but I believe this is what they call “privilege”? (more…)
Joe Biden has risen in the South Carolina polls seemingly at the expense of the other center-left candidates.
Biden has also taken a commanding lead in the endorsement primary, most recently winning the support of South Carolina’s most prominent Democrat: Congressman James Clyburn.
Bernie Sanders has far less support from party officials, but he has won the endorsement of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, himself briefly a 2020 hopeful.
Biden needs a win in South Carolina, where one in six Democratic voters are black, to breathe new life into his campaign.
Sanders is wildly popular in California, the largest state to vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, but Biden leads in the few polls that have been conducted in Florida and Georgia. In North Carolina, Texas and Virginia, Biden, Michael Bloomberg and Sanders are neck and neck.
Bloomberg won’t be on the ballot in South Carolina. (more…)
