Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: US Elections 2020

Presidential and congressional elections were held in the United States on November 3. The Atlantic Sentinel endorsed Democrat Joe Biden, who defeated Republican president Donald Trump. Democrats defended their majority in the House of Representatives and gained five seats in the Senate, where they split control with Republicans.

  • Democratic Primary News

    • Beto O’Rourke has dropped out.
    • Joe Biden has pulled ahead of the other candidates in the endorsement primary.
    • Elizabeth Warren has released a plan to pay for Medicare-for-all.
    • Kamala Harris has pulled out of New Hampshire and is focusing entirely on Iowa.
    • Biden is at 27 percent support in recent polls, followed by Warren at 21, Bernie Sanders at 17, Pete Buttigieg at 8 and Harris at 5.
    • Biden is down from a high of 40 percent in May, when Warren was polling at just 8 percent. (more…)

  • Who Pays for Medicare-for-All?

    Elizabeth Warren
    Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts visits a high school in Des Moines, Iowa, October 21 (Phil Roeder)

    Replacing private health insurance with a single-payer, government-run system is hugely unpopular in the United States, but that hasn’t convinced two of the Democrats’ three top-polling presidential candidates — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — to back away from it.

    In the most recent televised debate, Warren, who is polling neck and neck with former vice president Joe Biden, couldn’t say how much “Medicare-for-all” would cost or who would pay for it. She has since promised to release a detailed plan.

    Sanders, to his credit, admitted it would require tax increases. But by how much, and for whom, he didn’t say.

    He can’t. Nationalizing health insurance for 327 million Americans is such a huge and complex undertaking that nobody knows how much it would cost.

    Which calls into question the wisdom of doing it at all. (more…)

  • Democratic Race Stable as Ten Candidates Qualify for Debate

    Ten candidates have qualified for the third Democratic presidential debate, to be held in two weeks’ time, putting pressure on the low-polling candidates to drop out.

    New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who failed to qualify, ended her campaign on Wednesday, joining John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Seth Moulton and Eric Swalwell.

    Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Tim Ryan, Tom Steyer and Marianne Williamson remain in the race, although they have little support.

    The ten candidates who qualified are: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang.

    Of those, Biden is the clear frontrunner while Sanders and Warren share second place in the polls. (more…)

  • Democrats Back Away from Abolishing Private Health Insurance

    Kamala Harris
    Democratic senator Kamala Harris of California listens during a meeting in Los Angeles, April 21, 2017 (Office of Senator Kamala Harris)

    Good news: Democratic presidential candidates are coming to their senses on health care.

    Senators Cory Booker, Kirstin Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have all backed away from abolishing private health insurance in favor of Medicare-for-all.

    Even Senator Elizabeth Warren has given herself wiggle room, saying “there are a lot of different pathways” to achieving universal coverage.

    The exception is Bernie Sanders, the author of Medicare-for-all and a self-declared democratic socialist. (more…)

  • Down in the Polls, Sanders Echoes Trump on Media Bias

    Bernie Sanders
    Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, January 9, 2016 (Gage Skidmore)

    First, Bernie Sanders suggested the Democratic Party teamed up on him in 2016 to deny him the presidential nomination. (Of a party of which he is not even a member.)

    Now he is suggesting The Washington Post is giving him negative coverage because he has been critical of its owner, Jeff Bezos.

    America already has one party that regularly calls the legitimacy of institutions like universities, the FBI and NATO into doubt. It doesn’t need Democrats to do the same. (more…)

  • Democrats Are Not Talking to Swing Voters

    Bernie Sanders
    Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, October 30, 2015 (Michael Vadon)

    Imagine you’re an American swing voter and you listened Tuesday and Wednesday night to the twenty Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination. What did you hear?

    • Three of the four highest-polling candidates want to abolish private health insurance and replace it with a single government program.
    • Virtually all candidates would decriminalize illegal entry into the United States and all of them praised immigration.
    • Many would give free health care to undocumented immigrants.
    • Some, like Bernie Sanders, would even give them a free college education.

    This is not a winning program. (more…)

  • Elizabeth Warren May Be the Strongest Democratic Candidate

    If 2016 taught me anything, it is not to make predictions. I don’t know who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States, so take what follows with a grain of salt — and remember that we’re still more than half a year out from the Iowa caucuses, which will kick off the official nominating process in February. A lot can (and almost certainly will) change.

    Former vice president Joe Biden is ahead. He places first in the national polls and the early voting state polls. He is also first in the endorsement primary, which measures support from elected officials. For Democrats pining for a restoration of the Obama era, Biden is the obvious choice.

    I would put California senator Kamala Harris in second place. She is second in the endorsement primary and shares second place in national polls with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She made a strong impression in the first debate, but she has flipflopped twice on whether or not she wants to abolish private health insurance. This is not a trivial issue. Her vagueness on what many Americans rank as their top concern (health care) is worrying.

    Sanders is probably in third place, but I don’t think he has a lot of potential for growth. I’m biased, though. I don’t like Sanders’ style. Whenever he is pushed for detail, he argues that a “political revolution” will make his far-reaching policy proposals somehow feasible. I prefer plans over slogans.

    If I had to bet right now, I would put my money on Warren. (more…)

  • Democrats Are Closer to the Center Than Republicans

    San Francisco California
    Traffic in San Francisco, California, April 7, 2010 (Jerome Vial)

    In a recent column, I argued Democrats in the United States have moved to the left but Republicans have moved farther to the right. The former, at least in their policies, are still more centrist than most center-left parties in Europe while the latter now have more in common with far-right populists than they do with Britain’s Conservative Party and Germany’s Christian Democrats.

    Centrists (myself included) still worry that Democrats might become too left-wing for voters in the middle — who, the turnout fantasies of partisans on either side notwithstanding, tend to decide the outcome of national elections.

    Emphasis on national. In last year’s midterm elections, Democrats ran progressives, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in safe Democratic districts and states, and moderates, like Doug Jones and Ralph Northam, in Republican-leaning places. All three won.

    In the 2016 presidential election, white working-class defections arguably put Donald Trump over the top in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but you can also argue (indeed, I have) that Hillary Clinton lost because she didn’t convince enough middle-income voters in the suburbs of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia to switch parties. (more…)

  • Abolishing Private Health Insurance Is Bad Policy for Democrats

    Kamala Harris
    Democratic senator Kamala Harris of California listens during a meeting in Los Angeles, April 21, 2017 (Office of Senator Kamala Harris)

    Four of the Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination committed to replacing private health insurance with a government-run system in debates this week: Senators Kamala Harris of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as well as Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York.

    Harris later maintained she had misheard the question and supports Medicare-for-all with supplemental private insurance.

    She, as well as Sanders and Warren, stand a real chance of becoming the nominee (de Blasio is a long shot), so it’s worth pointing out why abolishing private health insurance is such bad policy for Democrats. (more…)

  • Democrats Don’t Have a Good Answer to the Mitch McConnell Question

    Democrats don’t have a good answer to what Ezra Klein calls the “Mitch McConnell question”.

    The Republican leader is likely to retain his majority, or at least a blocking minority, in the United States Senate next year. Then what will come of the Democrats’ plans?

    In two debates on Wednesday and Thursday night, none of the party’s twenty presidential hopefuls had a good answer. (more…)

  • Sanders Should Stop Undermining Trust in the Democratic Party

    Bernie Sanders
    Vermont senator Bernie Sanders gives a speech in Brooklyn, New York, April 8, 2016 (Timothy Krause)

    Bernie Sanders is at it again, alleging that the 2016 Democratic primary was “rigged” against him.

    It wasn’t, and Sanders should stop saying so. At a time when Donald Trump is calling the legitimacy of academia, science, the news media, the FBI, NATO and other multilateral organizations into question, the last thing the left needs to do is undermine trust in more institutions. (more…)

  • Don’t Be Too Hard on Politicians Who Change Their Mind

    Joe Biden
    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)

    Don’t be too hard on Joe Biden for changing his mind on federal funding for abortion.

    The former American vice president, who is the top candidate for his Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, has a reasonable argument to make. He previously opposed federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest and where the mother’s life was in the danger. “But circumstances have changed,” he told supporters on Thursday.

    Republicans have been working overtime to restrict access to abortion in the states they control. The most egregious example is Alabama, which recently outlawed abortion after five or six weeks of pregnancy. Few women even realize they’re pregnant at that stage. Georgia, where Biden spoke, could see a similar law come into effect next year.

    “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need,” Biden said. (more…)

  • Too Many Democrats Are Running for Vice President

    White House Washington
    View of the White House in Washington DC from a helicopter, January 15, 2015 (White House/Pete Souza)

    Steve Bullock is the latest Democrat to put his personal ambitions before the interest of his party.

    The governor of Montana is wildly popular at home. Donald Trump won Montana with 56 percent of the votes against 36 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, the state’s first-term Republican senator, Steve Daines, is up for reelection. If Democrats want to beat Daines, and stand a better chance of winning a majority in the Senate — the odds are currently against them — Bullock should be running for that seat, not for president. (more…)

  • Joe Biden Is a Stronger Candidate Than You Might Think

    Joe Biden Barack Obama
    Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, August 27, 2014 (White House/Pete Souza)

    Joe Biden might look out of sync with today’s Democratic Party. 76 years old, Biden is a Third Way-style liberal who used to be “tough on crime”, voted for the Iraq War and now faces his own #MeToo accusations.

    Yet he is the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination.

    RealClearPolitics has Biden’s support at 39 percent, 23 points ahead of the runner-up, Bernie Sanders.

    We’re still almost a year away from the first primaries. Polls are not usually predictive at this point in the contest and say more about name recognition. But Biden is also ahead in the endorsement primary, as measured by FiveThirtyEight. The former vice president has already convinced eighty prominent Democrats to support him against 55 for California senator Kamala Harris. (Who I think is actually the second strongest candidate at this point. Read Frank Bruni’s column about her in The New York Times.)

    What explains Biden’s popularity? (more…)

  • Why It’s Fair Not to Treat Sanders Like the Democratic Frontrunner

    Bernie Sanders
    Vermont senator Bernie Sanders takes part in a protest in Washington DC, November 17, 2016 (Lorie Shaull)

    NBC’s political team asks if it is fair to treat Bernie Sanders as an insurgent rather than the legitimate frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary, given his high name recognition and the fact that he has raised more money than the other candidates.

    I think so. (more…)