GREAT! Does the Iowa Democratic party have a plan to beat Trump singlehandedly this fall?
Infighting helps one candidate: Trump.
Corporate Dems once again demonstrating their expertise at reading the mood of the nation.
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again, but campaigning for the Irish election began on the 14th of January, at midnight tonight (the 6th/7th of February) the moratorium on campaigning and coverage in the media begins ahead of voting on Saturday the 8th. It’s nasty and brutish, but at least it’s short. I’m tired of the next US presidential election already, a long time ago.
Also: despite a complex voting system (PR-STV) there will be no queues at polling stations.
We can trust that the vote counting will be conducted fairly due to multiple, adversarial, and redundant oversight.
As a bonus, watching the counts is genuinely enjoyable and often really exciting.
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You can’t make a counterargument against a non-argument. “Money is what really matters” is a hypothesis, not an argument. “Candidates can’t raise tons of money on small donations” is a hypothesis, not an argument.
Having twice as much money as Trump didn’t win Clinton the presidency. Having an average donation size of $19 doesn’t stop Sanders from out fundraising all other Democratic contenders. Bloomberg’s “effective” anti-Trump ads haven’t stopped Trump from peaking in approval rating. The idea that money is everything is folk wisdom.
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I’ve listened to three years of criticism from Democrats complaining about Trump losing the popular vote.
And here Bernie is winning the popular vote and not getting delegates.
WTF
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Yes, caucuses are an obsolete bit of political code, much like the Electoral College, and both have clunky mechanics that cause issues like this.
Ironically, one of the main reasons caucuses are still a thing in Democratic primaries after 2016 is because Sanders supporters opposed removing them. (Bernie did better in caucus states than in primary states; caucuses tend to be where a small but dedicated number of supporters can have an effect greater than their overall number would suggest.)
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Nope, but it helped her win 3 million more votes than Trump despite her unpopularity.
And didn’t win him the nomination in 2016, or make him a breakaway candidate in 2020, or bring out the supposedly enthusiastic progressive turnout in the Iowa caucuses that is supposed to be the reason he’s so electable.
As is the facile idea that having access to money automatically makes one a bad candidate or bad at governance. There are a lot of good arguments against Buttigieg’s candidacy, but “OMG WINE CAVE BILLIONAIRES PAID FOR HIS GROUND GAME” is not among them.
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Billionaires are a bug in the system, that are inherently undemocratic. A functioning democracy suppresses the aggregation of massive wealth.
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I think you’ll find that the less straw-man-y version of the “idea” here is “taking large donations from influential people heavily invested in stratified, status-quo economics is highly inconsistent with a party with economic justice in its platform”
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“Public Policy For Sale - Cheap!”
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Fair enough. But even that has its limits–in my view, it’s a corruption (or corruption-like) problem only to the extent that it affects policy positions. And it’s entirely possible to not be a billionaire (or have billionaire donors) and yet have policy positions that do not involve, for example, a massive wealth tax or a single-payer medicare-for-all healthcare system, and to have arrived at those positions through honest policy disagreements over the extent to which we need to scrap capitalism or revise it. The more the Democratic party decides to welcome only fully-bought-in progressives of the Sanders ilk and mostly-bought-in progressives of the Warren ilk, the smaller the party’s reach.
It also depends pretty heavily on your definition of “large.” The “billionaires in wine caves”, for example, sure sound bad until you learn that the “megadonors” in attendance each donated only the federal maximum of $2,800. To be sure, that’s a lot of money, and a lot more than most people can comfortably donate. But it’s also not the kind of money that is going to cause a presidential candidate to revise his policy positions.
Another view is that massive wealth is a tool like that like many others can be put to good ends or bad ones, and that while it requires some care to make sure that the wealth itself does not become the primary object of policy, there is some pretty significant value in having billionaires on your side, because the other side definitely has them–and despite the best intentions of the progressives in the race, there is simply not a chance that the Trump judiciary will allow significant structural changes to the fundamental capitalist underpinnings that make billionaires possible.
Much like assault weapons, it’s just a tool. Billion$ don’t kill democracy, billionaires kill democracy…
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To me that feels like “foot-in-the-door” money that opens “conversations about opportunities.” It sets a tone for buying access and there are plenty of non-reportable ways to be corrupt (and more and more by the day, as protections against corruption crumble due to lobbying and lack of enforcement…)
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Right, so didn’t make Clinton win. It is perfectly possible that the money mitigated what would have been a bigger loss, but that’s a guess.
Whether or not the money helped Sanders win, Sanders raised the money. I was contesting your claim that you can’t raise huge amounts of money on small donations. You can, Sanders does, and the fact that this doesn’t win seems to be in furtherance of my first point, that money isn’t the only, main, or most important thing in determining the winner.
I thought you believed raising money was a critical factor in elections, but I see you agree that it has not been for Sanders. Maybe I’ve misunderstood you. Or maybe money that comes $5 and $10 at a time doesn’t have the same winningness as money that comes in larger chunks?
If I had to guess, I’d guess that money for presidential campaigns works a lot like money for people. There’s a certain amount you need desperately, and if you have less than that amount your chances of winning dwindle extremely quickly. But money past some threshold has rapidly diminishing returns so that having twice was someone else has is usually only a small edge.
Maybe it is. My point was more that “what’s your counter-argument” is a weak thing to say when you haven’t made an argument, just an assertion.
I think billionaires are scourges on society in the same way kings and emperors are, possibly worse. But that’s not an argument, it’s my opinion.
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As well as-- I hereby declare because it’s so bloody obvious-- the truth.
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Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “Mayo Pete”, though.
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I’ve always been fond of the name Pete Butterchug, but it seems like that’s just me.
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