Your 2020 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

Yup

After having seen most of the potentials speak recently, I am feeling Kamala Harris the most.

gosh i can't wait to see what this great and long-awaited bipartisan health care bill might look like, with all the good-faith ideas the children-loving republicans have brought to the table on this critical issue over the last few years

what a terrible position. just run on M4A for chrissakes.

Any candidate(s) on board with AOC's 70% tax plan?

Harris has praised the proposal and said it is worth considering iirc

Gillibrand knows which way the wind blows, and she’ll cut your throat, but I think Clintonism is in her blood and you’ll see a lot of hair splitting.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) January 15, 2019

This picture of the opportunistic, ice cold, shrewd bish that people are painting Gillibrand as, it must really suck to have your biggest career obstacle be that you tried to hold a man accountable for bad behaviour.

it must really suck to have your biggest career obstacle be that you tried to hold a man accountable for bad behaviour.

The worst thing any woman can ever do.

I think her biggest obstacle is that she was no liberal when appointed to the Senate, but that could just be me

do ppl who aren't Franken's direct friends/colleagues even care about her involvement at all? like....still?

Yeah she is a bit too moderate for me when there are more progressive candidates. I also don't care about the "doing it for the children angle."

xpost one of my friends who is super super liberal calls her Judas because of the Franken thing. i want to slap it out of him.

ugh

i think a lot of boomer Dems and (maybe) Minnesotans are pretty pissed about Franken. or at least what i can surmise from online outrage.

Weird and bad grudge to hold imo

yeah I am...agnostic about whether he should have been pressured to resign but at this point who really cares

Yeah we have bigger problems

Gillibrand would be a perfectly acceptable VP, and she's good in the Senate. She hasn't got a chance of becoming President, though.

i think you can think franken was right to resign when he did and still think it wasn't great that he got taken down by a string of mostly anonymous accusations (which, oddly, seemed to stop as soon as he resigned)

obv blaming that on gillibrand is stupid, schumer had already told franken to resign

i think you can think franken was right to resign when he did and still think it wasn't great that he got taken down by a string of mostly anonymous accusations (which, oddly, seemed to stop as soon as he resigned)

is that really odd?

if he was right to resign when he did, why was it wrong for people to be pushing for him to resign when he did?

b/c i mean the "taking down" wasn't like he was gunned down in the streets, or put through a show trial without due process or whatever. he was called upon to resign from an elected office, and he did.

Getting your ass grabbed is a thing that women have long minimized. One of the women really thought long and hard about coming forward because it's usually more punishing for the woman than it is the man.

Like, do you want to be known for taking down a senator that you like for something as everyday as getting your ass grabbed?

Yeah, coming forward always leads to retribution for women, so if he has already resigned, why come forward?

why was it wrong for people to be pushing for him to resign when he did?

if i remember right (stopped paying attention to this a long time ago), franken had submitted himself to the internal party or senate process, and people were just waiting to see what it found; the push to resign was to do so ahead of that determination. so if you think the process had some kind of legitimacy that a worry about optics or whatever could have abandoned, then that would be a reason.

The process does not have legitimacy, lol.

Sorry for sounding flippant. It's not a laughing matter.

you bastard

http://time.com/5042931/al-franken-accusers/

I mean seriously, how many you "unintentionally" land your hand on someone's ass while taking a picture?

There are four named women in that piece, and one of them had photographic evidence. I've honestly rarely seen these stories be so clear-cut?

XP Ask Poppy Bush.

Yeah, I also didn't give him a pass because he was old. They should've wheeled him out far from arms length of any woman.

I would bring people together to start getting things done. If you want to get health care done, you have to bring Ds and Rs to the table on the shared values of this country. We all love our children."

This position needs a lot of work before it has any resonance at all. For chrissakes, take a solid position on what you think the freaking children need that they aren't getting now and how you want to deliver it. Bipartisanship is not an end in itself and literally no one cares about it. They care about what happens, not how.

Voters totally give lip service to bipartisanship but generally what they actually mean is “get the other party to cave”

back to back otm's

even in an election cycle where there isn't this much progressive energy, you would expect Dem candidates to tack to the left at least somewhat during primary season, so if Gillibrand ends up trying to stake a claim towards the center she may be dooming herself before she even gets off the ground. this is also why Biden's campaign is either going to be gratuitously phony or gratuitously tone-deaf.

Gratuitous in some way, surely. Really hope he doesn't run. Fox News headline that popped up recently: Biden family sounds warning – Dems moving too far left. gtfo

If Gillibrand begins tacking rightward (centerward?) once she's all in, I'll be super disappointed. Partly because she's doing it, but mostly because Morbs can say "told you so."

I could really use a candidate scorecard on these proposals

On nearly every "radical" idea the American people are with us:

72% want to expand Social Security.
70% want Medicare for All.
65% want a jobs guarantee.
64% want to legalize marijuana.
60% want tuition-free public colleges.
58% want $15 min wage.
57% want to break up big banks.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 15, 2019

I could really use a candidate, Bernie or otherwise, who goes hard on the issues w/o apology all the way through

the=these

lol at "tuition-free public colleges" though. (I get that "tuition" is short for "tuition fees" here, but think the construct looks unfortunate.)

no idea what your objection is

I get that "tuition" is short for "tuition fees" here

Here?

Well, to me "tuition" means "the act of teaching", and "tuition fees" the payment for being taught. I read "tuition-free colleges" as "colleges where no teaching is being done" when I see that.

But yeah, I see from some online dictionaries that the fee interpretation is more or less equally common now, especially in North America.

I would say it's more than equally common in the US, I've never actually heard it used to mean anything other than education fees

Fair enough! Sorry for derail.