Your 2020 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

lol yeah i'm pretty sure there were other factors at work in the russian revolution besides those scheming germans

I definitely hope someone does one of those “wah this thread topic is about one thing but people are posting about something else” posts soon

The election of Trump was the most successful covert intelligence operation since Germany sent Lenin to St. Petersberg.

i missed this the first time but lolllllllllll so good a+++++

signs that Bernie's troubles with POC voters might not be such a thing anymore

Narrative trouble as Bernie polls as more popular with black Democrats than white ones. https://t.co/uRZxSr0O9L

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 17, 2019

Ya but if lenin had stayed in switzerland it’s not clear if the soviet would have ended up seizing power. Even the bolsheviks in petersburg at the time felt the time wasn’t right—they were scandalized by the april theses

article's about AOC and so sits at odds with the thread title (no i don't think she should run any time soon) but always love a good Eric Foner quote about political dynamics:

https://i.imgur.com/HibzSGC.png

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-01-17/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-s-big-ideas-for-taxes-and-medicare

I feel like there might be a better thread for 1917 theorizing

I like it better than rehashing 2016

You know what? Fair.

Let's rehash 2008 instead. In that situation the sitting two term GOP president had collapsing approval ratings, the economy was veering off course and the election was pretty much the Dems to lose. In 2016 the polls were tight, it's always tough for a party to win a third term, the economy was so so. To say that the losing Sanders campaign was less hurtful than the losing Clinton campaign is so nonsensical, and I don't get how everyone just repeats it and calls it 'the math' as if it isn't deeply idiotic to look at it that way. 2008 had room for a divisive fight. 2016 less so. People misread the signs and thought Clinton had it in the bag all throughout the year, and it was a major fuckup.

It's obviously okay to criticize Kamala Harris for her record as a prosecutor, but hopefully she is planning to include criminal justice on her platform anyway, so there will be a lot more info to base a decision on once the primaries start? The thing that seems a bit awkward is that if she is going to have any chance of winning the nomination, she will have to win over black voters in the South, so they will in the end have to make a choice whether they trust her or not, and it does seem a bit weird for a white voter to go 'nah, she would be bad on BLM' if black voters themselves decide to ignore it?

damn y'all it's january 2019

Also, Nate Silver on that poll:

Bernie's favorables among African-Americans are generally good/fine. But this isn't a good poll to tell us much about it because the sample size here (of African-American Democrats) is like ~70 voters.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 17, 2019

Sorry for danesplaining, I just had a couple of minutes to check the net before I go to sleep. Have a nice fight and all that :)

kamala harris was an AG and a DA from 2004 to 2017, there's already a lot of information to base our decision on, and i'm not sure someone with that bad a record can make the problem go away just by saying she'll act differently as president

from that nyt op ed "Of course, the full picture is more complicated. During her tenure as district attorney, Ms. Harris refused to seek the death penalty in a case involving the murder of a police officer. And she started a successful program that offered first-time nonviolent offenders a chance to have their charges dismissed if they completed a rigorous vocational training. As attorney general, she mandated implicit bias training and was awarded for her work in correcting a backlog in the testing of rape kits." -- those are not small things

Fred - Harris is going to do fine w black voters in the South: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/412289-kamala-harris-rallies-voters-in-south-carolina

@ Aimless: "obligated" taken literally is the wrong word. i was attempting to capture what i probably misread as a sort of let-me-tell-you-how-to-do-this-the-right-way quality in your "it might be productive to use the issues ... to initiate a discourse... and get some further clarification on her current thinking, or even to persuade her to alter her thinking." like in the context of this dicussion, where you objected to a different way of taking discursive or political action, this reads as a statement that your approach is valid and pleasing, and that just saying "because of the issues i care about, her record is disqualifying to me, don't vote harris imho" is invalid and/or non-pleasing.

but maybe that's unfair because basically i'm coming back at you with my own proscriptions: if you want to defend harris, just defend harris. if you don't think the record is relevant or disqualifying, just say so. there's no need for it to become five-steps-ahead speculation about how this might be used by foreign disinformation efforts, in your case, or nerdstrom's party-infighting-got-us-trump angle. neither of which is ever going to fly anyway because, again, both could apply to any criticism of any candidate and lead us to where there's no point talking about anything anybody has ever said or done.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/kamala-harris-booker-are-early-2020-favs-among-black-leaders-n803636

@ Fred: who gets to decide there's "room" for a "divisive" fight? what qualifies as "divisive"? if there are incorrect, "fuckup" years to have "divisive fights," in which bad feelings brewed up by arguing for one platform or candidate and against others are incurably destructive, then shouldn't the party just cancel having a competitive system of candidate selection in those years?

Yeah like, i’m not anti-harris or anything, but things have to matter besides helping democrats get elected

Harris ran for DA in SF in 2003 on a pledge not to seek capital punishment, and won. When a police officer was murdered in 2004 she was severely criticized by law enforcement and other politicians for her decision not to consider it. But according to the Chronicle at the time, San Franciscans were against capital punishment by about 70 percent to 30, different from the state itself, and SF juries were known for not ever agreeing to award the death penalty in trial. So on that she was in tune with SF voters but not the state as a whole

In 2012, California voters rejected Proposition 34, which would have ended capital punishment in the state. In 2014 an op-ed was written in the Chronicle by Mugambi Jouet from Stanford criticizing Harris for arguing to uphold the CA death penalty law in front of the 9th Circuit. She and Brown could have chosen not to defend the 1977 law when it was overturned by the district court. Her argument in front of the 9th was that the district court “mistook its policy critique" of the death penalty “as a proper basis for legal judgment." The 9th Circuit overturned the lower court decision unanimously, concluding that there was no legal precedent for the arguments used to reject the original 1977 referendum originally reinstating the death penalty. Lara Bazelon’s description of that in her NYT op-ed seems very distorted to me, which makes me suspect the rest of her criticism tbh

I wish Harris had not chosen to defend the law in 2014, but I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know what the legal consequences of not defending it based on the arguments made would have been.

It has always surprised me how much support there has been in California for the death penalty. As recently as 2016, CA voters rejected another referendum, Prop 62, that would have repealed it, instead narrowly approving Prop 66, which would speed up executions! (I think it’s still mired in red tape). All of this makes me remember that Rose Bird, a CA Supreme Court Chief Justice considered a divisive ideologue and ousted by voters for her opposition to the death penalty in 1986, was a pioneer

harris clearly feels that she does not have a professional obligation to defend laws she thinks are unjust (which is the right approach imo). she did this with proposition 8, but chose not to exercise this discretion with the death penalty

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-death-penalty-kamala-harris-appeal-20140824-story.html

yeah, that makes me question her decision

The death penalty is disgustign. Maybe in some roundabout way this is principled but there is nothing i hate more than the idea that the state can murder people.

Max Weber would like a word with you

What does he say on the death penalty? I’m very uneducated.

I wondered aloud earlier if there was such a thing as "progressive prosecutors" and then someone went ahead and made a list

There are many examples of truly progressive prosecutors: @SAKimFoxx @Rollins4DA @DALarryKrasner @Bell4STL @ScottColom @kimoggforda Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, John Creuzot in Dallas. And more. @KamalaHarris is not in that group. https://t.co/ZSSRPdyq3M

— Lara Bazelon (@larabazelon) January 17, 2019

some come closer than others, but as of year 243 and president 45, the usa has yet to elect a truly progressive president. I'm not going to hold my breath.

how many times in that timespan has a "true progressive" been on the ticket?

Does lincoln count?

Eugene Debs ran on the Socialist ticket, as did Norman Thomas.

A list of names of people I don’t know? That’s good enough for me too.

xp someone? I guess you mean Lara Bazelon

I read two comments on that article before I saw someone bitching about Gillibrand and Franken. Sigh.

Way upthread, sorry but

it was broadly the least sophisticated Facebook meme bullshit that only the most addled right-wing kooks and extreme low-info voters would take at face-value

Which is... um, a lot of people

real small clickthrough rate is all you need

i guess i hadn't seen tulsi gabbard on film before. her apology made her seem lame and stilted.

and insincere honestly. i don't know why these people with no chance are throwing their hats in the ring.

attention

Elie Mystal had a great tweet in response to Gabbard's apology.

Good to apologize.
Your punishment is that you can't be president.

wants a show on RT

is it time to include mike pence in this thread

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/18/larry-hogan-donald-trump-2020-election-1110535

lots going on here

help pic.twitter.com/29b0gxpthJ

— Carl Beijer (@CarlBeijer) January 18, 2019

That is like one of those Yes Yes No segments from Reply All, and I'm at No.

we're doomed

oh hell no

LAUSD strike over apparently thanks to mediation by garcetti, so look out for him to announce soon (if the ominous real estate corruption probe of city hall doesn't get too close to him). he sucks btw.