Andrew Yang Overtakes Pete Buttigieg to Become Fourth Most Favored Primary Candidate: Poll

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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20 Responses

  1. As we were discussing on Twitter, the fact that we are making headlines out of fourth place – that’s fourth place with a 4 in it – shows the static nature of this race and the weakness of the field. Much as in motorsports, when the announcers/commentators are talking about the “battle for third/fourth place” it means the leader is well out and front and not being challenged, otherwise that better, more important story would be the one being discussed.Report

      • Murali in reply to Jaybird says:

        I wish there was more yangmentum. I think Yang should have started a bit earlier (maybe 6 months to a year).Then he’d be polling well into the double digits now. As it is, he has to overcome a lot of inertia and he hasn’t got much time.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Murali says:

          I am feeling neither Yangst nor Yanger. By being part of the debate, he is helping shape it. Libertarians helped with not only Medicinal Marijuana’s debate, but the Recreational Marijuana debate. I saw Libertarian arguments used in the service of SSM.

          In the same way, the debate is nudged in certain (good!) directions by My Main Man here.

          He is the Yangel on top of the Christmas tree in my heart.Report

          • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

            In getting marijuana measures passed, the Libertarians opened the door for black market marijuana vaping cartridges that caused deaths and permanent lung injury, resulting in a health panic and Trump raising the legal smoking and vaping age to 21.

            Thanks for striking a blow for freedom, fellas! O_OReport

            • Jaybird in reply to George Turner says:

              Studies are inconclusive.

              Anyway, you should be smoking the sticky green itself (or eating it). It’s like complaining that the bathtub gin is low quality. Drink wine! That’s what wine is for, you numbskulls!Report

              • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

                Yes, but they accomplished what even the smoking Nazis could not, raising the smoking age to 21.

                It’s pretty obvious that if a 20 year old isn’t competent to own a pistol, drink beer, or smoke, they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to vote because their judgment is obviously flawed and fundamentally unsound.

                To really shakes things up though, we shouldn’t allow them to take out loans because they’re too immature to understand the ramifications. Colleges will just love that!Report

      • North in reply to Jaybird says:

        He’s doing better than Amy so I’m happy for ya Jay; I still don’t think he’s gonna get many to any delegates.Report

    • North in reply to Andrew Donaldson says:

      Disagree partially. The race is rather static, I agree with that, but I think it’s because of the strength of the candidates; not weakness. We’ve seen what a race looks like with a grab bag of weak candidates- it’s a rolling ball of dysfunction with one candidate after the other rising to the top and then sinking back down. See the GOP field in 2015. The given candidates in this field aren’t staying mostly where they’re at due to weakness but due to strength. Which is why we don’t have a different leader of the month every month.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to North says:

        Nate Silver breaks it down:

        Report

      • greginak in reply to North says:

        Agree in general. There is one other reason the race seems static. Nothing has happened since we aren’t at the primaries yet. All these months have not had actual events. It’s a lot of talk and PR and news fluffing and debates for whatever little they are worth, but nothing that shows where people are actually at. Certainly not where the non politics nerds are at. It just feels like the race has been going on forever so we should have some idea where things are at. But we are just warming up for the first inning to drop the puck for the kickoff.Report

  2. George Turner says:

    One of the problems I have with Yang’s candidacy is that he’s a “new idea” techie guy. Such folks don’t necessarily make very good leaders because most new policy ideas fail because of real world complexities. There’s very often some good reasons why we’re not already using policy X, Y, or Z, reasons that may not be immediately obvious. Now certainly the other tendency, old folks who are hidebound by tradition, can be an equal or worse problem, but with them, new policies that are adopted usually have broad support and data to back them up.

    Tech guys, engineering types, and out-of-the-box thinkers are great for think tanks and conferences, and as their ideas get batted back and forth, the good ones get filtered from the bad ones (in theory) and as the idea catches more attention, some politicians will adopt it as a goal and see if they can manage to pass and implement it. The latter is the sausage making part of legislation, and often tech billionaires don’t have the patience, nuance, or understanding of that aspect of government. They make great TED Talks, but might not be at all good at running a government, and indeed might turn out to be a disaster because they always have to be trying something quirky.

    That problem is different from a bureaucrat or legislator who simply mandates a solution, often to a problem they created earlier, despite contradictory requirements making it impossible to follow the mandate. Here’s an example, a new California law going into effect for 2020.

    Planned Power Outages (SB-167): Electrical companies, such as PG&E, will be required to create a three-year wildfire mitigation plan that must be approved by the Wildfire Safety Division. Among other criteria, the plan must include strategies to prevent wildfires and how to provide electricity to customers who have medical conditions.

    That sounds great, except it means they have to provide electricity to any customer (medical conditions are randomly distributed) even though power is cut off to all the customers. I suggest magic electrons. Unless PG&E gives away free generators, along with the highly expensive transfer switching gear, there is no way for them to fulfill this requirement.

    Yang would probably suggest some wildly expensive way to provide electricity to any random customer (microwave beams, PG&E funded battery/inverter systems) instead of solving the real problem, that California laws, regulations, and mandates made it impossible for PG&E to run a safe grid, something other states don’t have a problem with.Report

    • J_A in reply to George Turner says:

      It is a pity that a perfectly reasonable and thought provoking comment about how technocrats are not political leaders is ruined by a completely unnecessary, completely wrong, aside

      …. that California laws, regulations, and mandates made it impossible for PG&E to run a safe grid, something other states don’t have a problem with.

      There’s nothing in California’s regulations that makes it impossible to have a safe grid. Like everyone else, from Albania to Zambia, from Alabama to Wyoming, California mandates, essentially, that vegetation be kept away from power lines, and that power lines withstand wind forces that can reasonably be expected to occur. California, like everyone else, allocates a certain percentage of the distribution tariff to cover the related expenses to achieve all of the above.

      For some reason, most likely corporate greed, PG&E, who operates on a part of the country where strong, sustained, winds are common, and where wet and dry weather alternate, creating year.y piles of tinder dry dead vegetation, neither keeps the required clearance nor builds lines strong enough.

      If anything, California’s failure hasn’t been to allow PG&E to ignore the regulations for many years, to the point where the state is crisscrossed by weak power lines running through masses of dry vegetation, lines that will fall to the ground with the next strong wind, or the one after that, and create blazing walls of flames that the same winds will push forward for miles.

      There’s nothing special about California regulations. There’s local California weather, and it is up to PG&E to build and maintain their power lines in line with the local weather conditions, with the money California mandates customers to pay for specifically that.

      Notice the one thing PG&E doesn’t say in their defense. They never argued that the money the tariff allocates is too little to pay for vegetation clearance and stronger lines. PG&E has never argued that California mandates them to do unreasonable things or things that the tariff does not cover. If PG&E had been earnestly trying to do all that California requires, and couldn’t because the tariff did not pay enough, PG&E would have been every day lobbying for ta4iff increases to cover for more vegetation clearing. But they don’t lobby for more money, because they are not even trying to do the required vegetation clearance.

      Yes, technocrats can’t mandate engineering solutions to political problems. But they should be allowed to mandate engineering solutions to technical problems. Running utilities is a technical problem. One that involves externalities. Bush fires from tumbling power lines is one such externality. Pollution is another. There are technical solutions to minimize the impact of those externalities. Let technocrats do their thing.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    How can you not love this guy?

    Report

    • When he spouts off ridiculous statistics about disappearing industries that aren’t accurate, and he is smart enough to check and doesn’t, which makes it fearmongering, but he is still more likable than most of that weak field, so…you know what that makes my head heart and my heart sad so just going to stop right there.Report