Super Tuesday, Part Deux Open Thread

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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50 Responses

  1. North says:

    I swear to God(ess?) I have whiplash from this primary. The laughter of the low attention/info voters should be accepted and embraced by political junkies like us as a valuable lesson. All the back and forth, all the drama and switchbacks and now the race is down to… … … Biden and Bernie with Bernie distantly trailing.
    I take solace in knowing that no other political junkies saw through it either. Yeesh, you look at 538’s tracking model and those lines are fishing bonkers! Biden is 99% the odds on to get a majority now. Just a skant week ago it was No one and before that it was Bernie.
    And now? Bernie’s best case outcome scenario is merely that he’ll close the gap enough to -try- to get a large plurality at the convention. Best. Case.
    And if Biden gets what the polls say he’s gonna get? Bernie is toast.
    2016 was A New Paradigm; 2020 seems to be the Party Decides strikes back; man I hope that means it’ll end with 2020 The Return of the Democrats.Report

  2. InMD says:

    Starting to see Michigan called for Biden. That would be devastating for Bernie.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to InMD says:

      He’s toast. In two weeks Joe! went from dead in the water to making a compelling argument that Bernie should drop out of the race. Unreal.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

      If Biden loses Michigan, he has no path to anything but trying to win on the second vote.

      Which he won’t do.

      So the question is… does he/should he stay in to leverage the platform or drop out for the good of democracy everywhere?Report

      • North in reply to Jaybird says:

        Well if Biden wins Michigan then odds are there won’t be a second vote; Biden could well get an outright delegate majority in round one. In fact 538 says it’s almost certain.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to North says:

          Then Biden has one job and one job only: “Vote for me. Vote for a return to normalcy. Vote for me for a return to sanity. Vote for me to make politics *BORING* again.”

          And then he has to go back to being goofy (and punctuate goofiness with boringness).

          And maybe Klobuchar for VP? Someone from the Midwest, anyway.Report

          • North in reply to Jaybird says:

            Man I would be delighted with Klobuchar for VP. She’d practically live in Wisconsin and rotate through the other Blue Wall states and that’d be a serious problem for Trump.
            But don’t you think he should consider a more liberal woman VP? Not Warren, obviously, because she’d be replaced with a Republican and because she’d be far better for liberalism as a Lioness of the Senate but perhaps Stacy Abrams or Harris? But really the Veep subject probably deserves its own article.Report

  3. George Turner says:

    It’ll be a Biden/Clinton ticket, but he’ll conveniently fall down a flight of stairs on the way to his inauguration party, so he won’t even get sworn in. Then Hillary will take the podium and say “This tragedy was completely unexpected, and like you, I’m torn with grief!” Then she’ll whip out her twelve age inauguration speech that she worked on for two months.

    But if I was a betting man, there’s a real possibility that Covid-19 will blow up the entire race, because all the remaining candidates are highly exposed and in their 70’s – except one. Tulsi is still in it, and plenty young enough to shake off the virus. Heck, she won’t even be exposed to it because she has no crowds. If all this happens prior to the convention, it’ll be interesting to see Buttigieg, Beto, Yang, and Klobuchar (who are also young) try to jump right back in, with Tulsi saying “But you failed to persist.”

    Of course the GOP won’t have a problem because the line of imperial succession natural goes to Donald Trump Jr., who is only 44.Report

  4. Saul Degraw says:

    Biden over 50 percent in all states so far. Yang apparently endorsed Biden.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    Here’s a psyop from one of the RINOs at NRO:

    I do think that if Biden doesn’t implode, he has Michigan in the bag thanks to Detroit.

    (Now all he has to do is not implode?)Report

    • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

      For some reason, Biden came out in support of the Green New Deal, which will be the nail in Detroit’s coffin. Wanting to take guns away from all the union workers, and then insultingly lying to their face about it, won’t help either.

      The Green New Deal created a huge rust belt/oil patch problem for Democrats.Report

      • Philip H in reply to George Turner says:

        except there’s a ton of unused manufacturing capacity there . . . and skilled labor . . . who can build all the stuff the green new deal actually takes to make happen. Stuff like solar panels and mounts, or windmill vanes, or batteries for electric cars or heck road paving made from recycled milk cartons (which is a thing in Europe). As with anything the climate crisis and the green new deal actually offer economic possibilities – we just have to stop insisting that everything be as it was. Because it can’t be.Report

        • George Turner in reply to Philip H says:

          And what will they manufacture? All the wind turbine jobs that don’t exist keep getting promised to people in places like West Virginia. The solar panels are made in China because our environmental regulations make us non-competitive (making them is cheaper if you emit noxious fumes). Mounts for solar panels is a trivial economic sector, much like making window frames. We don’t need to make batteries for electric cars because almost nobody buys electric cars, and if they did our grid couldn’t power them because environmentalists won’t let us build fossil fuel or nuclear plants. And why on Earth would we want to repave our roads with milk cartons instead of pavement?

          As one of AOC Green New Deal wonks mentioned, the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment. It’s just a program to push socialism.

          Union workers know all this. They don’t drive Priuses and Teslas, they drive trucks.
          That’s why the Green New Deal will make it much harder to for Democrats to take back Michigan.Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    Okay: turn Michigan back blue on the map:

    Report

    • North in reply to Jaybird says:

      I’ve always worried that a Biden campaign would be like “Of course I’ll turn the midwest back blue” and take it for granted which would leave an opening. But the results in Michigan have allayed my fears a little. The man seems to have a decent connection to blue collar voters.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

      A democrat winning the majority of Democratic votes in a democratic primary is not exactly earth shattering. He has to win other votes in the general election to, ya know, get elected.Report

  7. Stillwater says:

    I’ll just park this little truth bomb here:

    Here’s the truth…I’m a straight, white, christian, educated American male who makes a fuckton of money. Elections can’t even touch me. Fuck it, vote for Trump. Or ignore Biden because your favorite Grandpa didn’t get the nod. Go for it. I still win. Trump is a plus for me. 1/

    The thing is, he’s still a cancerous ghoul whose only goal is power and wealth and he’s happy to take a big syphilitic piss on the Constitution and the institutional strength of America to do it. But again, I still win. I’ll pay lower taxes and my kids will surpass yours. 2/

    I get why people like the guy—especially fat-faced dimwits. He’s the dumb bully they never got to be. He exudes a tasteless person’s vision of status. He’s what every angry moron thinks he’d be if only the liberals/Jews/welfare queens/etc. hadn’t ruined the American dream. 3/

    Doesn’t really matter though. I still win. I’ll wiggle out of income taxes and send my kids to private school and never worry about insurance and buy a boat named “$elf Made.” I’ll buy houses to rent to 40-ish millennials with 🌹in their twitter names who can’t afford to buy. 4/

    And you’ll either vote for the next Trump (you idiot) or boycott the next Biden because you grew up in the era of fake internet points and Change.org
    petitions and you think fleeting, peacocking displays of your ethical rectitude mean fuck-all in the real world. 5/

    Or maybe you’ll realize that the reason I’m saying all this asshole-ish but truthful shit is because you (you, me, the broader we) actually have to quit pretending that being a pissbaby about your candidate is going to do anything but make life worse for vulnerable people. 6/

    It doesn’t matter that you liked Bernie. Or Warren (man I liked Warren) or McKinsey Pete or whoever the fuck Tom Steyer is. It doesn’t matter. They lost. And pretending that someone who can’t beat Joe Fucking Biden was going to win the general is asinine. 7/

    Because here’s the thing—the real thing. You’ve got to give a shit about other people. A kid in Pennsylvania is counting on you to send Betsy Devos packing so he can have a school lunch—the only real meal he gets in a day. RBG is out here clingin to life to save jurisprudence. 8/

    People from all degrees of marginalized existences—the poor, LGBTs, immigrants, your grandma with diabetes, minorities—are counting on you to stop wilfully making shit worse by “stanning” some defunct candidate and giving more power to the grifters and single-issue fuckwits. 9/

    So sit around and pet your crotch about how Bernie was going to forgive your loans from your semiotics degree at Swarthmore. Or maybe just grow up a little and stop making the world better for people like me and worse for people to whom we owe a duty of care as fellow humans. 10/

    Care about the greater good for once—not just your infantile, idealized, selfish version of it. Care enough about your country to put away your fantasies about loan forgiveness and stop the guy whose goal is “well done steak cooked over the ashes of American governance.” 11/

    Or, don’t. Like I said. I’ll be fine. Looking forward to that boat, really. 12/12

    Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Stillwater says:

      Yep, pretty much all this.Report

    • greginak in reply to Stillwater says:

      Solid work there. I’ve been trying to talk some sense into some people on the twitters and reddit. Lots of people get it. But some are committed to an “ideal” or a personality more then making things better.Report

    • North in reply to Stillwater says:

      That’s some clever writing.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to North says:

        Yeah, I should’ve linked to the guy’s twitter account.

        Here it is: Granite @oneminutecallReport

        • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

          Do we know who this guy is? I mean in a general sense?

          That thread just seems like a giant pile of confirmed priors.

          And, since my priors are pretty different than a lot of folks here… a few of my spidey senses are tingling. I suppose it could just be the difference between being a simple HENRY and not making a “fuckton” of money, but I’m getting performance art vibe.

          If I had to lay down a marker, it would be Betsy DeVos and Boats. Have we checked how many racoons are in the trechcoat?Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

      Uh oh.

      NEWS: Bernie Sanders will hold a press conference at 1pm per @ryanobles
      in Burlington.

      We may find out how the pissbabies react pretty dang soon!Report

      • North in reply to Stillwater says:

        Would he really drop out before the Sunday debate?!? Surely it’s just a “the fight goes on” press conference.Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

        Apparently he’s staying in?

        Originally I was going to say that my gut tells me Biden unopposed for the next 4 months might not be the boon people think it would be.

        But now that he’s staying in, I’m thinking Bernie chewing on Biden for the next 4 months might not be the boon people think it would be.

        So what do I know?

        I suppose if Bernie were to stay in as part of a “movement” building scenario where he’s basically conceded defeat, but wanted to champion 2-3 items (that are more or less agreeable to the party at large) and “support but challenge” Biden, then I could see it being a boon. I’m not sure that’s how Bernie (or his faction/followers) operates.Report

        • North in reply to Marchmaine says:

          Yeah, the fight goes on, color me unsurprised. But how much fight we talking about Bernie?Report

          • Jaybird in reply to North says:

            Abolish ICE, college debt relief, the Green New Deal.

            Biden can repudiate Bernie as the Goldwater of the left.

            And establish centrism (with some occasional wandering left) as the course of the country.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

              Well, sure, if I could control a Robot Bernie I’d have him champion the craziest of all his ideas and have Biden ROFL Stomp all over them.

              But best I could imagine for Live Bernie was some realistic moderation of some of his best ideas to allow Biden to coopt one.Report

            • North in reply to Jaybird says:

              Yeah what Marchmaine said. If Bernie just pushes his policies hard then it’d be great for Biden. But if Bernie goes personal, attacks and starts going all #NeverBiden it could go really badly for Biden.

              I was pretty sure Bernie was gonna be in it all the way to the convention. The only thing I don’t know is which Bernie we’re going to get for the next couple months.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

              If Bernie is the Goldwater of the left, the 2036 election is going to be epic.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Stillwater says:

      That was a good thread. If you want to read the responses too…

      Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Stillwater says:

      I’m a straight, white, christian, educated American male who makes a fuckton of money. Elections can’t even touch me. Fuck it, vote for Trump.

      I’m certainly not a fan of the current administration, and I don’t give him credit for the economic performance of the last few years, but can we acknowledge the war on women and minorities that the more histrionic among us predicted back in November of 2016 never actually happened, and that the last three years have actually been pretty good for the vast majority of Americans, even those who are not straight, white, rich men?Report

  8. Jaybird says:

    Your daily moment of Zen:

    Report