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Election Year Open Thread: Good for Mike Bloomberg

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Stacey Abrams will not be Bloomberg’s VP, if only because his chances for the nomination are vanishingly small. But if her local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is correct, Bloomberg was responsible for about a third of the funds Fair Fight raised to fight voter suppression during the second half of 2019. For that money, not to mention the money he’ll be expected to donate in the future (and that his support will produce from other donors), she’s willing to give him a spot at her invite-only summit. Who knows, he might learn some important leassons… as might the reporters who’ll follow Bloomberg, who wouldn’t have shown up otherwise.

It’s purely transactional, on both their parts. I’m sure this is actually comforting to Mike — he’s a self-proclaimed Data Guy, for whom transactional is easy, unlike all that grip’n’grin stuff natural politicians find fulfilling.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

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If Fitzpatrick is your rep, you might want to send him a thank-you message.

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And a long read, because it’s Saturday morning and worth the effort:

… Harry Reid, who retired in 2017 after representing Nevada for 30 years in the U.S. Senate—a dozen of them as chair of the Democratic caucus, eight of them as Senate majority leader—was supposed to be dead already; his pancreatic cancer was forecasted to prove fatal within weeks. But he’s still here, which is how I came to be talking with him, not long before Thanksgiving, in a conference room at the Bellagio, asking him why he remains the person to whom many of the Democratic presidential candidates come for advice and anointment.

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have both stopped by for meetings and checked in via phone. Pete Buttigieg made a special pilgrimage to see him. Bernie Sanders welcomed Reid to his hospital room after his recent heart attack. Before Mike Bloomberg started filing the paperwork to enter the primaries, he didn’t alert many Democratic Party figures—but he did call Reid…

If defeating Donald Trump rests on the Democratic Party unifying early and strong around a nominee, then the current state of things looks ominous. Polling suggests a scenario in which four different candidates could each win each Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—with a fifth candidate, Bloomberg, the one with the deepest pockets, only then entering the primaries. Not a recipe for rapid coalescence—and conceivably a situation in which the Democratic convention arrives next July with candidates still scrambling for delegates and no one in possession of a majority. In that case, who could play the role of party elder to mediate among the various factions?

Barack Obama would seem to be the natural choice; he’s not only the last Democratic president, and the only one since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected twice with majorities of the electorate, but he remains the most popular figure, by far, in the Democratic Party. Yet it would be hard for him to appear to remain neutral. He’s good friends with one top-tier candidate, Joe Biden, his vice president for eight years; he’s expressed public doubts and private annoyance about the socialism-inflected movement inspired by another, Bernie Sanders; he’s had an uneasy relationship with a third, Elizabeth Warren, since she briefly worked for him setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and Buttigieg has explicitly tried to position himself as the next Obama. (Obama actually has deeper roots and a closer friendship with a fifth candidate, Deval Patrick, than with any of these four.) But beyond this, Obama doesn’t want to be the party mediator or convention broker. Part of why he’s retreated from the public is because he’s hoping the party will move past him, and he doesn’t think that his being seen to have handpicked Trump’s opponent would be good for Democrats’ odds in the general election. There’s also the more self-interested worry about his legacy: What would it say about him if he couldn’t get a deal done, or if his handpicked candidate loses to Trump?

So if not Obama, then who? Not Bill or Hillary Clinton—they’re too loathed by some of the very factions they’d be trying to soothe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the de facto leader of the party, and people close to her hope and expect that she might be asked to mediate, based on her skill at steering the party toward the center-left. But she doesn’t have much of a relationship with any of the candidates or their campaigns aside from Biden, so she wouldn’t be able to exert personal suasion effectively.

That leaves the man, hairless due to chemotherapy, sitting across from me. Reid knows all the candidates who are within range of contention for the nomination; his former aides populate their campaign staffs. Perhaps most important, given the intransigent nature of Bernie Sanders and his supporters—who were notoriously reluctant to yield to Hillary Clinton last time around—Reid may be the only politician in America other than Sanders himself who’s trusted by Jane O’Meara Sanders, the senator’s wife and possibly most fight-hungry defender…

Reid said he agrees with Obama’s warning two weeks ago that the electorate was not as into progressive revolution as some candidates and Democrats on Twitter want to believe—but he also assured me that the party isn’t on a self-destructive bender. “You can go back and look at presidential primaries for as long as you want to go back, and candidates are always criticized in the primary for being too far to the left. But as time moves on, you wind up being more center. It’s going to happen this time, just like it always has,” he said.

Moreover, opposition to Trump will unite Democrats, he predicted, and heal the rifts among them. “We know that to say four more years of Trump will not be good for the country is a gross, gross understatement.”…

If the selection of the Democratic nominee does come down to Reid brokering a compromise, whom might he back? He won’t say, of course, and has promised not to make any endorsement until at least after Nevada’s primary, at the end of February. But he’s been talking up Warren since the 2016 election ended, and she was the candidate he was decidedly the most effusive about, calling her “one of the finest people I’ve ever worked with.” And many former Reid staffers occupy prominent roles on the Warren and Sanders campaigns and on lefty Twitter.

Does all this mean that you’re a secret liberal, or you’re more progressive than people thought? I asked Reid.

“I’m glad you think it’s a secret,” he told me…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Yearning for Their White Dude

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The way we live now…


They’re not racist-racist! It’s just that things have always been a certain way: Iowa was quadrenially important, and presidents were white. We tried experimenting with that last factor, and things went all to hell! Maybe America (not *them*, of course, but all those other voters) just isn’t ready for a(nother) President who isn’t white, and male!

Such a nice young man, that Mayor Pete…

Other candidates are gonna be less oblique, of course, because they’ve got their base locked down already:

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Smash the Green Lantern (Theory)

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Open Thread: A Reminder That the Electoral College Needs to Go

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It’s now part of the official GOP program for keeping “America” in the hands of the rich, white, and Republican. Once again, Trump says the quiet parts out loud.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Excellent Choice, Ms. Abrams!

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Per the Washington Post:

… Abrams, speaking at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in Las Vegas, announced a 20-state voter protection initiative, using her experience challenging voting laws during her gubernatorial campaign last year in Georgia, which included widespread irregularities.

“We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018,” Abrams said…

The effort, expected to cost between $4 million and $5 million, will target 20 states, most of them battlegrounds in the Midwest and Southeast, and three states with gubernatorial elections this year: Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi…

In past election cycles, campaigns and state parties tended to wait until the start of general election campaigning to put together voter protection programs, which were often dismantled after elections. But with ongoing efforts by Republican state lawmakers to pass more restrictive voting laws, Groh-Wargo said, it was important that Democrats start working now to be ready to help voters navigate potential hurdles. Similarly, some states, such as Michigan and Nevada, have recently passed laws to expand access to voting, and party leaders and activists in those states need to make sure voters can take advantage of the changes…

The majority of the program will be run by Fair Fight PAC. Depending on the campaign finance laws of individual states, Fair Fight will make direct cash donations or will help groups raise money to hire staff, set up voter hotlines and develop public information campaigns…

Read the whole thing — it’s really uplifting!

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Open Thread: Moscow Mitch Goes There

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Maybe he fractured that shoulder patting himself on the back. At the same event:

Newsweek, “#MassacreMitch Trends As People Blame Mitch McConnell Blocking Gun Control Legislation for Mass Shootings”:

… More than 120,000 tweets have been sent using the #MassacreMitch hashtag after at least 20 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a further nine people killed in a shooting around 13 hours later in Dayton, Ohio.

Many Twitter users expressed their anger towards McConnell for blocking a Senate vote on a bill passed by the House of Representatives in February which would require full background checks to be run against every person who wishes to purchase a gun.

Others also accused McConnell of costing people’s lives by pandering to the NRA due to the donations he and the Republican party receive from the lobbying group.

It is the second time in a matter of days that a McConnell-related hashtag has trended on Twitter. Tens of thousands of people used the “Moscow Mitch” hashtag after the Kentucky senator blocked a set of election security bills…

Several Democratic lawmakers and politicians are urging McConnell to call the Senate back for an emergency session so that the background check bill can be passed in a vote and move closer to becoming law.

Senator and 2020 presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, tweeted: “The House passed a bill more than 5 months ago to require basic background checks on gun sales—the very least we can do to keep our loved ones safe. How many more people need to die before @SenateMajLdr McConnell puts aside @NRA interests and gives that bill a vote?”…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Readership (Voter) Capture

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From the Washington Post:

Former first lady Michelle Obama is urging teachers throughout the country to make sure students who are eligible to cast ballots actually register and “are ready to vote.”

Obama made her call through a video address at two recent teachers union conferences: the annual convention of the National Education Association, the country’s largest labor union, and the American Federation of Teachers. Together, the organizations have as many as 5 million members, most of them educators.

Her outreach to teachers is the first piece of a voter registration initiative that she helped launch last year, a national, nonpartisan organization called When We All Vote. Other co-chairs include Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monáe, Chris Paul, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. The teachers unions are partners with the nonprofit initiative, as are other organizations including the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote…

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Repub Venality Open Thread: Still Laboring to ‘Make America White Again’

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The Washington Post, this morning:

There are two likely explanations for the Justice Department replacing its legal team in the census citizenship question case. Neither of them is good, and one could signal something much worse lying ahead.

The Justice Department announced the moves Sunday, as The Post’s Matt Zapotosky reported, and there is at least some indication that it was because the lawyers had qualms about the direction in which this was heading…

Another not-mutually-exclusive possibility is that the lawyers had seen their credibility shot by changing their minds about how to proceed. The old legal team told a judge last week that they were done, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross waved the white flag publicly too, before President Trump reversed the administration’s course in a tweet…

Or as Nancy Pelosi frames it, per Bloomberg:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused President Donald Trump’s administration Monday of wanting to “make America white again” with its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

“You know his hat? ‘Make America white again.’ They want to make sure that people, certain people, are counted,” Pelosi said at a press conference on election security. “It’s really disgraceful and it’s not what our founders had in mind.”

Pelosi said the goal of the Trump administration is “self-evident” to have “a chilling effect” so certain populations will not respond to the census…

She added that Democrats were fighting for an accurate census count and are seeking enough funding for outreach to ensure everyone is counted.

Democrats are also seeking to enforce subpoenas for information on the census. The House Oversight and Reform Committee voted last month to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for withholding documents.

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Because of Course He Did

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This is not even remotely surprising:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) pushed officials at the state’s Department of Public Safety to scour driver’s license records for noncitizens and forward that information to the Texas secretary of state, a fellow Republican, in advance of the state’s botched voter purge, according to emails made public Tuesday.

Texas officials would go on to falsely claim that they had found nearly 100,000 noncitizens registered to vote. They later admitted that number was based on deeply flawed data. But some Texas officials knew all along that they could access more information in order to determine whether the people whose driver’s licenses said they were noncitizens were actually noncitizens, the emails suggest — and pushed ahead regardless.

The emails, obtained by the Campaign Legal Center as part of litigation over the purge effort, provide the first look behind the scenes into a highly controversial state effort to identify noncitizens on Texas’ voter rolls. The state has refused to comply with a congressional request to turn over communications and documents related to the January incident.

It doesn’t matter if you are actually a citizen, Republicans don’t consider you a full citizen if your skin is a certain color or if your last name is harder to pronounce than Smith. And nothing will happen in John Roberts’ post-racial America.

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Proud to Be A Democrat Open Thread: Good News Out of Georgia

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Full props to Stacey Abrams!

Which reminded me, I hadn’t yet found a chance to post this great Washington Post profile, “Stacey Abrams: Being a black woman in politics isn’t ‘some fatal diagnosis’”:

…In your book you describe just showing up to a [Spelman College] board of trustees meeting [while a student there]. Why did you crash it, and what did they make of you?

I did not understand why my tuition had to go up every year. I did not understand why financial aid did not keep pace with tuition. So I showed up to the meeting. When [Spelman president Johnnetta Cole] allowed me in, the person I sat beside was a partner at an investment firm. I didn’t know what an investment firm was. But he was very kind. Everyone was. He let me sit beside him and shifted his notebook over to me. And I’m looking at all of these numbers; I had no idea what I was looking at. And he leaned over and started explaining financial statements to me.

Then there was the highest-ranking woman at Coca-Cola. She started telling me things. And the president of Ben & Jerry’s. They saw it as an opportunity to educate me, and I was just so hungry for information. I was listening and learning so much so that over time, they forgot that I sort of barged in. They started telling me when the meetings were. And I eventually got my own notebook.

Sitting in those board meetings was incredibly eye-opening. It showed me that these things weren’t impossible to know. And you didn’t have to be “to the manner born” to learn. You just had to work harder…

To quote the great Shirley Chisholm: If there’s not a seat for you at the table, bring a folding chair!

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Democrats Are Pro-Voters; Repubs Are Not

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The Washington Post, paper of record in the company town where national politics is the monopoly industry, has a good explainer:

The House approved a far-reaching elections and ethics bill Friday — one that would change the way congressional elections are funded, impose new voter-access mandates on states and, in one of several provisions targeting President Trump, force disclosure of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

Democrats dubbed the bill H.R. 1, a designation meant to signal its place as a centerpiece of their congressional agenda. The measure, which has more than 500 pages, contains dozens of provisions favored by liberal advocacy groups, labor unions and other Democratic allies.

“It’s a power grab, a power grab on behalf of the people,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at an event on the Capitol steps ahead of the planned vote.

The bill is headed for a brick wall in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made clear it will not get a vote. However, Democrats and their allies said the bill’s passage would build momentum for action in coming years if and when Democrats solidify control in Washington.

“If Mitch McConnell is the immovable object, H.R. 1 is the unstoppable force,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the lead author of the bill. “We’ll keep pushing on it.”…

Read the whole thing for a full list of the bill’s (excellent!) provisions.

Ed Kilgore, at NYMag:

… Aside from its scope, what’s most remarkable about HR1 is that every single House Democrat voted for it… And every Republicans voted against it, which means the GOP is determined to use barriers to full participation in elections — along with related abuses like partisan gerrymandering and unregulated campaign spending — to maintain its competitive position, regardless of public opinion….

The vote on HR1 should also provide something of a counterargument to all the recent “Democrats in disarray” story lines stemming from intraparty debates over socialism or Israel. No, the bill won’t even get a hearing in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell has denounced it as the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.” Mitch has a point: It might well help Democrats in the long run, for the rather honorable reason that they are defending rather than resisting the full expression of the popular will.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Selma Sunday

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Matt Viser, at the Washington Post:

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls came here to a resonant remembrance of one of the bloodiest moments of the civil rights movement on Sunday, with Sen. Cory Booker talking emotionally about being a descendant of slaves and others urging a renewed defense of voting rights…

Booker hinted at the words of Martin Luther King Jr. to draw attention to what he depicted as a resurgence of racial animosity.

“The dream is under attack. The dreamers are in danger,” Booker said. “And we need each other more than we realize in this country.”

Selma has become an annual pilgrimage site for Democratic politicians, culminating with a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, marchers advocating for voting rights were attacked by police in a day that has become known as Bloody Sunday. The Voting Rights Act was signed the same year. This year, the events marking one of the most searing moments of the civil rights movement took place over four days, including a Jubilee Golf Tournament on Friday and a “battle of the bands” on Saturday.

The main event, Sunday’s march across the bridge with linked arms, call-and-response, and gospel songs, was nearly derailed by thunderstorms. But the weather cleared enough for thousands to make the walk.

A trio of potential presidential candidates — Sanders of Vermont and Booker of New Jersey, who have announced their campaigns, and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is considering a bid — were here along with Clinton during the day’s events…

Sunday’s events provided a forum for the belief among many African American leaders that the GOP has been launching a renewed fight against voting rights, with such measures as voter ID laws and the curtailment of early voting.

“Make no mistake: We are living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy,” Clinton said. “There may not be, thank God, tanks in the streets. But what’s happening goes to the heart of who we are as a nation.”…

Brown, who told reporters that he will decide on a presidential bid by the end of March, also circulated among the mostly African American attendees, asking about their lives.

Asked how he could compete in a diverse field of candidates, and with an increasingly diverse electorate, Brown said he would let his record speak for itself.

“If I run, I’ll be the only Democrat on that stage who voted against the Iraq War. I’ll be the only Democrat on that stage who supported marriage equality 20 years ago. I’ll be the only person on that stage who has a longtime F from the NRA,” Brown said. He pointed to his face. “I can change a lot of things, but I can’t change this part of me, right?”

I don’t think Sherrod Brown will end up as our Democratic nominee (although plenty of people on twitter have suggested he’d be a great vp for Kamala Harris), but I am very interested in seeing what he’ll be saying over the next few months!

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Election Fraud Open Thread: A Re-Run in North Carolina

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Per the local Charlotte Observer:

The new campaign in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District kicked off Friday with a rally by Democrat Dan McCready, hints from several would-be GOP candidates and silence from Republican Mark Harris.

The flurry of action came a day after the North Carolina State Board of Elections ordered a new election following a hearing that detailed election fraud in Bladen County.

It made its decision after Harris stunned the hearing with his own call for a new election, after insisting for weeks that he won the vote last fall and should be certified…

The primary campaign would be relatively short. Though no schedule has been set, elections officials said one scenario would be for a May primary, a June runoff if needed and an October general election. The same officials have proposed a May 14 primary in the 3rd District, vacant since the death of Republican U.S. Rep. Walter Jones…

Former Mecklenburg County commissioner Matthew Ridenhour, a Charlotte Republican who lost his seat in November, said he’s received texts and emails since Thursday urging him to run. He expects to decide within a few days. And Republican legislators could run for Congress in a special election without fear of losing their seats, which are not up until 2020.

Despite McCready’s headstart, the 9th District still leans Republican. No Democrat has represented it for decades and President Donald Trump carried the district by 11 points. But some Republicans said the election fraud and Harris’ ties to Dowless have hurt the party’s label in the 9th.

“We have some work to do to repair our brand, and I’m not sure the current folks in leadership know exactly how to do that,” said Shaheen. “In my opinion party leadership in Raleigh made a fatal mistake by jumping out in front and being so supportive when they didn’t have the whole story.”…

Between the messy failure of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and the new State Court ruling on ‘racial gerrymandering’, it seems the GOP party leadership had a pretty good outline of the whole story — and since their guys were using those stolen votes to ‘win’ elections, they were just fine with that!

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