The Pandemic And The Table, Part 1.

The inside of the first Piggly Wiggly, the first "supermarket", from our post on its opening in 1916.

Interesting post from the USDA:

Will COVID-19 Threaten Availability and Affordability of our Food?

The answer, according to the USDA, is almost assuredly no.  And I'd further guess that's right.

Not that COVID 19 hasn't revealed some interesting things that experts no doubt already new about the food distribution system in the US, but which most folks, including myself, did not.

For one thing, there isn't a food distribution system per se, but two of them, one for regular home consumption and one for restaurants.  That surprised me, but it makes sense in retrospect.  The two systems actually have nearly no commonality.  

That turns out to be enormously important for the simple reason that it further turns out that 50% of the American food distribution is dedicated to restaurants, which stunned me.  But then again, stopping to think about it, a lot of people in our busy modern world eat two meals out of three at restaurants every day without even thinking about it.  They probably would even balk at the thought, but they do.

By this I mean the people who stop at McDonalds for an Egg McMuffin, or something similar at some other fast food joint, and then eat lunch out after that.  Add to that the large number of Americans who ate out a lot otherwise, if not ate well, up until COVID 19's stay at home orders, and you have 50% of American food being served through restaurants rather than through the home.

And that explains why the boxed beef, vegetables, buns, tortillas, etc. etc. that are served up daily on American plates at restaurants have come to have a different food supply chain.  Those places don't go down to Safeway, Ridley's, Smith's Albertson's etc., to pick up their food constituents.  And they certainly don't go to Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery.

And as an NPR broadcast I listened to the other day revealed, that chain has been disrupted.

In fact, at least one farming enterprises that are solely in the restaurant food system has decided simply to let its crops stay in the field right now rather than harvest them (they must be located in the south or California where they can presently be harvesting).  They're outside the grocery store chain and therefore they're retail customers have quit ordering and the food has no place to go.

And as it has no place to go, people who previously ate two or three meals a day from restaurants are now eating meals at home.  Maybe not good meals (although there seems to have been a boom in home cooking), but meals.

And that in fact has created a heightened demand at the grocery store.

So, what's all that tell us?

Well, maybe not much. But maybe it does.  Maybe its one of those thing that shows the weakness of the centralized consolidated market systems we've allowed to evolve.  I.e., when Walmart started being a grocer, maybe that was a red flag wwe shouldn't have ignored.

There was a time when this didn't work this way.  Local restaurants, and they were all local at one time, bought food locally.  They pretty much had to, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they did.  Where they were high quality restaurants they demanded high quality supplies, and that's not a bad thing either.  

That made food, even restaurant food, pretty local, but that's part of the charm, or not, of local food.  It was authentic, which might mean authentically great or authentically bland, but it was authentic any way you looked at it.

Now, in fairness, some of this remains.  Anyone who has been to the coat and eaten in better restaurants has sampled part of the food chain system that still works the old way.  In some localities, although they're rare, aspects of this have been preserved somewhat accidentally by law, as in Hawaii where fish are often sold right off sporting docks to local restaurants.  In the west, and in this instance we mean all the way to Northern California, there are some restaurants that have teemed with ranchers for the direct supply of local beef, and even in some areas of the rural West you'll run into this.  And one big boom in the local has been the massive return of locally brewed beers.

But on the other hand, when you go to Big Box Burger, or whatever chain, the beef, poultry, lettuce and the like, probably came from somewhere else and from somebody there's no chance that you knew.

And this provides something interesting to muse about from a Distributist prospective. While most economist would certainly argue that our large system favors low food and efficient distribution, normally, if we had a more localized one it might have some really interesting impacts.  For one thing, local demand creates a local need to fill it.  I.e., if Big Red's Barbecue, or whatever, bought from local suppliers, there'd be a demand for local suppliers, which would likely mean that being a local farmer or rancher, let alone grocer, would be a more attractive and realistic possibility.  

We tend not to think of things that way, but it's none the less the case.  By going from local grocery stores to super markets, we've wiped out what was once an entire retail profession, grocers, and replaced them with supermarket workers, for the most part.  And we've made it harder for a guy to be a local truck farmer as well.  Indeed, we've so messed up the dairy industry that it's practically impossible to imagine the way it had once been, with local creameries that supplied milk fro local cows.

And a byproduct of that has been increased urbanization and the evolution of the grocery store owner into the Walmart clerk, and the local dairy farmer into the cubicle worker, who is now at home sheltering in place.

The creamery that my family once owned.

April 16, 1920. Carranza seeks to repeat history. . .

by transporting his troops across Texas to go into action in northern Mexico.

It was exactly that action in 1915, which allowed Carranza to transport his troops across Texas to go into action against Poncho Villa's, that lead to the 1916 raid by Villa on Columbus New Mexico.  Villa, not illogically, concluded that the United States should be chastised for intervening in the Mexican civil war in that fashion.

The irony was that Carranza personally disliked the United States and had never been its friend.  Wilson's 1915 action had been a mistake.  Carranza was asking him to repeat it. At the same time, Mexican revolutionaries in Sonora had invaded neighboring Sinola.

It was Arbor Day.

Agriculture Secretary Meredith making the principal address at the Arbor day exercises in Washington D.C.

Francis Fukuyama, this is your wake up call

Does anyone recall that in 1992 Francis Fukuyama published a book called The End Of History, purposing that era had arrived?

Francis, you dope, it wasn't.

April 15, 1920. Crimes and Revolutions.

Children at the Washington D.C.,Municipal Play Ground at 18th. & Kalorama Road planting a tree in memory of animals killed during World War I during "Be kind to dumb animals" week. The tree was entered on the honor roll of the American Forestry Association.  April 15, 1920

On the front page of the newspapers around the country, the events in Mexico continued to make front page news as Mexico slid back into war with itself.

Also on the front page, the strike in Chicago, which we haven't been addressing, came to an end, as did a local high school student's strike.

Not on the front page of this paper, however, elevator operators were going out on strike. 

This is a nearly extinct occupation, at least in the form which once existed when elevators were mechanically complicated and had to be manually stopped at floors with precision.  W here they exist now, it's mostly as a courtesy of sorts, or as a form of announcing operator, a la Fran Kubelik in The Apartment.

In Braintree Massachusetts a guard and paymaster were murdered in the robbergy of a shoe company.  The murder would ultimately lead to the trial, conviction and execution of anarchist Nicola Sacca and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Vanzetti left, Sacca, right.

The trial was tainted by the defendants' anarchism and their status as Italian immigrants and it was accordingly controversial at the time.  Debates about the verdict started nearly immediately and have continued to this day with the result that its now fairly impossible to determine what their status was in regard to the crime, if any.

On this same day Irish Republicans acted to establish their own law enforcement and judicial system in the parts of Ireland they controlled or heavily contested.  Ultimately, 21 of the Irish counties would come to have Republican police and judicial systems and some counties would act to recognize the Irish Republic as the sovereign rather than the crown.

April 14, 1920. Gathering Storms.

Salvador Diego Fernandez, the then new Charge d'Affaires of the Mexican Embassy, called at the State Department on this day in 1920.  Dressed in a dapper fashion but wearing a serious expression, the news coming out of Mexico was no doubt the topic of his conversations inside the building.

The news coming out of Mexico on this day suggested that a civil war in Mexico was about to commence right on the U.S. border.

Carranza was rushing to meet the challenge presented by Sonora in revolt.  And that entailed moving troops right along the troublesome border with the U.S.

Indeed, the Secretary of War was asking for additional troops to guard that border.

Another border also featured in Washington on this day, that being one that Armenian veterans of World War One, who staged a parade in D.C., hoped would be recognized for Armenia.  They received a Marine Corps escort and there was good reason, at the time, to think that their wishes would come true in light of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ongoing attempted occupation of Turkey by France, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Armenian veterans presenting a petition after their parade.

In Washington D.C., President Wilson  met his cabinet for the first time since his stroke.

Josephus Daniels and John Payne, April 14, 1920.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby and Secretary. of Agriculture E.T. Meredith arriving at the White House for the Cabinet Meeting. Both men were new to their positions.

The 2020 Election, Part 6

March 4, 2020

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, the day in which the single largest number of Democratic delegates are chosen, and today we have our sixth installment in this series for the 2020 election.  There will be more, of course.

Before we post on Super Tuesday, let's recap what's happened so far.

The first contest was the Iowa Caucus from which Pete Buttigieg emerged the top vote getter and for which the press declared second place Bernie Sanders, who didn't do any better there than he had in 2016, to be the winner.  Press fascination followed Sanders to New Hampshire where he did considerably worse than he had in 2016 but where the split among the centrist Democrats caused 3/4s of that vote to be spread out among three candidates, with Buttigieg and Klobuchar doing well, but not so well as to be able to out tally Sanders.

With that race done, Patrick Deval dropped out and the press declared Sanders, still doing no better than he had in 2016, and in fact worse than he had in 2016, to be a steamroller.  That took the race to Nevada where Sanders actually did well, and the press declared him, in a declaration which I suspect will prove false in more ways than one, to be the favorite among "young blacks" and "Latinos".  More likely, the drumbeat of his inevitable victory caused people to vote for the Press declared favorite.

By that time there were some amateur pundits (i.e., me) pointing out that Sanders percentage of the vote was really not that great and most Democrats were voting against him.  Moreover, his percentages, save for Nevada, weren't better than 2016, they were equal or worse than 2016.

The press declared Biden doomed in the race he'd expected to win, South Carolina. Then that primary occurred and Biden swamped his opponents. Suddenly it looked like the press might be wrong and in fact pundits started to get wobbly about their predictions, noting that Biden might be able to disrupt things on Super Tuesday, maybe.  Still, the press was oddly convinced that Biden wasn't doing all that well with Black voters, which he very clearly was, as young black voters, they believed, were voting for Sanders.  Maybe, but yesterday's tallies suggest that the press was just wrong in general.

And so Super Tuesday was yesterday.  Here's what we know, the morning after.  Before we look at that, keep in mind that if a candidate takes 15% of the ballot, that candidates gets delegates.  These are not winner takes all contests.

Alabama:  Biden won.
Arkansas:  Biden won.
Massachusetts:  Biden won.
Maine:  Biden won
Minnesota:  Biden won.
Oklahoma:  Biden won.
Tennessee:  Biden won.
Texas:  Biden won.
Virginia:  Biden won.

California:  Sanders won.
Colorado:  Sanders won.
Utah:  Sanders won.
Vermont:  Sanders won


American Samoa:  Bloomberg won.

Hmm. . . .

Now, we really do need to break these down a bit more, as noted, candidates getting 15% get delegates.  Sometimes even less is required, apparently

So let's look at those states again:

Alabama:

Biden:  63%   40 delegates
Sanders 16.6%  7 delegates
Bloomberg 11.6%  1 delegate.

Alabama has a large black population, and it's clear that Biden has a large element of support in that community.  Sanders did well enough, however to take 7 delegates.  Bloomberg did well enough to take one, but he's way under performing there.

Arkansas:

Biden:  40.5%  16 delegates (so far)
Sanders:  22.4%  8
Bloomberg 16.7%  4

Probably the same story here as for Arkansas.

California

Sanders:  32.8%  72 delegates (so far)
Biden:  24% 21
Bloomberg:  14.9% 8
Warren:  12.1% 7

California's politics have become increasingly odd as the state approaches the distressed state category. Sanders was expected to dominate and he did take the more delegates than his nearest competitor, by a 10% margin.  But this isn't the blow out expected.

It also may at least partially reflect early voting.  The one Californian I know mentioned that person had voted by mail. This is a topic that's going to have to be addressed as now some voters are throwing their votes away for this reason.

Indeed, California every single candidate who had run, including some you haven't heard of, even hear, received at least four digits in votes.  Buttigieg and Klobuchar's combined tallies were over 10%.  Thousands of California ballots, in a state that's been smarting about coming after Iowa, were just wasted, and in fact California didn't get the attention it wanted as by the time it was done voting, it was already clear it was a Biden sweep elsewhere.   California would be better off limiting mail in votes and taking a position after Super Tuesday. . . or before.

That Sanders would do well in California isn't a surprise. California is the state where "Social Democrats" basically rule already and its a pretty good test bed for failure in that regard, with the results being pretty negative.

Indeed, that latter fact may have played into California's votes  Biden took 24%, but Bloomberg took almost 15%.  Added together they exceed Sanders' votes.  Of course, if Warren is added into Sanders, that isn't true.

Colorado

Sanders:  36.2%  20 delegates so far
Biden:  23.2%  9 delgates so far
Bloomberg:  20.9%  9 delegates so far
Warren:  17.2%  1 delegate

Colorado has gone from being a Republican state to a Democratic one as the state worked hard to form a new, and as it turned out weedy, economy.  It's often noted to have a large number of California ex-pats.  It's now a Democratic state and a "young" one, which likely showed in its support for Sanders.

Oddly, Colorado is way behind some other states, including California, in counting yesterday's results, so we really don't know what the final tally is, but it will be something like that.

Maine

Biden:  33.9%  8 delegates
Sanders:  33.1%  8 delegates
Warren:  16%  2 delegates

Maine is Vermont's neighbor and this is thought to have influenced the vote there.  Still, in the end, Biden polled slightly better there than Sanders, and some left wing Democrats there went for Warren.

Massachusetts

Biden:  33.7%  34 delegates
Sanders:  26.6%  26 delegates
Warren:  21.2 %  17 delegates

Warren picked up quite a few delegates in various states, in small increments, but she notable could not carry her own state.  And the centrist candidate pulled ahead, albeit barely, the leading left wing candidate.  Had Warren not been in the race, Sanders would have dominated Massachusetts

At this point its obvious that Warren is in staying in the race knowing she's going to loose and the only thing she is doing is taking delegates away from Sanders.  Strategically the only way this makes sense is if she's figuring 1) she can bargain with those candidates for the VP slot from Sanders at a brokered convention and/or 2) Sanders' old age and health will catch up with him before the convention and she'll inherit Sanders' delegates by default.

Massachusetts Democrats, it might be noted, basically slapped Warren in the face.  There's no two ways about it.  There's obviously some discontent with her in her home state right now.

Minnesota:

Biden: 38.6%  38 delegates
Sanders:  29.9%  26 delegates
Warren:  15.4%  10 delegates

Minnesota was a gift of Klobuchar's to Biden, but note that the hard left took barely more votes than the center. Warren acted as the spoiler to Sanders in Minnesota.

North Carolina:

Biden:  43%
Sanders:  24.1%
Bloomberg:  13%

For some reason there's no delegate tally for North Carolina yet, but clearly Biden will take more delegates than anyone else.

Here, Bloomberg hurt Biden from absolutely dominating the state more than he already did.

Oklahoma

Biden:  38.7%  21 delegates
Sanders:  25.4%  13 delegates
Bloomberg:  13.9%  3 delegates

Before South Carolina, Bloomberg was expected to take Oklahoma.  The winds blowing out of South Carolina changed this one.

Tennessee:

Biden:  41.5%  28 delegates
Sanders:  24.7%  15 delegates
Bloomberg:  15.9% 7 delegates.

The story here is somewhat like that of Oklahoma.  Had Bloomberg not been in the race this would have been a Biden blow out.

Texas

Biden:  33.6%  56 delegates
Sanders:  30%  50 delegates
Bloomberg:  14.7%  4 delegates

Sanders was expected to win this just a few days ago. And like elsewhere, Bloomberg didn't poll anywhere near enough to win, but enough to keep Biden from having a blow out.

Utah

Sanders:  34.6%  9 delegates
Bloomberg:  16.9%  2 delegates
Biden:  17.1%  1 delegate

Wow, what happened here.

Well, Utah is an extremely conservative state and one with a unique demographic based.  It resembles Wyoming in its conservatism in that the Democratic Party is very weak there. By extension, with a Democratic Party so weak, most of the centrists Democrats long ago moved over to the Republican Party, leaving the Democratic Party unnaturally weak and non reflective, for the most part, with its state.

Additionally, Utah is extraordinarily business friendly and development oriented.  Like a lot of conservative states with that sort of view, it ironically attracts growth that encourages the immigration into the state of a young and much more liberal voting base.  Colorado provides a good example of this, and it'll be interesting to see how Utah, which has had this view since its foundation, will handle this in the future. Salt Lake City is already a fairly cosmopolitan, if still fairly conservative, city whose voter don't hold the expected views.  That also is part of what we're seeing here.

Having said that, Utah's politics are incredibly conservative, and most of its politicians and voters are as well.  In the general election, it's going for Trump no matter what.  And here, Biden and Bloomberg split the centrist vote.

Vermont

Sanders:  50.7%  11 delegates
Biden:  22% 5 delegates
Warren:  12.6%  0 delegates

Sanders is from Vermont so it was expected that he'd win.  Still, Biden managed to do as well there as Sanders has generally done else elsewhere.  And Warren once again came in to nearly hurt Sanders.

Virginia

Biden:  53.3%  66 delegates
Sanders:  23.1%  31 delegates
Warren:  10.8%  2 delegates

The Old Dominion really went for Biden, which wasn't predicted.  Quite a few thought Sanders would take it, but he had his best results there.

And once again, Warren hurt Bernie

So what is the overall delegate count right now?

Well, it's not really known as results are still coming in, so it will change. But preliminarily it looks like this:

Biden:  453
Sanders:  382
Warren:  50
Bloomberg: 44
Buttigieg:  26
Klobuchar:  7
Gabbard:  1

It's pretty clear that Biden is resurgent in a major way.  Even if Sanders had swept California Biden might still be in this position and for that matter even if Sanders managed to pull ahead, it wouldn't be so far ahead that the message that he's now in a declining position to come through.  Having failed to take Texas in a dominating fashion, his race is now frankly over.  He won't see it that way, however.

Biden is likely to carry this trend through to the end, although the remaining states will be hard fought and Sanders will still take a few (my prediction is that the Utah result for Sanders will repeat itself here).  But Sanders, who was declared to be unstoppable by some punditry even after South Carolina, wasn't.  He's been stopped.

Unless, that is, Bloomberg's prediction that the "race starts in Florida" is true.

Bloomberg massively underperformed on Super Tuesday, but he still performed, bringing himself nearly on part with Warren who has been in the race since the onset.  He's likely to keep pulling from Biden but he's unlikely to take any states. That, however, could really hurt Biden in states where he'll still be close to Sanders.

In fact, in every state, including California, where Sanders took the most votes, Biden would have if he'd received Bloomberg's voters.  And he probably would have.

And what's up with Warren at this point?  She went into Super Tuesday knowing she couldn't win, what's the point?  She didn't even win her home state, Biden did.  Here she pulled votes away from SAnders.  She's still in for some reason, and it isn't to win.  As noted above, she's either hoping for a VP slot under Sanders, which is a real possibility if Sanders doesn't start  holding her spoiling role against her (which he very well might), or she's there in case Sanders poor health means he's out of the race prior to the nomination.

And, we can't help but note, the punditry pretty much dropped the ball on the Democrats process all along.  Indeed, last night Chuck Todd was making the observation that by and large Sanders never pulls in more than 25%, which means his base hasn't grown. . . which is something that another net pundit, i.e., me, noted weeks ago.

One added thing.  The Democratic belief that winning the Iowa Caucus means you will win the nomination is clearly wrong.  Buttigieg won the Iowa Caucus, in spite of what the press believes, and he's out.  He was nearly neck and neck with Sanders, and Sanders isn't going to get the nomination either, most likely.

Okay, let's take a look at the local races.

In the race for the Senate, Cynthia Lummis is the front runner in the GOP race, and therefore the front runner, against her only serious contender, Converse County Commissioner Robert G. Short.  The race also features candidates Joshua Wheeler, Patrick Dotson and R. Mark Armstrong, none of whom have a chance in the race.

The Democratic candidates for the same office are University of Wyoming ecology professor Merev Ben-David, teacher Chuck Jagoda of California, and Laramie community organizer Yana Ludwig.  None of these candidates stands any chance at all.  Ben-David is likely the one who would likely be nominated in most states but right now, with the Democrats hardly running at all, either Ben-David or Ludwig could be nominated if another better known Democrat doesn't enter the race.  Probably none will as their chances of prevailing are next to nonexistent.

Liz Cheney will be reelected to Wyoming's lone house seat.  So far only Carol Hafner, who doesn't live in Wyoming and who is campaign as a left wing candidate, has announced for the Democrats.  It's possible, therefore, that Wyoming might not have a Democratic candidate for the contest at all.

Indeed, the real race is in the primary race for the Senate and there's no race at all going on right now for the House seat.  Nothing could be more emblematic on the near complete disappearance of the Democratic Party in the state as none of the Congressional seats are actually being seriously contested.  Running as a Democrat in recent years put a person against long odds, but it did mean that a serious candidate had a better chance of rising to the top than in the GOP where there are more contenders.  Right now, however, the Democrats aren't fielding anyone who has a chance of winning at all.

Indeed, that may explain the real infighting, ironically, in the GOP as the struggle on political ideas between the right and center is taking place there, there effectively being no other political party in Wyoming.  Nearly everyone who wants a voice in the state's politics has, therefore, registered as a Republican.

March 4, 2020, part two

A couple of afterthoughts.

The next Democratic primaries are next Tuesday, when six different state go to their partisan polls, including neighboring state Idaho and near neighbor North Dakota.  That list of states is Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington.

Biden had a really good day yesterday, but next week he may not fare as well.  Idaho, like Wyoming and Utah, is a conservative state which means, in ironic extension, it likely has a very liberal Democratic Party.  As the country has become increasingly polarized it's become the case that centrist remnants in states that are heavily left or right have simply disappeared, usually with those former party members either becoming independents or joining the dominant party.  That's been a constant topic on the party of upset Republicans in Wyoming, but the switch started back in the 1990s and frankly was largely completed in the 2000s.

North Dakota has traditionally oddly liberal politics for a plains state, with that being a remnant of its early political history.  I'd guess that Sanders may do well there.  Michigan is also a very liberal state.  Washington has become one, in part for the same reasons that Colorado has, in recent years.  So a week from today, the headlines may deceptively be that Sanders has staged a comeback.  That will be followed by March 17 polls in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Ohio and the Northern Marianas.  My guess is that Biden will take all of those except for the Northern Marianas, which Bloomberg will take.

Then, on April 4, there's Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Wyoming.  Sanders took Wyoming in 2016 in the popular vote, but the superdelegates gave it to Clinton in the classic School Administrator vote, to use a Garrison Keillor analogy.  I'd guess that the state may go to Sanders again, unless he does badly in the prior races in which case it won't, as nobody wants to be the last man to leave a losing cause.  Alaska is hard to predict as well, but my guess is that Sanders will do well there too.  Biden will take Hawaii and Louisiana.  I'll be curious if Gabbard hangs on to Hawaii.  If it looks like she'll have her doors blown off in that election, my guess is that she'll get out before then rather than stand for the embarrassment.  I really can't figure out why she remains in the race at this point anyhow.

Of course, there's also a GOP race going on as well.  We'll start hearing more about that, not because there's competition in it, but because Trump now really has a problem.  Sanders would have been Trump's preferred opponent, which is not to say that it would have been impossible, like some claim, for Sanders to win the election.  Rather, Biden is likely to and Trump needs to start countering him now.  That race is likely to get nasty in tone.

NPR's Politics podcast noted, and its worth noting (it has the best analysis of any of the pundit shows) that everything about Biden's victory yesterday is contrary to conventional wisdom.  That's quite interesting, to say the least.  Sanders and Bloomberg had a lot more money to spend.  Sanders has been campaigning for a lot longer and has a much bigger organization.  Indeed, Biden only had one field office in California.  So the poorer candidate with less of an organization won yesterday.

They didn't complete that analysis but what it shows is that Sanders supporters are dedicated and willing to devote the time and energy, and money, to the campaign that Sanders requires, but at the end of the day, they're no more than 25% of the Democratic Party.  That being the case, getting their message out isn't getting out more of a vote.  And it's not likely to.

Additionally, Sanders isn't "bringing out the vote" like he keeps claiming he will.  Democratic voter participation hasn't been climbing. And, and this is easy to forget, the "youth vote" isn't static, like he seems to think.  A lot of the older voting "youths" if you will, that voted for him in 2016 aren't going to in 2020.  Voters from 2016 that were law school radicals and getting their masters in economics are now in white shoe firms and watching the Dow.  The problem with the youth vote is that it keeps aging out, all the time.

On another demographic, Latino voters, I continually think that the press is nearly as misguided about them as it is about black voters.  Disgruntled young black voters aren't going, I'm fairly certain, for Bernie Sanders, they're simply leaving the Democratic Party and some are even joining the GOP.  Latino voters are a bigger problem as they're every bit as socially conservative as black voters and therefore they're economic Democrats, which means that the Democratic party has a narrow window with them. A lot of Latino support arises due to immigration issues, of course.

Finally, everyone keeps saying that this is a "two man race", and it nearly is.  But Bloomberg seems to be banking on showing up the week after next. That's too late, but it suggest that he's willing to stay in and keep being a spoiler to Biden, which is all that he is now.  That ironically works against his declared positions, but as some have noted, Bloomberg is really a Republican.

And Warren occupies that same position.  Her calculations are hard to figure, but as noted, they seem to depend on being offered something at the convention or on the barque that crosses the River Styx embarking passengers on the natural causes due to age trip.

March 4, 2020, part three

And now Bloomberg is out and has endorsed Biden.  It's not quite a two person race, but Warren right now, who is reported to be pondering her situation, is only serving to scrub delegates away from Sanders.

The delegate count right now is:

Biden:  566
Sanders:  501
Warren:  61
Bloomberg:  53
Buttigieg:  26
Klobuchar:  7
Gabbard:  1

Some might be inclined to note that if Warrens delegates were added to Biden's, their nearly tied. But if Bloomberg's, Buttigieg's, and Klobuchar's are added to Biden, they're not.

One thing that has occured during this past week is that the Democrats in 2020 haven't done what the GOP did in 2016, which is to have kept a lot of moderates in the race against Trump so that no one single figure ever emerged to represent them.  It looked as late as last week that the Democratic race of 2020 would follow that same pattern.  Now its a two man race.

And its a two man race that Biden is almost certain to win.  With him, Trump will face a candidate that will have large scale Democratic support without the baggage and dislike that Clinton carried in 2016.  Given the margins last time, that alone may carry Biden over the top in the fall.  Of course, Trump has the advantage of being the incumbent and is in office with a very good economy, at least so far.

_________________________________________________________________________________

March 6, 2020

And now Senator Warren is out.

Following Super Tuesday Warren announced that she was reassessing her options and yesterday she apparently decided she was out of them.  By that time she was frankly taking a lot of heat from now somewhat desperate Sanders supporters who see her as an obstacle to their candidate, which in fact she was serving at that point to be.

In dropping out she didn't take the route of Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg and unite behind her nearest political traveler, Bernie Sanders.  She didn't endorse anyone, although she indicated that she might.  She interestingly noted that in entering the race she, in her view, was taking a third road between the two "roads" that were occupied by Biden and Sanders, and indeed while she was a left wing "progressive" she was to the right of Sanders.  Accepting her at her word, she apparently had believed that the party was now much more to the left of center than it is, but not as far left as Sanders would like to believe it is.

I would take her at her word here.  Her remaining in the campaign up until yesterday was becoming increasingly baffling, but she apparently did believe that the part was open to a fairly left of center approach but not a Democratic Socialist one.  Assuming that is the case, her mistake in the campaign was probably cozying up to Sanders for much of it, which made her look like a full fellow traveler, and indeed some are wondering today, as I have been for days, if she's hoping for the Sanders VP slot.  Right now, she might actually be hoping for the Sanders or Biden VP slots.  Given her very poor performance in her own state's primary, she probably ought to be pondering her future out of her current office.

Warren was at one time seen as the favorite to receive the Democratic nomination this season, although that was before any votes were cast.  With her departure, this race is literally down to being a two man race. . . .well a three person race if a person includes Tulsi Gabbard who quixotically hasn't dropped out yet and likely won't, as she's really not campaigning.  Now that the votes are fully in, however, Gabbard's delegate county has doubled.  The current count is:

Biden:  627
Sanders:  551
Warren:  64
Bloomberg:  60
Buttigieg:  26
Klobuchar:  7
Gabbard:  2

That tally remains instructive, even though we're basically down to two people.  Biden went from the floor to the ceiling overnight, as we know.  But Bloomberg was about to overtake Warren for third place and he's just gotten on the ballot.  Gabbard, who obviously isn't going anywhere, still has a count that's now comparable to Klobuchar's, although it'll be surprising if she receives 15% in any future county so as to be able to pick up any more delegates.

Now that the race is a two man race things are going to be much different going forward in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, just today the local paper published three different columns by three columnist, including conservative Mona Charen, very conservative Laura Hollis, and conservative Jackie Gingrich Cushman.  With three conservatives writing, we're given a taste of who the Democratic race will be viewed from all parts of the GOP.

Charen cheers the events of Super Tuesday and lauds the rise of Biden.  From her writing, it's pretty clear that she'd welcome an ultimate Biden victory in the fall even if (and I don't know what her view is on that) the GOP President should fall.  She views the rise of Biden as a rejection of socialism in the Democratic Party and a return to political sanity, as she sees it, in that party and she specifically mentions the relief of "Never Trumper" Republicans.  Hollis,on the other hand, takes an approach that we're increasingly likely to see now that Biden is the Democratic frontrunner, which is that the turn to Biden is one of Democratic desperation and he'll be slaughtered by Trump in the post nomination debates, which is likely a hope as well as a prediction on her part.  Gingrich Cushman interprets the events as one of voter empathy, with Democrats turning to a candidate that they feel knows them and their problems, and makes the opposite prediction of Hollis, that being that unless Trump can make voters feel the same, he'll be defeated in the fall.

A hard core Democratic columnist yesterday did the math in the paper from the 2016 election and noted what surprisingly few people have done so far.  Last election Trump one, but it was an electoral college victory.  His victory is one of two recent ones in which the popular vote was for the other guy.  I'm not a critic of the electoral college and feel it continues to exist for a real reason, but when this occurs it occurs because the votes in some districts were very close  Now seemingly forgotten, Trump barely won in the districts that gave him the election.

This means that Trump is in extreme trouble right now, and that trouble is much amplified with Biden as the candidate, which he'll now likely be.  Many of the things that Trump backers state about Biden are things that voters don't care about.  Yes, he has rambling speech. Yes, he's a bit goofy.  And so on. But Trump has odd speech too and he also comes across as wacky to his detractors.

Will Democrats go with the Joe they know?

And because the race was so close last time, a lot of factors stand to play out differently.  Trump has done incredibly well in getting Republicans in Congress to support him, particularly the Senate, although the question can really be asked if Mitch McConnell has turned Trump to his goals or the opposite.  Be that as it may a lot of regular Republicans view him like Charen does and they don't like him.  With a centrist option, quite a few of them are likely to vote for Biden or just not vote.

Some say that left wing Democrats will sit out the race if Biden is the nominee and the "youth vote" that Sanders keeps saying he's bringing to the table has, in fact, failed to pull up a seat.  While Sanderites right now are decrying what appears to them to be a conspiracy of the Democratic "establishment", where to people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez actually go if Sanders isn't the nominee?

Finally, recent elections have caused quite a few former Democrats to become Republicans or independents, and quite a few Republicans to become independants.  Those disgruntled voters are pretty likely to go with the Joe they know.

All of which means the race going forward is increasingly going to be one between Biden and Trump and Sanders is going to get less and less air time.  Trump has to take on Biden now, and it's going to be pretty nasty.  Biden will have to respond.  Sanders sun will set.

_________________________________________________________________________________

March 8, 2020

Kamala Harris joined the group of former candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination who have endorsed Joe Biden as of today.

She must have done it really early in the day, as I saw this as a headline at 7:06 am, meaning its still pretty early everywhere in the U.S.
_________________________________________________________________________________

March 9, 2020

Adding to the list of former candidate endorsements, Cory Booker endorsed Joe Biden.

The story, in the Sanders camp, that the Democratic establishment is circling the wagons begins to wear a bit thin at this point.  Its more in the nature of the Democrats, of which Bernie Sanders is not actually a member, circling the wagons.

_________________________________________________________________________________

March 11, 2020

Another Tuesday, another set of primary results.

And in this case, results that mostly benefited Joe Biden's resurgent campaign.  The current tally of delegates is:

Joe Biden:  823
Bernie Sanders:  663
Elizabeth Warren:  69
Michael Bloomberg:  61
Pete Buttigieg:  26
Amy Klobuchar:  7
Tulsi Gabbard:  2

Obviously Biden did well, but he not only did well, he did well in some locations that went for Sanders in 2016 and which were expected to repeat that even as recently as a week ago.

Those states include Idaho, where the results were as follows:

Biden:  48.9% for 9 delegates
Sanders:  42.5% for 7 delegates.

Now, obviously, Biden "won" but Sanders took nearly as many delegates and nearly the same amount of votes.  But Biden's two delegate margin is helping him stay ahead while Sanders two delegate shortfall means he's falling behind.

Idaho held its first Democratic primary this year.  In 2016 it held a caucus, and that's revealing.  People who attend a caucus are a lot more likely to be really dedicated politicos, or even on the extreme end of their parties.  In 2016 when it held its last caucus Wyoming, it's neighbor, also had more Democrats vote for Sanders than Clinton, although Wyoming's super delegates reversed that.  I suspect if the state had a primary, that wouldn't have been the result.

Sanders here, it might be noted, looked to do well like he did last time.  You have to wonder how much he benefited from early voting that came before Super Tuesday, something we'll note here again.

Note also that the two candidates votes don't add up to 100%.  The balance was with now dropped out candidates, some of whom undoubtedly received pre Super Tuesday mail in votes.

Michigan

Michigan was a Sanders surprise victory in 2016 and was expected to go for Sanders big in 2020.  Instead, Biden pulled way ahead.

Biden:  52.9% for 53 delegates
Sanders:  36.5% for 35 delegates.

In a state where he'd done well before, this was a Sanders disaster.

Mississippi

Biden: 81% for 29 delegates
Sanders:  14.9% for 2 delegates.

Mississippi has a large African American population and that factored in here.  Contrary to earlier press following Nevada, Sanders isn't picking up African American support.

Missouri

Biden:  60.1% for 40 delegates
Sanders:  34.6% for 23 delegates.

North Dakota

In North Dakota, which has a remnant liberal base  which has a socialist heritage, Sanders did very well, but with odd results

Sanders:  53.3% for 5 delegates
Biden:  39.8% for 5 delegates

Now, the difference between these two tallies is a bit difficult to figure, as Biden's delegate share is the same.  This must be due to county by county tallies.  So even though the old socialist north of North Dakota gave Sanders about 2,000 more votes (the combined votes is less than 15,000), delegate wise he came in the same.

Washington

Sanders:  32.7% for 17 delegates
Biden:  32.5% for 17 delegates.

There was no "victor" in Washington, which was expected to go for Sanders.  Or maybe there was, and that was Biden who came up from behind to tie Sanders.

It's worth noting that Washington was like California in that a huge slate of candidates received votes, including those who have withdrawn from the race.  Both Warren and Bloomberg were in low double digits.

This means that all of the major withdrawn candidates continue to scrub off votes from Biden and Sanders.  If we assume, for example, that Warren's 12.3% would have gone for Sanders, or Bloomberg's 11.1% were mail in votes, the results may have been different if those voters had attended the primary in person. Even Buttigieg's 5% may have made a difference.

Of course, some of those votes may have been protest votes, but I'm guessing most weren't.  Most were mail in.

Which is another example of how this is a really screwed up system.  Mail in votes would make a lot of sense if there was a single voting day. But in a system that winnows candidates in this fashion, early voters are often voting for a candidate that isn't running and they effectively are removing their choice or accidentally hurting a candidate who would be their second or third choice.

While this year has demonstrated the danger of early predictions and there's still a lot of voting left to do, what this shows is obvious.  Sanders is effectively out of the race, even though he'll run to the end.  With Biden pulling ahead or getting to dead even in states in which he'd done well in 2016, voters are no longer interested in him even where they were a couple of weeks ago.  The Democrats did a remarkable job of coming together behind a candidate who is a Democrat, which Sanders isn't.  The Democratic Party was a flag of convenience for Sanders and the Democrats managed to do what the GOP couldn't in 2016, come behind a candidate who was a traditional member of their party.

Now that they've done that the race for the fall will start in earnest.  And it's started to.  Republicans, in spite of their 2016 reservations, have given Donald Trump 1,099 delegates so far and Joe Walsh, who has dropped out, 1.  Trump just the other day gave a semi amusing and insightful look at how he views Biden's rise noting how he had planned to take on Sanders as a "communist" and the like, and then saying that Sanders would have been a tougher candidate.  He won't be, probably.

But as noted on This Week, at this point Biden's problem is that he doesn't actually have a theme for his campaign.  That may well be enough, actually. Voter fatigue may be enough to cause a lot of voters just to "go with the Joe they know" and put an end to a traumatic news cycle.

He does have to put an end to gaffs, which he (and Trump) are both prone to. The other day he got into a shouting match with a Michigan voter on gun control, an area where he is definitely vulnerable but doesn't seem to know it in much of the country where that Democratic idea remains massively unpopular.  Dealing with that issue is one thing for a Democratic candidate, getting into a shouting match with a voter is another.

And a back channel rumor that he's suffering from cognitive impairment is making the rounds now and will get worse.  In actuality, he suffers from stuttering and has his entire life, which is a struggle for anyone who suffers from it and who has to speak publicly.  But candidates of this age are subject to that attack.  We'll see more of that as Biden continues to break out.

Sanders, it might be noted, is now concluding his political career. At 78 he won't run again and frankly his bolt is shot.

_________________________________________________________________________________

March 14, 2020

In local news, the Wyoming Democratic Party announced that its caucus, which was coming up in the first week of April, will now be conducted by mail.  Live gatherings were cancelled due to the Covid 19 pandemic.

In other news, Tulsi Gabbard has been complaining about being kept out of this weekend's Democratic debate.  Frankly, at this point, although she cannot win, she has a point.

In a lot of ways, Gabbard is the Democratic Anti Candidate.  Nearly all of the common commentary about the Democratic race and its candidates fails when she's considered.  She's been running for months and only really received much attention at the point at which Hillary Clinton accused her of being a Russian stooge.  That briefly raised her fortunes, but only briefly.

It makes sense that she has not done well this year as her position in regard to foreign intervention is very similar to that of Donald Trump's and she's acknowledged that.  This has made her, in the eyes of active Democrats, a pariah, even though she's a generally left of center candidate on most issues.  She has been right of center on some in the past, but she's changed her public stance as politicians will do.  Compared to Biden and Sanders, she's closer to Sanders than Biden.

She's also all those things that pundits claim failed this year.  She's a woman running for office, which the press claims is now no longer the case.  She's 38 in a field in which the other two candidates are in their late 70s.  She's a Samoan which makes her part of an ethnic minority when the press claims that the only candidates left standing are "white men".  She's a Hindu and probably the first Hindu to ever run for high office.

She's also a veteran of the Iraq war having deployed with the Hawaii National Guard and is a recipient of the Combat Medic Badge, something notable in a race in which the other two candidates managed not to serve in the military.  Biden had deferrements during the Vietnam War and was later classified as medically ineligible fro the draft due to a childhood condition of asthma.  Sanders was actually too old to serve in Vietnam and would have served, if conscripted, in the late 1950s, showing how old he really is, but he did apply for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.  Gabbard was a volunteer for military service and went to the Middle East twice.

Gabbard in a pinning ceremony reflecting a promotion.

Of course, those organizing the debate can legitimately claim that Gabbard doesn't stand a chance.  Having said that, she partially doesn't stand a chance as nobody remembers she's running.  The press and essentially conspired by omission to get her ignored and other candidates have done the same, notably Elizabeth Warren who lamented that "little girls" will have to wait for a female President now that Warren has dropped out. Well, they might not have to if Gabbard was allowed into the debate.

Allowing Gabbard in would certainly be a breath of fresh air even if she has no chance, which is a reason to let her in, in and of itself.  For that matter, in an election year as weird as this one, who knows.  Maybe she'd pull ahead.

_________________________________________________________________________________

March 18, 2020

There were primaries yesterday, but you could be excused for forgetting that.  The Covid 19 epidemics is all that the news is reporting on.

But that's another story.

The primaries were in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona.

Biden won them all.

It should be clear at this point to all, and I'm sure that it is, that the Democratic race is over.  Biden now has 1,147 delegates.  Sanders has 861.  Everyone else combined has 168.  The number to secure the nomination is 1,991.  There are more than enough unchosen delegates left for Sanders to win, but he has to start winning really big, and that isn't the current trajectory.

Rather, he'll keep picking up delegates until he drops out, and at this point he may figure that he should run to the end to exhibit as much influence on the convention as he can, or he may figure that he should drop out for the same reason.  But with Biden pulling steadily ahead, a dramatic change of fortunes would be needed for Sanders to even be in contesting range in this primary season at this point.

• Joe Biden
  Needs 46.8% of remaining
• Bernie Sanders
  Needs 62.7% of remaining
• Other

TOTAL

LAST 7 DAYS

1,147

251

861

120

168

And what a dramatic one it was, until it was pushed off the front page by the Coronavirus.  Biden was down and out, then back in, and then the victor, in a surprisingly short period of time.

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March 19, 2020

A primary that Biden didn't win was Ohio's, which was moved into the summer out of concerns for the coronavirus.

After this week's primaries both Sanders and Biden delivered speeches which sounded a lot like Sanders was dropping out, even though he isn't.  Sanders sounded defeated and Biden sounded like he was trying to welcome Sanders' supporters, both of which were odd when its considered that both remain in the race right now.

Sanders can still theoretically win the nomination but it's a practical impossibility, which he knows.  There's speculation that he remains in the race to attempt to pull the Democrats to the left, which is where he thinks they should be.  That's a risky thing for the Democratic Party as it assumes that's where the American electorate is, for which there's no good evidence.

Moreover, Sanders supporters have a track record of simply staying home, which has been part of his problem in the primary season and which occurred after he failed to secure the Democratic nomination in 2016.  That presents a problem for Biden in that he may very well need them in order to win in the fall, while at the same time the more leftward he goes the more likely that he loses support elsewhere.

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March 20, 2020

Tulsi Gabbard dropped out of the race yesterday and endorsed Joe Biden on the basis that he'd clearly been chosen by Democrats to be their 2020 nominee.  She did this by email, which fits the times

Gabbard was potentially one of the two most unique Democratic candidates this year, the other being Andrew Yang.  Interestingly, neither Yang nor Gabbard received very much focus on their "diverse" nature, in a year full of concerns about diversity in the Democratic field.

Yang was the son of Taiwanese Chinese parents.  Not too surprisingly, given that he's a first generation Chinese American, Yang was also somewhat unique in that he is not a Christian.  He expressed a belief in spirituality, which would be consisted for traditional Chinese, who are often animist.  He does attend a Protestant Christian church with his wife and children, however, who are Christians.  Very little was made of Yang's ethnicity during his campaign which supports my view that what is culturally regarded as a minority is just that, cultural.  Chinese Americans have rapidly ascended to the "white" status and therefore aren't really regarded for the most part as a distinct "race" in American cultural terms anymore.

Gabbard was even more unique in that she was a woman in which the press was focused on female candidates.  Indeed, the press was so focused on it that when Elizabeth Warren dropped out the face the press treated that event as if she was the "last woman" in the race, which at no point was ever true.  Gabbard is also a member of a racial minority as she's a Samoan and she's further unique as she' the only Hindu candidate for a party's nomination that there's ever been.  As a 38 year old Hindu, woman, combat veteran, you'd suspect she would have been a press darling, but the opposite was true.

Of course, the press can't be fully blamed for that as her candidacy never really took off, although her supporters would claim that was in part because she was ignored by the press.  Be that as it may, her views on many things were quite unique and didn't fit well into this year's Democratic campaign.  Indeed, given her background, she fits much more closely into the narrative about the Democratic party having certain ethnicities for very limited reasons rather than their generally supporting the Democratic platform at large.  She was really despised by some Democrats and was the subject of absurd ire by Hillary Clinton, which ironically served to briefly boost her popularity.

Because of her unique views, there was some fear for a time that she'd bolt the part and mount a third party campaign.  Perhaps she should have, although that effort would fail, as it would at least serve to demonstrate that the two party system we have creates two tents too small to include everyone who wants to be in them.

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April 3, 2020

At this point, a person could be excused if they forgot an election was even going on.

Campaigning has halted completely and at least one primary has been moved, all due to the COVID 19 pandemic.  And now the Democratic Party has announced that its planned July convention will be moved to August in hopes we're past this crisis at that point. Whether we will be or not is anyone's guess at this point.

And the impact on the campaigns is completely unknown. Early on both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were making broad claims that, had they been President, things would have gone better. But as the full enormity of the Pandemic has hit home, and its global reach, voices have grown quiet.  President Trump still receives a lot of criticism, but most people have arrived at the conclusion that we're in the thick of it now and nothing could have prevented it.  The President's task is to manage it, and a collapsing economy, and he'll be judged on how well he does that.

So the question is, at this point, how voters will weigh those considerations, and whether they'l judge Trump the way that they judged Hoover, switching a President out during a crisis, or like Wilson, sticking with one in spite of one or because of it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

April 6, 2020

I didn't listen to the weekend shows the week before last as they've frankly become too depressing.  I did, however this weekend.

Joe Biden reemerged as a guest on This Week, where the discussion was mostly about the Coronavirus.  Of interest, Biden was an early supporter of President Trump's actions in shutting down transit with China, which Trump recently noted.  Trump took a lot of criticism for the action at the time, but Biden agreed with his actions and is of the view that Trump is simply getting to everything too slowly.  He made a convincing argument on this score, noting even on the cited examples that 45 countries had banned travel with China prior to the United States.

On other news, Biden has formed a Vice Presidential search committee.  He's apparently apologized to Bernie Sanders regarding this on the basis that he feared it might look premature, but Sanders apparently indicated he was okay with it.

The weekend shows, we'd note, were otherwise very interesting but at this point This Week and Meet The Press are very different in their presentation.  George Stephanopoulos, who after all was in a Democratic Administration, and who has a family member with Coronavirus, remains very objective in his presentation.  Chuck Todd has completely lost all objectivity whatsoever.

_________________________________________________________________________________

April 8, 2020

The Wisconsin Primary was held yesterday but due to the large mail in vote, due to Coronavirus, the results are not known and will not be for several days.

The primary itself proved controversial as the Democratic Governor of the state sought to postpone it due to the pandemic.  His early suggestions fell on deaf ears as he sought to have a special session of Wisconsin's Republican majority legislature called into session.  Ultimately he tried to move the date by executive order which, in spite of the press suggesting the decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to strike that decision down as being political, was clearly an illegal act.  So the primary went forward.

Apparently there were sizable crowds in spite of the Pandemic, including a lot of people who were very disgruntled due to what had happened.  The number of polling stations was reduced enormously which, at least in Milwaukee, may have had the unintended consequence of concentrating voters.

The campaign itself has virtually disappeared from the news with Joe Biden just resurfacing last week.  Biden and Trump had a short telephone call on the Pandemic which services, in some ways, to demonstrate the extent to which he's now the presumptive nominee.  In order for Sanders to now pull back into the lead he'd need a sizable percentage of the vote in the remaining states.  Having said that, this has been an odd election year to say the least and nobody knows what impact the Pandemic has on the minds of Democratic voters.

_________________________________________________________________________________

April 9, 2020

And, one day after the Wisconsin primary, whose results are unknown, Bernie Sanders ended his campaign.  He did not endorse his opponent, Joe Biden.

It was an odd end to a campaign that was widely misreported on the entire season.  Sanders overall did worse in 2020 than he had in 2016, consistently pulling in a lower tally of Democratic votes in each contest he was in.  Nonetheless, starting in Iowa, where he came in second, he was routinely touted by the Press as the frontrunner and up until the South Carolinian primary he was reported as being the then inevitable nominee.

At South Carolina his weaknesses became obvious; he was primarily a candidate liked by the extreme left, nearly all all WASPs, of the Democratic Party. The youth vote that he claimed would carry him over the top never materialized and black voters weren't impressed.

And after South Carolina the other Democratic contestants began to pull out, each realizing that they were splitting the vote among themselves in a fashion that was only serving Biden, whom none of them felt to be a viable candidate.  As soon as Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out, Biden surged.

The Coronavirus Pandemic put a pause in all of the Democratic activity, but when it started to reemerge Biden, wisely, was no longer campaigning against Sanders, but against Trump. The general election season had begun.

That was evident before Wisconsin and therefore, if Sanders realized that, it would have seemed like a wise thing to pull out before Wisconsin and save his diminishing base from having to the polls during a Pandemic.  He didn't, but did the day after, which is even stranger as the results of Wisconsin still aren't known.  It may be, of course, that poll watchers in the state reported back that his efforts there had failed and the inevitable sunk in.  In order to win the nomination Sanders would have had to take a large majority of all the remaining Democratic votes.  At any rate, he's dropped out.

Well, mostly.

But as noted he, like the other left wing candidate Warren, didn't endorse Biden.  Of course, Warren had a good reason not too. . . Sanders still had a chance at the time and she may well have been hoping to be his VP nominee.  Indeed, Sanders would have been wise to to pick her up for that slot at the time.

Sanders reason for not endorsing Biden seems to be because he wants to remain the ancient head of the liberal resurgence of the party and he's taking affirmative steps to retain that position.  He won't, but he's been making sounds that in spite of a two time defeat, the left is the party's future.  It probably isn't.  Indeed, at this point Biden will start to tack to the right.  Biden will end up being just as left wing as the last term of the Obama Administration became, but no more than that.  He can't tack to the right of his former running mate but going any more to the left would serve to alienate Republicans whom he hopes to pick up, and frankly right now there are plenty "establishment" and rank and file Republicans who are likely to vote for Biden.  If he comes across like Sanders, or like AoC, they'll vote for Trump.

To try to stemp this, Sanders is dropping out of the race, but not off the ballot.  He is specifically, and bizarrely, still asking for votes.  He knows he can't win, and acknowledges it, but wants to have as many delegates as possible at the convention, whenever that is, to broker, and shove with.  Its' the first instance of "I'm out, but still vote for me, I've ever heard of".  Now Sanders is specifically asking his supporters to vote for a doomed candidate as a vote for a movement, essentially taking the position that many third party voters actually do when they cast their votes.

Some Sanders supporters, disgruntled that their man lost again are threatening not to show up at all in the Fall, and indeed in 2016 quite a few Sanders supporters, lots of whom are no longer Sanders supporters, did just that.  Some of that is just heat of the moment whining however.  Some of it is genuine, and I suspect that some of it, on Twitter and Facebook, is the product of Russian shills, known to be playing in social medial now in a renewed effort to disrupt an American general election.  But some of it no doubt is because of the view that Sanders holds that he's the embodiment of a movement that he's supported his entire political life that's on the threshold of the future.  That the movement is personified by politicians at the Presidential level who are in their seventies doesn't seem to strike him as problematic, or if it does, it's not obvious how to turn it over to the younger voters he feels he represents.  So we'll go forward to the convention, I suspect, with Sanders not having endorsed anyone, and maybe even threatening to return to the campaign (or even doing it) if he receives any significant support in a remaining primary.  He's retained a hand in austensibly and likely genuinely for a reason, but that reason allows him to have some hope for influence and revival.

One thing that won't go forward is this thread.  Now that this is down to the two candidates for the General Election, we'll start a new one.

_________________________________________________________________________________

April 12, 2020

Okay, I know that the last entry was supposed to be, well, the last entry, but here's one that's a sideshow of a sideshow to such an extent that I'll put it here before going on to a new one.

Last week, in a typical Democratic fashion, some Democrats briefly pondered murdering their party by having Andrew Cuomo replace Joe Biden on the ticket.

Those doing that probably don't realize that Cuomo comes across as a blatherer to everyone outside of a large East Coast metropolitan area.

Indeed, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the political world right now seems divided between those who live in a large metropolitan area and whom are finding New York's politicians simply the rave, and everyone else who finds them to be in a constant incoherent blather.

It's not that they're doing a bad job, it's just that they're loudly constantly complaining.  They are faced with a genuine health crisis of epic proportions, but a lot of the country hopes for calm leadership from their state governments (and hopes for that from the Federal government as well), and finds the loud complaining to be undignified and uninspiring.  In other areas, however, that sort of leadership is obviously admired, as people are admiring Cuomo.  With the political scene now thick with New Yorkers, it's a bit much for everyone else.  Those defending them would probably note, justifiably, that they're in the very thick of the pandemic, but then so is Louisiana and its politicians aren't coming across the same way.  It doesn't look like leadership to others.

Indeed, it would be well worth noting that not all of the criticism coming out of New York has been consistent.  Mayor De Blasio, who admittedly is not Cuomo (but to outsiders, and unfairly, there's little distinction between the two), suggested efforts to halt interstate travel amounted to a horrific suggestion, before those criticisms increased.  One of the two politicians hesitated to close schools because so many school children receive their meals there (which we've otherwise addressed), which is a legitimate concern but which is perhaps misplaced if sending them to school would only serve to spread the disease.

Again, Cuomo may be doing a fantastic job under extremely difficult situations.  But asking him to run against Trump, another New Yorker, would be sealing the deal for Trump, which at least enough Democrats realized in time to stop a move that would have wiped out their party in innumerable ways.  The troubling thing is that some considered it.  Perhaps more troubling still is that the Democratic Party is becoming incredibly rooted in a very small geographic base in terms of its candidates, a large number of which are New Englanders who don't necessarily sell well elsewhere.

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April 14, 2020

Yes, another update on this old thread.  I still haven't started a new one and stuff keeps coming in that's appropriate to this old one.

Yesterday Bernie Sanders got around to endorsing Joe Biden.  It was late, but he took the step.

On the same day, Just Amash, a former GOP and now independent Congressman from Michigan who describes himself as a "Hayekian Libertarian" announced he was considering running for President.  It's unclear if he meant he was considering doing this as a third party candidate, or as an independant. 

_________________________________________________________________________________

The 2020 Election, Part 1

The 2020 Election, Part 2

The 2020 Election, Part 3

The 2020 Election, Part 4

The 2020 Election, Part 5

Blog Mirror: Russia paid a heavy price to end the oil price war

Russia paid a heavy price to end the oil price war

Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed to cut oil production by . . .

9.7M bbls per day.

Meanwhile, price at the pump, locally,  is under $1.70.

Global demand, meanwhile, is down due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Easter 2020

For those on the Gregorian Liturgical Calendar, which is most of the world outside of the Orthodox Churches that retain the "Old Calendar", and in various places not all of them do, this is Easter Sunday for 2020.  For those on the Old Calendar, next Sunday, April 19, is Easter.

This is a sad and strange Easter for Christians.  Many will not attend services. Some will watch them on television or make other observances, but it just isn't the same in all sorts of ways.



This is because, of course, of the Coronavirus Pandemic.



Maybe this gives people time to pause and think a bit.  Quite a few people who know that Easter means something give it no more attention than going to church once a year, or maybe twice if they also observe Christmas, and otherwise get tied up in a secular celebration involving a big meal and the like. 



Easter is a feast, but it's a feast because of what it is, not what it is because of a feast.  In a season, now, of isolation, perhaps that's more apparent.