U.S. Primaries, 2020

[gaggedLouise]

Still nothing approaching a final result from Iowa, after an app meant to handle the incoming data failed. Apparently they had not tested the new software beforehand, to make sure that it wouldn't get hacked!  :P

[Lexandria]

There's also some big hullabaloo about Pete Buttigieg having something or other to do with the company that created the app; there's some nasty tags trending on Twitter about it right now. Not sure what's up with that, currently. App creator company is called Shadow, I guess.

Saw some images from some of the caucuses; really a weird set up. Lots of tallies on stickinotes and such, seemed really disorganized. And there's two rounds of voting? This is the most confusing thing I've ever seen. Just implement ranked choice voting and make it straight forward please. I feel like whatever happened tonight was nuts and unnecessarily complicated.

This is a fun start to the Democratic primaries (<--sarcasm)

[Chulanowa]

You might not like it. but the real winner in Iowa is clear



O8)

But seriously, this is a hell of a mess. And i don't wanna make claims, but Pete claiming victory with 0% of the results being in, and his apaprent ties to the company behind the app does look pretty darned weird.

[gaggedLouise]

You might not like it. but the real winner in Iowa is clear



O8)

But seriously, this is a hell of a mess. And i don't wanna make claims, but Pete claiming victory with 0% of the results being in, and his apaprent ties to the company behind the app does look pretty darned weird.

Yep, Trump himself has basically said it's a win for him. Awful mess, indeed.

[TheGlyphstone]

When did Jeb Bush become a meme?

[gaggedLouise]

If this had happened in one of the later Republican primaries back in 2016, Trump would not have hesitated to claim that either Hillary or Ted Cruz had hacked the program to stop Trump from winning the day.

[gaggedLouise]

By the way I guess it's time to start a 2020 Primaries Talk thread? :)

[Oniya]

By the way I guess it's time to start a 2020 Primaries Talk thread? :)

*boop*

From someone who worked in software development for 7 years, I can say that having a rush-scheduled app WORK after being handed out to untrained operators would be better indication that there was something hinky going on.

Please also remember that deliberate disinformation and amplification of rumors were prime tools in the 2016 Russian information warfare playbook. 

From the other side of the primaries, the Republicans also had a caucus yesterday.  Joe Walsh and Bill Weld were also on the ballot, but Trump got a landslide of the delegates at 39.  I was surprised to see that Bill Weld actually got 1 delegate out of that.

[Callie Del Noire]

You’d think both parties would learn from 2016s SNAFUs

[Blythe]

Hmmm.

Purportedly Buttigieg and Sanders are in the lead in Iowa, with Sanders ahead of Buttigieg by a meager 1%.

[CuriousEyes]

And i don't wanna make claims, but Pete claiming victory with 0% of the results being in, and his apaprent ties to the company behind the app does look pretty darned weird.

I can't wait to hear the insinuations that are going to dog him for the entire primary over that "declaring victory" moment. Honestly the only thing that might be worse for him is if he ends of coming in second, which would be a victory for him in all honesty but is an instant soundbite.

For what its worth, my understanding is that he's basing that claim on having people present at something like 60 - 70% of the caucus sites tallying votes for him. IE even though the app that officially compiles numbers was busted, he knows the numbers that should be going in and feels he's insurmountable. Guess we will see soon.

Unrelated, I hate Iowa. It should not be first I'm the nation for Democratic primaries. The state caucus system is wonky and pushes a state that's already kind of a demographic outlier into results that generally don't reflect the electorate.

[Missy]

Hmmm.

Purportedly Buttigieg and Sanders are in the lead in Iowa, with Sanders ahead of Buttigieg by a meager 1%.

When I looked it said Butti had more delegates and Bern had more individual votes. I dunno, the thing about it is the more you examine the details of the American electorate system the more ridiculously broken it looks.

[Chulanowa]

When did Jeb Bush become a meme?

Somewhere between "Please Clap" and "hell yeah I'd kill baby Hitler!"  ;D Comrade Jeb is one of my favorite memes.

Buuuuut yes as far as the stuff with Pete and the app? apparently the app's creator's husband is part of the Buttigeig campaign... and her brother-in-law is head of Iowa state comms.  And there's something about the company getting $42,000 from Buttigeig. I'm just like... hey, I don't know all the details, I don't know if it IS shady.. .but it sure looks shady. Like even if it's all on the up-and-up, just seems like the sort of thing his campaign should have either scooted the hell away from or owned up on WELL before Iowa.

[Oniya]

Well, lookie here:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/clog-lines-iowa-caucus-hotline-posted-online-encouragement-disrupt-results-n1131521

Turns out that some [insert appropriate epithets] from 4chan decided to flood the caucus phone lines, which resulted in the >30 minute hold times for people trying to report the caucus results.

[clonkertink]

Is it Russian Cyberwarefare O'clock already? Where does the time go?

[Teo Torriatte]

With 100% of the delegate in, Buttigieg wins by 2 state delegate equivalents, or .1%!

But it's so close and there have been so many issues that the Associated Press has just given up calling a winner altogether.

https://apnews.com/4f9044fe46f551d397d48dd8ca3d58db

What a start for the Democratic Party in 2020. The trump-tards won't have a field day with this or anything. Even though they made it worse themselves by clogging the phone lines.

[Callie Del Noire]

With 100% of the delegate in, Buttigieg wins by 2 state delegate equivalents, or .1%!

But it's so close and there have been so many issues that the Associated Press has just given up calling a winner altogether.

https://apnews.com/4f9044fe46f551d397d48dd8ca3d58db

What a start for the Democratic Party in 2020. The trump-tards won't have a field day with this or anything. Even though they made it worse themselves by clogging the phone lines.

Unless the DNC leadership pulls their collective heads out of their ass, they will play internal games like last time and divide the party again. Right now I’m think the president will win again.

[Callie Del Noire]

I dislike James Carville a lot, but I think he pretty much summed up things in this interview/rant

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/7/21123518/trump-2020-election-democratic-party-james-carville

The DNC leadership needs to pull their heads out of their asses.

[ReijiTabibito]

The DNC leadership may be trying to do that as we speak - both Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are well-positioned to replace the now-collapsing Biden in the moderate lane of the party as a general election candidate.  Given the situation, Klobuchar should absolutely be the candidate the party wants.  She's from a purple state - meaning she can pull appeal from voters there AND has experience navigating mined political waters.  She's been a US Senator since 2007 - not as much experience as someone like Biden or Bernie, but certainly more than Buttigieg.  She's a Boomer - well, practically everyone in this race that isn't Buttigieg is - but she's on the younger end of the scale, so she doesn't look a billion years old or sound like someone's grandma.

But if anyone but Bernie gets the nomination (Warren has no chance, she came in 3rd in Iowa and she's on track to claim a distant 4th in NH), the radical, 'energetic' wing of the Democratic party - the Squaddies and their ilk - will not vote for the DNC's candidate.  They will come out and say that they were robbed of their rightful place on the dais.  Again.  And that only the 'corruption of the government on the behalf of special interests' kept them from winning the day, barely if at all entertaining the notion that their ideas are terrible and nobody wants them.

As for Carville, sure, he makes a big talk about being worried the direction his party is taking.  He has issues with people talking about open borders and decriminalizing borders; he's against banning nuclear energy and fracking (mostly because he understands that the Squaddies' ludicrous demands to shift off of fossil fuels within any of the timeframes they have discussed will wreck the world economy, let alone the US, and that China and India will copiously flip the bird to AOC given the chance).  He's against letting terrorists and convicted felons vote from jail; he's stated that the idea of student debt forgiveness isn't a winning idea (because he recognizes the fact that you will have a ton of people who actually paid back their loans, or worked to never have to get them in the first place, pissed off that a bunch of people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time - through no action of their own - get their debts relieved).

He understands the cultural divide that is at work in the US.  In that interview, he notes the tweet from a guy at the New York Times given about LSU asking about free public college proposals, if it would include ones like LSU, or just 'actual' schools, makes the Democrats come off as smug, and that they can't do that if they want to win.

But he's clearly not all that concerned about the directional shift.  He stated, quite clearly, that even though 'the Democratic Party isn’t Bernie Sanders, whatever you think about Sanders' - he's still voting for him, if he gets the nomination.  Never mind that if Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, that will only encourage more Democrats to be like Bernie Sanders.  Success, once achieved, is often duplicated because once a method of success is proven, why change it?  If Carville wants the Democratic party to stand for a set of principles, then he has to be willing to walk away from a candidate who doesn't espouse his principles.  But he doesn't.  Because, in his own words: "Without power, nothing matters."

Carville wants the power to pursue what he believes is the agenda that needs to be set for the US.  But he's concerning himself with acquiring power now and setting the agenda later, rather than the other way around.  And when you place power before principle, that's how you get corruption.  I don't mean corruption in the standard political sense.  I mean corruption in the dictionary sense: that of a process by which something original is debased and altered such that its original purpose no longer exists.  Something like what happened with the Tea Party - it began as a middle class movement responding to bad economic trends (mostly connected to 2008) and ended up becoming a political group that wields power in the House and the Senate.  (See The Newsroom for more.)

Carville is assuming that once the Democrats acquire the power they need to make the changes they want, that men like him will still be in control of the process.  They won't.  Or at the least, there is no guarantee that they will.  Carville may wake up one morning with the Democrats having control of the White House and Congress only to discover that the people he has placed in power have no interest in doing what he wants them to do.

On the other hand, if Carville takes the time to look for and promote the right candidate - someone who does share his interests and agenda - then it might very well be a time before that happens, and it might be such that the opposition wins in that time.  And that becomes the question, then.

Do you allow for the possibility that others might lead while you gather your forces, but ensure that when you win, the winners follow your plan?

Or would you rather strike now, denying the opposition any chance of leadership, but risk the thing you've unleashed being something you cannot control?

[Lexandria]

I'm just here to lament Andrew Yang suspending his campaign; I really liked him, his approach to data and making decisions, and his ideas and vision for the future. His campaign have me hope for the future that the other candidates couldn't come close to capturing. And I liked that he was always positive and chill and didn't attack people, but ideas/actions.

Hoping he might land a VP pick from whoever comes out on top, as it would help him get some political cred if he decides to run again. Or maybe he'll try other avenues of achieving a better future.

[Humble Scribe]

I know it's pronounced Boot-edge-edge, but I still can't stop myself calling him Butty-Geeg.

[Missy]

Booty Gig

I will only vote for him if someoen publishes a gif of him doing a booty gig.

[HannibalBarca]

I've been keeping abreast of politics since I was 13, and I'm 51 now.  Being a student of history as well, I've developed in my outlooks as I've gleaned more information over the years.  Raised by Republican Catholics who believed birth control was okay, and racism was prevalent, I've diverged from my parents over the years, as they have from me.  They're now right-wing evangelicals, while I am an atheist who leans towards Marxism as an economic system...or at least a healthy dose of actual Socialism.

My ideology has developed from an observation of the changes that occur not only in our era, but from those in history, all over the globe.  Not only the United States, but much of the world, developed and not, is in a state of flux, due to increased mechanisation and the information society we live in today.  I find that much of what causes strife and division nowadays is a fundamental lack of basic thinking skills and skepticism, within a framework of massive amounts of data that is thrown at us from multiple platforms, often causing people to seek out only information that conforms to what they already believe--also known as Confirmation Bias.  It is entirely too easy to find yourself within a bubble of information that meets with your expectations, and quickly rule out any other data that contradicts it.  Therefore, it isn't education in general that is needed to maintain a healthy democratic civilization...but the ability to sift and sort the data, to end up with facts, and discard lies and misinformation.

Unfortunately, logical reasoning is only now being instituted in minor ways in the United States within the education system...also known as Common Core.  Too little, too late, to my view as an elementary school teacher.  The damage has already been done, as the system was allowed to continue too long during the Information Age while still clinging to the old 50s-style education standards, which were far, far too outdated to help students during the time of the Internet.  To wit, this current condition bodes ill for any semblance of a functioning electoral system or, concurrently, a functioning democracy:

“The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate.”

--Thomas Jefferson

The problem is twofold-- 1) how does one educate a populace increasingly distracted by social media and growing issues of income inequality, poverty, and ignorance of the very governmental system it has a responsibility to carry on?  And, 2) How does one prevent those who desire the status quo from interfering in the evolution and adaptation of our nation and education systems to something that more closely correlates to what is necessary for a functioning and healthy democracy?

All of this is preamble to the questions in his thread.  It is obvious to me that much of the electorate, whether left or right, is unhappy with the status quo.  The surprising numbers of voters who indicated they would vote for either Trump or Sanders in 2016 shows that the populism of both has some parallels, regardless of their differences in policy.  The similarities are in the stark growth in income inequality over the last several decades.  Regardless of whether you want democratic socialism to begin to set the system to balance, or an authoritarian daddy figure to make everything better for you with mere force of will, it is apparent that a very large segment of the population is sick of business as usual...much more than the usual grumblings over the last several decades.

What is not in vogue is the muddled prognostications of moderates, who seek to keep things the way they are...or at least, to bring them back to an era of Clinton-Bush-Obama, where the economic elites didn't have to worry about demagogues upsetting the apple cart, and politicians were mostly bought and paid for and kept in line with what their billionaire owners desired of them.  Republican leadership is to blame for mindlessly seeking to give as much economic power as possible to their wealthy donors, feeding the hysteria of low-information Conservative voters to the point where the Trump/MAGA mob now threatens them in the voting booth if they are anything but obsequious to their god-king.  Democratic leadership is to blame for spinelessly going along to get along, seeking an imaginary middle road that has constantly moved with the reactionary Republicans pulling back from the middle and moving the Overton Window to the right of the political spectrum while the general population of the United States has gradually moved to the left with the march of time.  Gay rights, racial equality, and economic security have become watchwords for most Americans, while the politics of Washington have supposedly become 'divisive'--but the only thing that has changed is that the rich have gotten richer, and the Democrats in power have hopelessly tried to seek an equal basis with their Republican colleagues, an effort doomed to failure if I've ever seen one.

Given the situation, Klobuchar should absolutely be the candidate the party wants.

That's not surprising for the establishment of the party.  Given that Hillary Clinton should have run away with the election from a racist, sexist demagogue like Trump, despite intelligence community-verified interference from the Russians, standing in a muddied middle cost her the votes of the dispossessed and angry.

She's a Boomer - well, practically everyone in this race that isn't Buttigieg is - but she's on the younger end of the scale, so she doesn't look a billion years old or sound like someone's grandma.

She's a tweener between the Boomers and my Generation X, but age seems an odd quibble, considering the most popular candidates on both sides (Trump/Sanders) are in their seventies and enjoy massive popularity from their respective followers.  I don't think old age is a very important qualifier any more, in this era of modern medicine.

But if anyone but Bernie gets the nomination (Warren has no chance, she came in 3rd in Iowa and she's on track to claim a distant 4th in NH), the radical, 'energetic' wing of the Democratic party - the Squaddies and their ilk - will not vote for the DNC's candidate.  They will come out and say that they were robbed of their rightful place on the dais.  Again.

I voted for Bernie in the primary...and then for Hillary in the general.  The number of people who refused to vote for Hillary is fairly close to the people in 2008 who refused to vote for Obama after Clinton lost to him.  There is always a minority of voters who are going to claim sour grapes.  It might be a bit larger with Sanders voters because, simply, many of his voters aren't Democrats to begin with.  I've never belonged to a political party, and the 'none of the aboves' are at least a good third of the electorate as it is.  If Bernie can pull people who rarely vote (as Trump did with disaffected Conservatives) into the election, that's a good thing.  The problem will be with those who actually belong to the Democratic Party who hypocritically refuse to vote for him because their candidate doesn't get chosen.

He's against letting terrorists and convicted felons vote from jail;

Placing terrorist next to convicted felon seems to conflate the two.  Considering an abnormally large percentage of convicted felons are people of color placed in prison because of the policies of the failed War on Drugs indicates to me that not all convicted felons are as bad as terrorists.  I've known many of them, and several of them were decent people who were parents of some of my students.  Going to prison for possessing or selling weed isn't the same as detonating a car bomb...and most terrorists of the domestic variety in this country (the vast majority, in fact) are right-wing reactionaries and white supremacists.  regardless, I don't personally think that even being a felon should take away your right to vote.  While the U.S. has the largest percentage of its population behind bars, I doubt that even prisoners voting at a large rate would change many elections--but those who have served their time and are now free should never, ever be stripped of their inalienable right to vote.

he's stated that the idea of student debt forgiveness isn't a winning idea (because he recognizes the fact that you will have a ton of people who actually paid back their loans, or worked to never have to get them in the first place, pissed off that a bunch of people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time - through no action of their own - get their debts relieved).

Considering Carville's past and his support of failed choices like Clinton's removing limitations on banks gambling with people's money, banning gay marriage, and NAFTA, I don't think any of his opinons should be taken with anything but a heaping pile of salt.  I paid my own entire way through college, working multiple jobs, with no help from my parents, and I have enough empathy for my fellow, younger teachers to wish all of their considerable student debt was immediately erased, because I know how it causes economic hardship for them and their families, and only rewards the banker class with the endless supply of loan interest they soak from the vast majority of the college educated.  A lot of the people who get pissed that someone else gets their loans forgiven--but they didn't--simply lack the empathy to seek a better life for others that they themselves did not get to have.

Carville wants the power to pursue what he believes is the agenda that needs to be set for the US.  But he's concerning himself with acquiring power now and setting the agenda later, rather than the other way around.  And when you place power before principle, that's how you get corruption.  I don't mean corruption in the standard political sense.  I mean corruption in the dictionary sense: that of a process by which something original is debased and altered such that its original purpose no longer exists.  Something like what happened with the Tea Party - it began as a middle class movement responding to bad economic trends (mostly connected to 2008) and ended up becoming a political group that wields power in the House and the Senate.  (See The Newsroom for more.)

The United States has a systemic problem, from its inception, that is causing this issue of power struggle.  It began with the sin of slavery, and the compromise that became what we know as the United States Senate.  The Senate is inherently unequal, as it rewards Conservative states for having more states, not for having more people.  Much like Citizens United rewarding the rich with more power for having more money, the Senate ensures such travesties as the failed conviction of Trump.  Until the Constitution is amended to either modify or abolish the Senate, and have a much more fair and equal parliamentary system of one overarching, population-based House of Representatives, this inequality and corruption will continue.

My study of history shows that civilizations follow a life expectancy--they are born, grow, adapt (or not), and die (or evolve into something different than they were originally).  The United States is simply following this observed pattern.  That so many Americans believe in the Exceptionalism of our country matters not one whit to the reality of the situation.  America can fail, and will change, one way or another.  It can evolve as England did, from a world power to something less than it was, but more stable and less destructive to the world in general...or it can fail, as Spain did...or worse, as Rome did.  In the position our nation finds itself in now, the moderate path does not appeal to enough people, nor is it even remotely adequate to the situation we find ourselves in.  If you're heading towards the precipice, steady on does not avoid a catastrophe.

[ReijiTabibito]

Woke up this morning, read the results of the SC contest last night, and had to check my calendar that it wasn't Easter, because it looks like a man just came back from the dead.  :P  Biden won in a blowout - he had nearly half the votes cast in the primary, and almost two and a half times that of Sanders, who came in 2nd.  Biden is now a not-so-distant 2nd place in delegates (50 to Sanders' 58), and him winning in SC means he's potentially on track to carry the South on Super Tuesday.

[Oniya]

Pete Buttigieg has ended his run - and I think Steyer as well?  Still over a month until my state primary, so I'm just keeping an eye on the field.  There are two candidates that I viscerally don't like, only one of which really has a chance of going anywhere.

To be clear, I didn't like Steyer, but I had him pegged as a 'vanity run'.  Pete wasn't my first choice, but I would have supported him if he'd gotten the nom.  I'm not doing the bandwagon thing this election.