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Well, this year both year-end holidays fall on a Friday, so I haven't completely decided how to handle our two annual awards columns. I basically have two options.
In the admittedly sophomoric fashion of headline creation, today we do not cheer: "On, Wisconsin!", but rather approach the state from the point of dealing with a tricky subject to address, in the style of: "On The Subject Of...". The reasons are pretty obvious (not to... ahem... badger the point), since the primary election they're holding today simply should not have been held right now, seeing as how we're all still in the depths of a medical crisis which demands as stringent social distancing as possible. But Republicans have successfully demanded that people risk death to cast a ballot, so (sadly) here we are.
Welcome back again for our continuing series where we attempt to pick the winners of all the 2020 Democratic primary contests. This is really the second part of a two-part article, as yesterday I discussed at length the shifting nature of the contest after three of the moderate candidates dropped out (Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar). Today we're going to forego the "big picture" analysis altogether and just dive right in to the state-by-state predictions.
It's "first in the nation" primary time, which means it is time once again to throw down my own markers and predict the winner of New Hampshire tonight. I've long felt that pundits who merely vaguely describe the race as it stands are craven, because it's a lot tougher to actually try to foresee the results ahead of time in an article under your own name. So I've always publicly announced my picks ahead of time, even if they turn out to be disastrously wrong in the end.
We're finally at the point where Democratic primary voters (or "caucus voters," today) get to register their choices in an actual election. It's been a long and winding road to get here, and along the way 18 of the announced 29 Democratic candidates have already dropped out of the race, leaving us with only (!) 11 remaining. After the Iowa and New Hampshire results are in, that field should narrow down to, hopefully, single digits.
Welcome back to the second and final installment of our year-end awards columns! If you missed last week's column, you should probably check that out, too.
Because we got some great suggestions when we first posted this, we thought today it'd be a good idea to solicit some more nominations for the second awards column. So here are the categories for Part 2, and as before if you don't want your login name used (to give credit), then please let me know that in the comments.
Welcome back once again to our year-end "McLaughlin Awards," named for the awards categories we lifted from the McLaughlin Report years ago. We've added a category here and there over time, but it's still the same basic list.
Instead, today I am throwing the nomination process open for our annual year-end "McLaughlin Awards." I am going to commit to publishing these on December 20th and 27th, the final two Fridays of the year. With such a short holiday season, I just don't think it's possible to move that up to starting with our awards this Friday, so we'll have one final Friday Talking Points column of the year before the awards. That's the plan, even if it does mean I'll be real busy the two days after Christmas. I have no idea what other columns will be appearing this month, so stay tuned for other updates.
We're beginning to see some polling which reflects the impressions the voters got in the second round of Democratic debates. It's still early and these trends won't become really solid until we see at least another week's worth of polling, but it's still worth taking a look to see where the Democratic field apparently now stands. So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of dramatic movement in the polls. There are really only three mini-trends to watch, and two of them really began before the debates even got started.