[ Posted Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 – 17:26 UTC ]
President Donald Trump apparently thinks he can easily beat the 2020 Democratic nominee -- if Democrats would only nominate Hillary Clinton again, that is. The fact that she's not actually running seems to have completely escaped him. Granted, with 24 candidates in the Democratic race, it is rather hard to keep track of them all -- but even so, it's pretty hard to miss the fact that there simply are no Clintons whatsoever in the race this time around. But Trump's never been one to let facts get in the way of a good chant at one of his political rallies.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 18th, 2019 – 16:40 UTC ]
The first authentic polling trend of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest may now be happening. By "authentic," what I mean is a polling trend that is not merely an "announcement bump." Every candidate (well... every viable candidate) has seen some sort of boost in their polling immediately after making their official announcement, but most of these have since subsided. Now that the field is full, there will be no more such announcements to skew the polling, and any trends must thus be due to actual campaign successes or failures by the candidates. And we're seeing at least the beginnings of the first of these trends: Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to be enjoying a surge.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 13th, 2019 – 16:55 UTC ]
President Donald Trump just made news by admitting what everyone already knew or suspected -- that he'd be just fine with Russia feeding him dirt on a political opponent during a presidential election campaign. He wouldn't see any necessity to inform the F.B.I. if a foreign government offered up negative information, and he furthermore insisted that any other American politician would do exactly the same thing. He's trying to normalize his own amorality, in other words.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 4th, 2019 – 16:37 UTC ]
The 2020 Democratic primary calendar has experience a shift of Biblical proportions since this time around "the last shall be first," at least out here in California. I know that's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough. In 2016, California was one of the last states to hold its primaries, on June 7. This time around, the guaranteed early-voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) will technically be first, but California will now be among those states in the "first among all the others" category, voting on Super Tuesday in early March. Since California is somewhat of an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to the sheer number of delegates, this is going to shake up the campaign strategies of all the Democrats running. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation, though.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 28th, 2019 – 16:46 UTC ]
Last week, the Democratic National Committee quietly instituted a new rule for their first debate, which was created to avoid having a "kiddie table" debate on either of the two scheduled nights. This was a smart move, given that the entire random selection scheme was set up in the first place to avoid lumping all the leading candidates together in one debate, leaving all the struggling candidates to compete with each other in the other debate. It will still be a random selection process, but there will now be two tiers.
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[ Posted Monday, April 29th, 2019 – 18:09 UTC ]
When political wonks look at factors which influence presidential elections, one of the most obvious correlations is with how the economy's doing. Economic indicators are a good indication of the mood of the voters, or at least they have been in the past. Of course, as with any attempt to identify causality in the nebulous field of politics, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule or anything, but tracking the economy is a better indicator than most as to whether the voters are in the mood for a change at the top or not.
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[ Posted Friday, April 19th, 2019 – 17:41 UTC ]
Yesterday, Robert Mueller's investigative report on Donald Trump was made (mostly) public. Today, Trump and his cheerleaders are insisting that he has been totally vindicated and exonerated, while some Democratic candidates for president are demanding that impeachment proceedings be launched in the House of Representatives. That's a pretty wide gulf in perception, but at this point it was to be expected.
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[ Posted Thursday, April 18th, 2019 – 16:56 UTC ]
The Mueller Report is finally out. Portions of it have been redacted, and congressional Democrats will doubtlessly continue their push to get an unredacted version to read, but even if that happens the public may never get to see the full text. So for now, we've only got what was released today to examine. And the emerging consensus seems to be that there was no one glaring thing to point to which will lead to Donald Trump's downfall. As usual, there is plenty of fishy and questionable and possibly illegal conduct by both Trump and his minions, but none of it is likely to spur immediate impeachment hearings.
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[ Posted Monday, April 15th, 2019 – 18:11 UTC ]
Today is not just the day when millions of Americans have to file their income taxes, if is also the day when the millions of Democratic presidential candidates also have to file their first quarter fundraising numbers. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but it certainly seems like millions at times, doesn't it?
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019 – 17:16 UTC ]
Before attempting to draw any comparisons or contrasts between Bernie Sanders and the rest of the 2020 Democratic presidential field, what I find rather ironic is to compare his second bid for the White House to two of the candidates from last time around: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Because, whether he likes it or not, Sanders is now close to occupying the position that Clinton held the last time around, and (if he's lucky) he might just follow the path Trump charted in the 2016 race.
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