Daily Archives: March 4, 2020

To grasp the difference between the two parties, compare Biden with the 2016 Republican contender whom, on paper, he most resembles: Jeb Bush. Like Biden, Bush was closely associated with his partys last president. Like Biden, Bush led in early polls. Like Biden, Bush struggled in debates. Like Biden, Bush performed horribly in Iowa, where he came in sixth, and New Hampshire, where he came in fourth. And, like Biden, Bush staked his candidacy on a comeback in South Carolina.

Bushs strategy in the Palmetto State was similar to the one Biden employed last month: He made himself the defender of his partys old guard. At a debate in South Carolina one week before voters there went to the polls, Bush drew a contrast between the insurgent Donald Trumps nativism and former President George W. Bushs more welcoming message. The great majority of immigrants, Jeb declared, are coming to provide for their families. And we should show a little more respect for the fact that theyre struggling.

Jeb also went out of his way to defend his brothers response to 9/11. At the debate, when Trump accused George W. Bush and his advisers of having lied when they said there were weapons of destruction in Iraq, Jeb struck back. While Donald Trump was building a reality-TV show, he replied, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And Im proud of what he did.

The younger Bush, The New York Times noted, seems to be embracing his inner dynast, joking about his family in speeches, pointing out relatives in his crowds and going out of his way to speak with pride about his fathers and brothers achievements. Two days after the debate, he brought his brother to South Carolina to campaign. Standing with Lindsey Grahamthe states Republican senior senatorGeorge W. told a North Charleston crowd that, If serving as president of the United States makes me part of the so-called establishment, I proudly wear that label.

Biden did something similar this year. Although he failed to secure Barack Obamas endorsement, Biden made his relationship with the former president the centerpiece of his South Carolina campaign. His surrogates reprised Obamas campaign chant, Fired up, ready to go. The former vice president referred endlessly to the Obama-Biden administration in speeches and used Obama as a battering ram against his opponents. One Biden ad accused Bernie Sanders of trying to destroy Obamas legacy by replacing the Affordable Care Act with Medicare for All. Another slammed Sanders for having considered challenging our first African American president in a primary in 2012. And just as Jeb Bush leaned on an endorsement from Graham, Biden touted his support from Jim Clyburn, the long-serving Democratic representative from South Carolina.

The results could not have been more different. Bush lost to Trump in South Carolina by 25 points, and quickly dropped out of the race. Biden beat Sanders by 29 points and, buoyed by a new series of high-profile endorsements, went on to beat him in a slew of other states last night.

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The Democratic Party Wasnt Ripe for a Takeover - The Atlantic

DALLAS Is it normal for poll workers to split up Democrats and Republicans into separate lines to vote?

That's a question many voters had Tuesday morning.

The simple answer is yes.

It's not uncommon for that to be the case during primaries in Texas, because voters must select which party primary they want to vote in and then get a ballot for that race.

They then often have to use a machine that has already been dedicated to one party or the other, as the ballots are inside the machines some counties use.

There might be longer lines for Democrats this year than Republicans due to the fact that there are bigger races in contention for that party, like the presidential nomination and the race for U.S. Senate in Texas.

RELATED: Know before you go: 2020 voter guide for Super Tuesday in Texas

Some voters were reporting a higher number of machines being dedicated to Republican voters than Democrats.

That could be due to poor management by the county or because a county has a higher number of Republican voters overall.

Joe Williams, the presiding judge of the Mansfield Subcourthouse polling place, told WFAA the number of machines they have is based on population data from the 2010 U.S. Census.

He said they have seven booths for Republican voters and five booths for Democratic voters.

The U.S. Census does not, however, ask respondents for their political affiliation.

WFAA's Ariel Plasencia talked to both the Tarrant County Republican Party leader Rick Barnes and the Tarrant County Democratic Party precinct chair Heather Buen. Both of them said the reason why there are seven Republican booths and five Democratic booths at the Mansfield Subcourthouse is not because of the census, as Joe Williams originally stated. Instead, this discrepancy is based on voter history at that polling location. Buen said that the Tarrant County Elections Administration Department decides how many of each booth there are going to be.

Buen said that the Democratic precinct chairs voted to keep the voting booths separate because they were concerned that their voters might be subjected to potentially hostile election judges.

Barnes said that Tarrant County Elections Administration Department went to the Democrats first, who voted not to share the machines.

It's important to remember that in Texas, the parties put on the primaries using county-owned voting equipment.

Tarrant County Elections tweeted out that they offered to have the parties share equipment this year, but the parties did not agree to do so. Now, officials with the county's Elections Administration Department say they wish the parties had taken their advice.

Tarrant Democratic Chair Deborah Peoples told the Fort Worth star-Telegram's Bud Kennedy in a statement that the party has "never shared machines in a primary. The Democratic Party always has is [sic] voting area with their machines and the Republican party always has its area. The only time we ever share machines is in the general and during early voting."

Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitely told WFAA this is only the second time they have used these particular machines and some of the problems can be attributed to some of the voters jamming the ballot into the machine. Whitely said there are currently almost 3,000 machines across 192 locations.

This November after the parties select their candidates every machine will have the same ballot and the elections will be run by the counties and Secretary of State.

Follow all the updates on Super Tuesday with WFAA's live blog.

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Why are there separate lines for Democrat and Republican voters on Super Tuesday in Texas? - WFAA.com

Tuesday, billionaire Michael Bloomberg is on 2020 Democratic primary ballots for the first time, running against, among others, a self-described Democratic Socialist in Bernie Sanders. And eventually, one candidate will face off against America's firstbillionairepresident, Donald Trump.

Of late, the Democratic candidates have spent the campaign season boasting of any humble beginnings and defending any wealth: Biden noted the first time he ever made anyreal money was in 2017 during the South Carolina debate. And Bloomberg said he's giving away his own money, while accusing Sanders of having three homes while in Las Vegas.

It all puts a fine point on how wealth inequality has become a rallying cry for the Democratic presidential candidates, and how it could further define the election for the Democratic nominee after that.

As a catalyst in the 2020 election, the rhetoric is "more acute" than it has been in decades, Democratic strategist, speech-writer and political commentator Hamza Khan tells CNBC Make It.

"I do not think it has been this severe at least since the time of Teddy Roosevelt in the last century," says Khan. (President from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt entered office during the "Gilded Age," another era in American history defined in part by extreme wealth inequality betweenindustrial workers and "robber barons" like John D. Rockefeller and J.P.Morgan.)

According to a January Pew Research Center survey, 78% of those who identify as Democrats or lean Democratic say there's too much economic inequality in the country. (Only about 41% of Republicans or those who lean Republican agree.)

So for the Democrats, the conversation around wealth inequality "will only continue to increase" and move to the "forefront,"Democratic political consultant Andrew Feldmantells CNBC Make It.

But how did economic inequality become a tent pole for the Democratic party's agenda in 2020? According to the experts, these are some of the specific political conditions making wealth inequality a force on the Democratic campaign trail and for the election.

"Inequality is rising as a political issue because it keeps getting greater,"Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, tells CNBC Make It.

In 2018, the top 10% of U.S. households controlled 70% of total household wealth, according to a white paper from Federal Reserve economists. (Up from 60% in 1989, the increase came at the expense of some of those with less wealth.) The top 1% controlled nearly 32% of household wealth in 2018.

The difference between average Americans and the rich (some of whom are running for president), is stark.

"If you make median income ($50,000/year), and you work hard and save 100% of your money, you'll have as much money as Mike Bloomberg...in 1.2 million years," Begalasays. (Bloomberg is worth $60 billion, according to Forbes.) "If you're really well off and make $1 million a year, you will catch Bloomberg in a mere 60,000 years."

(With median income would take 62,000 yearsto catch Trump,who is worth $3.1 billion, according to Forbes.)

According to Feldman, a focus on wealth inequality will be a key way to counterthe likely main point of Trump's re-election campaign: a strong economy.

Though fears of an economic slowdown resulting from the coronavirus outbreak have kept stocks volatile in recent days, theDow Jones Industrial Average isstill higher than when Trump took office. And the unemployment rate has been trending lowerduring the Trump years as well.

Feldman believes Trump is not likely to change his campaign strategy, however. "The more visible signs of a weakening economy, it hurts his argument, but I don't think he is going to stop using it."

Coronavirus consequences aside, highlighting wealth inequality has been the Democratic candidates' best counter punch.

During theDemocratic debate in South Carolina, for example, the first question, posed to Sanders, was, "How will you convince voters that a Democratic socialist can do better than President Trump with the economy?"

He responded by highlighting the wealth gap. "You're right. The economy is doing really great for people like Mr. Bloomberg and other billionaires," Sanders said. "For the ordinary American, things are not so good."

A focus on wealth inequality highlights that, "even when the macroeconomic numbers seem good, there is a lot of pain underneath," according to Begala.

"You have to talk about the wealth inequality gap when you talk about the challenges with our economy" otherwise Trump could "sweep [the Democrats] under the rug," Feldman says.

"The fact is that the electorate has evolved since 2016," Khan tells CNBC Make It.

The share of the U.S. electorate who are Gen Z voters (those born after 1996) will increase from 4% in the 2016 election to an expected 10% in 2020, according to aPew Research Center analysis. Taken together, the voting cohort of Gen Z voters and millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) form the largest voting block, Khan points out a projected 37% of voters. Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) will be 28% of the voting cohort, according to Pew.

These younger voters are more diverseand have different priorities than their older voting compatriots. "The difference is what this electorate is willing to tolerate versus what elder generations have grown accustomed to," he tells CNBC Make It.

So while wealth inequality "was clearly bad several years ago as well," this year's voters have different expectations, Khan says.

The Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 according to the Federal Reserve, is seared into the formative memories of younger voters.

Younger voters haven't known boomer-generation stability, he says. "Neither generation has seen the economic stability their parents or grandparents saw, and both are highly engaged civicallyand motivated to organize in order to see change," Khan said.

In 2016, Trump benefited from an evolution in the rural vote from more Democratic to more Republican, which exit pollsshow has been happening gradually over recent decades.

"To win the electoral college, Democrats need to narrow their margin of losses in rural America," Isaac Wright, a partner at Forward Solution Strategy Group tells CNBC Make It. An important way to do that is to address thewealth gap as a "very real crisis" in rural communities, he says.

Rural Americans are less optimistic about their financial future than those living in urban or suburban areas: 63% of adults in rural areas who report they don't currently have enough income to lead the kind of life they want also say they don't expect to in the future, according to Pew. (That compares with 54% of those in cities and 51% of those in suburbs.)

"The wealth gap in America has created a deep divide in society and in turn in the electorate," Wright tells CNBC Make It."Candidates put forth their own plans for how to address wealth inequality and many pundits and analysts think of it as an issue related only to the primary. But in reality, addressing wealth inequality will be crucial to determine the outcome of the General Election, largely in relation to rural voters."

Don't miss:

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Why wealth inequality is driving Democrats in the 2020 election - CNBC

As Super Tuesday finally transfigures the Democratic presidential nomination process into a binary choice between two old, occasionally problematic white men whose enduring popularity is consistently underrated by a baffled mainstream press, it's worth reflecting on just how poorly the media's preferred candidates performed in the 2020 race.

In the end, The New York Times' dual Democratic presidential endorsementsbestowed upon both Sens. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) and Amy Klobuchar (DMinn.)were like the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway?: They just didn't matter.

Nor did the media's fawning over South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, early flirtation with Beto O'Rourke, and absolute worship of Sen. Kamala Harris (DCalif.) resonate with the millions of Americans living outside the Acela corridor.

Instead, Democratic voters indicated over and over again that they were most interested in the popular former vice president and the iconoclastic but well-respected runner-up from the 2016 Democratic race. Before the actual primaries, Biden consistently led in polls and Sanders performed welland then the eventual voting followed this pattern, with early wins for Sanders and a comeback surge from Biden. The idea that any other candidate had a particularly likely shot at the nomination was always pundit-driven misdirection from a class of commentators demanding more interesting, intersectional characters, because the commentators themselves are more interested in identity-based diversity than the rest of the country.

Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox's Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing "even if all your friends love her." By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader ofVox.Yglesias famously describedVox's audience as "a graduate of or student at a selective college (which also describes the staff and our social peers)" and lamented that "if you assigned me the job of serving a less-educated audience [I'd] probably need to think about how to change things up." He's right; outside the Voxbubble, there was little interest in the kind of cultural progressivism represented by Warren.

At present, Biden and Sanders are locked in a battle for delegates. Both men have a good shot at the nomination. But this was true a year ago as well. They were both better-known and better-liked than many in the media seemed to grasp, and an endless series of magazine covers, fluff pieces, and editorial board endorsements aimed at other candidates couldn't make any difference whatsoever.

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Democratic Primary Voters Decisively Rejected the Media's Favorite Candidates - Reason

Officials at the Democratic National Committee have begun to plan for the possibility that their July convention in Milwaukee may be scuttled or dramatically upended because of the spread of 2019 novel coronavirus, multiple sources tell The Daily Beast.

Discussions over what to do if coronavirus makes it difficult, if not impossible, for delegates and the public to come to the convention have been mostly informal up until this week. But two top Democrats said they expected far more serious planning to begin in haste as infections and deaths accumulate and experts warn the virus will spread in the United States and, potentially, seriously disrupt travel and commerce. On Monday, state party chairs raised concerns on a conference call with DNC officials that party functions, including the election of delegates to the national convention, could be disrupted or delayed because of coronavirus fears.

It is serious. The question for state chairs is, look, we all have to put on conventions coming up. Most of the delegates to the national convention are elected at [state] conventions. What happens if state parties have to cancel these events where delegates are elected? said Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. If things continue to evolve, It could dramatically alter the contest and severely hamper Democrats as we try to unify our party.

Martin told The Daily Beast Democrats were already seeing ripple effects of the coronavirus in their operations. The Washington State Democratic Party, he said, was cancelling a big fundraising dinner they had scheduled for this Saturday because of the virus spread in the state, where it has killed at least six and infected 18. The Washington State Democratic Party did not return a request for comment.

The national party has not yet taken such measures. But in a statement to The Daily Beast, Joe Solmonese, CEO of the 2020 Democratic National Convention Committee, said contingency plans were being entertained for Milwaukee.

Ensuring the safety of convention attendees and local residents isand will always remainour top priority, said Solmonese. Every convention necessitates developing a number of contingency plans to provide for a variety of scenarios. As we prepare to welcome Americans to Milwaukee this summer, the convention team will remain in constant communication with the local, state, and federal authorities responsible for protecting public health and security. We will continue to monitor this developing situation closely and follow the guidance of the CDC and state and local health officials in the days and weeks ahead.

Convention planning is a laborious process, involving months, if not years, of preparation. It also represents a massive infusion of people into urban areas, and then into packed venues. In 2016, an estimated 50,000 people came to Philadelphia to partake in and witness the nomination of Hillary Clinton.

Similar numbers are anticipated for Milwaukee when Democrats are set to gather from July 13 through 16. But as coronavirus has spread and travel restrictions seem likely to be intensified, top officials are wondering whether attendees will or should make it.

The result could be a convention that is not just sparsely attended but one where the act of formally nominating a presidential candidate is thrown into disorder. Such a scenario could be especially chaotic if no one candidate enters Milwaukee with a majority of delegates and those same delegates are forced to stay away from the convention site.

According to several top officials, the DNCs charter and bylaws leave little ambiguity when it comes to the requirement that delegates be physically on site in order to cast their votes. Under Section 11, it states that Voting by proxy shall not be permitted at the National Convention. Voting by proxy shall otherwise be permitted in Democratic Party affairs only as provided in the Bylaws of the Democratic Party.

Among the topics being discussed by DNC officials now is what to do about the rules if delegates cannot get to Milwaukee, are spooked into not attending, or are being advised to avoid going entirely. The actual solution, officials say, is not all that complicated: The convention, by way of its Standing Committee on Rules, can change the bylaws to make it so that proxy voting ormore likelyremote voting is allowable.

If there is an emergency like this and there is broad consensus, Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic official who previously ran for DNC Chair, told The Daily Beast. Yes, the rules can be easily changed. These things are very flexible.

The issue, then, is how to build such a system into the nomination process. One official said they expected discussions in the coming days and weeks to center around whether there would be software fixes that the committee could adopt that would allow for remote voting for delegates. So far this cycle, the party has had slightly less than confidence-boosting results when it comes to the use of software to count votes.

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Coronavirus Could Shake Up the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee - The Daily Beast

Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want, Mr. Sanderss campaign wrote in response to the survey, adding that he would encourage states and cities to enact even stricter rent control.

Ms. Warrens campaign said that she did not want a federal rent control law but that she strongly supports state and local rent control efforts, which she believes will be more effective at protecting renters from unacceptable rent increases while ensuring adequate affordable housing supply.

Mr. Bloomberg said he opposed national rent control, and Mr. Bidens plan does not mention it.

The candidates are evenly split on the question of a tax credit for renters, and not along the usual ideological lines: Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders support it, while Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Warren do not.

Under Mr. Bidens plan, renters would receive the credit if their rent and utilities exceeded 30 percent of their income, and the credit would be large enough to bring the costs down to that 30 percent mark. He said he would allocate $5 billion a year for the credit, which would help low-income individuals and families who may make too much money to qualify for a Section 8 voucher but still struggle to pay their rent.

Mr. Sanderss campaign said that while he supported a renters tax credit, it must be paired with rent control to ensure it is not a windfall for real estate investors. Landlords should not be allowed to raise rents at will and then have the federal government subsidize those rent increases, he said.

Ms. Warren, by contrast, said that while she supported robust funding for rental assistance programs, the housing crisis was rooted in a lack of supply, and that she wanted to focus on policies that would address the shortage of affordable housing.

Individual proposals, especially ones as forceful as national rent control, are subjects of disagreement among advocates and experts and, of course, among candidates. But rarely has the debate played out on such a large stage.

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How the Democratic Candidates Would Tackle the Housing Crisis - The New York Times