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Sanders Wins NH; Buttigieg, Klobuchar Close Behind
Brooklyn Bolshevik Bernie Sanders rallies a New Hampshire crowd with his popular “Liquidate the Kulaks” speech.
Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden have been stuck in the single digits most of the night, a brutal showing for both. All the other candidates have less than 4 percent of the vote. Latest results are listed below the fold.
| Candidate | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Bernie Sanders | 25.8% |
| Pete Buttigieg | 24.3% |
| Amy Klobuchar | 19.8% |
| Elizabeth Warren | 9.3% |
| Joe Biden | 8.7% |
Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet both suspended their campaigns in reaction to their paltry showings. Deval Patrick is expected to do the same. “I am not someone who wants to accept donations and support in a race that we will not win,” Yang said late Tuesday night to supporters. “The ‘Yang Gang’ has fundamentally shifted the direction of this country and transformed our politics, and we are only continuing to grow.”
Remember to visit Ricochet’s Live Chat to discuss the results!
Published in Elections
Yang seems to be a decent human being, so obviously there is no place for him in the race.
Thanks to @exjon for doing the necessary work of following the NH Primary leg of the Democrat Gauntlet Show. Just spit-balling here, but it’s starting to shape up as less of a contest for who can beat President Trump and more of a fight for the Democratic Party.
I have read others suggest that the Bloomberg campaign was not a serious attempt for the presidency, but was more intended to garner support for his anti-life, anti-self defense crusade (which includes Moms Demand Action, Every Town for Gun Safety, and other like minded groups). However his racist roots have recently been exposed and this exposure surely cannot help those who care little whether minorities or the poor can adequately defend themselves from criminals win public office on the ruse that they just want everyone to be safer.
If the Dems reform for 2024 into a wholly different party, it will be interesting to see where he stands.
Apparently a plurality of Democrats have gotten the message that Bernie can’t win in November, and Liz isn’t a viable alternative. But they haven’t figured out yet who they want in place of Sanders, other than that they don’t want wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe. You’d think that would mean at the moment a battle between Buttigieg and Kloubchar to be the ‘Not Bernie’ candidate, but Bloomberg’s still back there waiting to money bomb both of them in the Super Tuesday primaries, which could split tonight’s vote even further (Bloomberg’s audio on Stop and Frisk policing could sidetrack him. But unless the media’s sold on Mayor Pete or Amy as the ‘Not Bernie’ alternative, my guess is the audio is at best a 48-hour story, since they see Bloomberg as having the $$$ to flood the airwaves in the fall against Trump, and their finance departments really, really like all the money he’s spending with them on political ads. There’s a financial incentive not to force Mayor Mike to go away).
It would be really funny if Klobuchar is doing so good because no one knows who she is.
“I don’t know who to vote for. They all suck. He’s a socialist, he’s… how do I even say that???… that one’s a fake liar, and he’s senile. Who’s this? Ok. This one’s it.”
“Was she the one who raised her hand at the debate last Friday over that Socialism thing? OK, I’m sold.“
I had no idea who she was. Then I read Peter Schweizer’s new book, and I feel like I know her a little better. Typical machine pol. All of her skills are in the money-churning, political maneuvering set. Whatever it takes to move up the power ladder, no discernable principles beyond that.
I don’t know how this translates to the general, but the Democrats are having a hell of a time trying to win their own primaries.
Hailing from Minnesota, I can tell you that Amy Klobuchar only won her seat because her name was a household word due to her father – a frankly mediocre, nasty fellow – being a columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper for ages. Take away that familiar last name, and I doubt she would have been elected. So I am astonished that, 1 – she entered the presidential race; and 2 – that she’s doing as well as she is. It points to the weakness of the Democratic field.
On an NR Cruise in 2016, on a panel about who the Ds might want to run against Trump, I said Amy Klobuchar. In a career littered with busted prognostications, it might yet pay out!
She has made her own lane by not being what the others are, being the Socialist Repudiator, being female, and projecting Sensible Midwestern Pragmatism, and also a certain centered character the party may wish to contrast with Trump, whom they regard as a poo-flinging monkey. Mayor Pete’s running mate? Maybe. Cue the jokes about his “office wife.”
What’s interesting is how the Ds think Mayor Pete having a husband is a footnote – at best, it’s cute and cool. You’d think they’d play it up more, because identity politics are awesome! First gay president! But they’re not.
I wanted Biden to hold it together until he got crushed in the fall. Any of Bernie, Bloomberg, Amy and Petey could plausibly beat Trump. Biden would have ensured disaster for the Dems.
Sorry. I endorsed him too soon.
I still think that if Klobuchar gets the nomination she is going to be like the dog that caught the car. She sees this stuff as a racket first and helping people or whatever second. Peter Schwitzer has some brutal stuff on her. I’m sure Gary is fired up.
Think about her notorious management style. That is going to be a huge problem and she knows it.
I have a sincere question. One of my big disagreements with Dennis Prager who’s usually right about everything is his view of legislators versus political executives. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal if you lack experience and you can switch anytime you want. I think that’s 100% wrong. I think Trump has problems because he lacks civic executive experience and civic knowledge. I think Mia Love lost her position because she never had any actual legislator experience. She was a mayor of a small town. Then she tried to be a hack on MSNBC and then they dumped her unceremoniously.
I want to make it clear I know absolutely jack about Klobuchar’s head prosecutor job. Maybe that makes her a big-time government / political executive.
I just think deep down she doesn’t want to be this visible and she doesn’t wanna make the freaky hard decisions she’s going to have to make. She knows her executive style is going to become a great big public deal.
I don’t know how this is going to manifest, but I’m sure it’s going to be a problem one way or another.
I agree with you. Legislative and executive experience are two different skillsets and two different ways of thinking. I have done both, running companies and being on boards of directors.
That may be a small problem, but the larger problem is that the organization was stacked against him coming in.
Going by the (admittedly slim) voting data of the first two weeks, it looks like about a third of Bernie’s 2016 support wasn’t so much Bernie Bro votes as they were ‘Anybody but Hillary’ votes — Sanders was the only other game in town four years ago, but with more options to choose from in 2020, those voters are looking for someone they think will be more palatable to swing voters this fall.
So Bernie’s ‘floor’ of die hard supporters is about 25-26 percent, where Trump’s floor four years ago was in the range of 30-32 percent. Doesn’t seem like that big a difference, but it’s the difference between having to get a quarter of the primary voters on your side to upend Sanders versus having to get a third of them every week in 2016 to beat Trump. So the bar for success is lower for Klobuchar to get into the game, but her problem is she’s battling Mayor Pete, and come Super Tuesday, Mayor Mike for that same lane to get to 25 percent or more to upend Bernie. That’s also tougher to do with Warren and Biden still splitting about 15 percent of the vote.
She might end up being the one to come out of it, but it would be against type for the Democrats — after three years of cheering on politicians who made the wildest claims/attacks possible against Trump — to suddenly decide to go for the most charisma-challenged/Dukakis-like option in Amy Klobuchar.
Right, I agree with that. I think his ability to deal with the media and his ability to have a fresh look about government was worth it etc, etc.
Another example that is interesting is Mike Bloomberg. He owned a monopoly and he had zero civic executive experience but by all accounts NYC ran like a watch. There was a really excellent guest column in the New York Post about this. It was by a lefty lawyer that worked in social services in New York City. The idea of the column is Bloomberg really helped people, solve problems and cared about lower level executives and their opinions. She said when Deblasio got in it became highly political and dysfunctional.
My guess is he knew how to get a really good executive team together to help him.
LOL well done.
In my opinion her job is to vote as far left as she can while throwing up a bunch of chaff that makes her look like she doesn’t vote as far left as she can. Then she gets reelected and that’s all she cares about. She may get some narcissistic gratification from having so much government power.
Bloomberg’s problem is just about everything good he did as mayor, in terms of policies that made the city work, he either has to renounce, run away from, or hide while running in the primaries, because they’re the things that made the progressive wing of the NYC Democratic Party loathe him. ‘Stop and Frisk’ has been the focus so far, but we’ve also got charter schools and his overall fights with the city’s public sector unions over limiting pay increases in order to keep the city’s budget in line. Those are things more in line with the Bill Clinton-Dick Morris triangulation strategy after the 1994 midterm debacle for the Dems, when Clinton governed to the left of where he ran in 1992. But the bulk of the party’s primary voters at least for now seem to want not a return to that but Barack Obama on steroids, which is why Mayor Mike’s pushing gun control and other things that didn’t help him get elected mayor.
I just got done listening to Breitbart News Tonight lay out all of Peter Schweitzer’s dirt on Klobuchar. It doesn’t sound like a very manageable situation for her.
Never Trump Strategizes!
You can click on it to see the whole thread.
Obama maintains his sainted position in the Democrats’ political lineup only via a wink-and-a-nod agreement between all sides that he stays above the fray, and they continue to pretend he’s their God-King emeritus.
The Bernie Bros already can barely conceal their contempt for the fact he didn’t lash out at the right in 2009, arrest Bush and Cheney for war crimes trials, shut down talk radio and Fox News via use of the FCC and in general do all the Hugo Chavez-like things they’re expecting Sanders to do if elected. The others who see Bernie as a looming disaster, including and especially the Clinton people, think that even if Hillary ran a slightly-less-than-perfect campaign, she still wins if Obama doesn’t bequeath her an economic and foreign policy crap sandwich, where only the core urban bi-coastal centers were being focused on by the administration, because those were the parts of the country they came from, and they thought changing demographics and special interest politics meant they didn’t have to care about virtually any of Flyover Country anymore to win the White House.
All of that animosity is going to start coming out if Obama picks a candidate to support in the primaries, before the Democratic voters pick a candidate, and he knows it. So no matter what Weinstein wants him to do right now, he’s not sticking his neck out and risking his reputation while the Democrats are still factionalized over who their nominee is — it’s why he also left wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe hung out to dry even though he was his VP for eight years, because to choose one is to risk the open wrath of the others, including truth-telling about Obama’s eight years in office.
I love this. lol
We should all get together and post this paragraph all over Twitter all at once. lol
Is Warren done?
Is that a good thing for the Republican ?
Yes and no.
Social media in ’09 wasn’t the sewer it is in 2020, but you can go back to this time 11 years ago and see that the hardcore progressives were already really angry, less than a month into his term. They knew Obama was lying to the swing voters in 2008 about his politics, but they also thought he was lying about his laid-back, professorial demeanor, and once inaugurated would turn into the Alpha-Progressive President.
But Obama was picked out and groomed by Axelrod, Ploffe and Jarrett specifically because he wasn’t Al Sharpton. He couldn’t have hidden that confrontational persona for an entire campaign, and he doesn’t even beat Hillary in the ’08 primaries if he’s that guy. The plan with Obama was he’s treated like a near-deity by the media, proclaims what he wants, and anyone who disagrees is bombed with race cards and written out of the political conversation. That he wasn’t an Alpha infuriated the angry progressives.
@jon1979 for Dictator of all conservative and libertarian political strategizing! Excellent.
Yang bumper sticker:
“Honk if you hate circumcision.”
And here is where the “Anybody but Trump” pundit class are stepping all over themselves. They hear the Sirens Song and are running towards it. “Amy Klobuchar said something nice to a pro-life Democrat” becomes “we can moderate her position” or “maybe she’ll veto extreme legislation.” In what world is this even going to be remotely true? It’s like the fat kid who thinks because a pretty girl said hello that she’ll go out on a date. It’s taking a sign and jumping to the best case scenario for your personal ambition.
It’s like our pundit class lost their minds and never heard of “lip service” as a political strategy. “Wait you mean you might market yourself as something you aren’t” from the people fooled by “Obama says he’s a tax hawk” and creases in his pants.
But here they are telling Democrats what they “need” to do to get elected, and while our side might have given them the time of day because they were political strategists for such fantastic campaigns as Mitt Romney and John McCain, Democrats are far more about political expediency than feelings. They’ll put them on MSNBC and CNN or write glowing pieces in the Atlantic, but at the end of the day, the smiling greetings in the green room are just lip service.
This is interesting:
The full list of donations is here.
From the DOJ’s announcement: