New Polling: Good For Bernie, Good For Mayor Pete, Bad For Status Quo Joe

This morning, Emerson released new national polling of registered voters. Two headlines: Bernie is beating Biden and Mayor Pete is beating everyone else. It finally looks like Status Quo Joe's long ugly record in the public sphere is beginning to catch up with him-- the corporatism, the sexism, the virulently anti-progressive posture, the racism... everything that made Biden a nightmare until Obama came along and rehabilitated his image. The new poll shows Bernie ahead of him with Democrats 29-24%.

Ohio Democratic activist and attorney, Tim Russo, was all over it within minutes of the poll's release, his intent likely to make Neera Tanden, John Podesta and others from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party cry. "[T]he leftward swing toward Bernie is among likely Democratic primary voters and caucus goers-- those usually polled for such things. That is all gravy. By Iowa in 2020, those “likely Democrats” will be joined by a flood of new voters, nonvoters returning to voting, and infrequent voters overwhelming whatever rump of establishment Democrats will bother to turn up and split their votes among 2 dozen pointless centrists auctioning themselves off to MSNBC’s advertisers. As of this writing, it is my view the 2020 primary is over, Bernie Sanders is the nominee, and it’s about time y’all start callin’ him Daddy or be run over... Joe Biden’s still-birthed 2020 'frontrunner' attempt is already a #MeToo corpse, before anyone even takes the first gander at his ghoulish blood-covered billionaire-bloated neoliberal policy record. A parade of posers constantly hurl themselves onto MSNBC-- Tune In! A Very Special Maddow With Buttigieg-- the desperation of 'Anybody But Bernie' now inescapable. Meanwhile, daily, hourly, movement grows around Bernie, the futility in opposing it becoming ever more pathetic."

Spencer Kimball, Director of Emerson Polling, noted that "Biden has seen his support drop. In February, he led Sanders 27% to 17%, and in March the two were tied at 26%. Now, Sanders has a 5 point lead, 29% to 24%." Emerson also asked participants for their second choice and it looks likely that if If Biden decides not to run or drops out as quickly as he did all the other times he ran and voters saw what he is, Bernie will be the early beneficiary, picking up 31% of Bidens’ voters. Mayor Pete Buttigieg gets 17%, followed by Beto with 13%. Buttigieg, more the product of a successful p.r. effort than any other 2020 candidate, officially got into the race over the weekend-- dropping his "exploratory" status on Friday and making a big hometown speech on Sunday-- but he's been campaigning full time since January. Within 4 hours of his announcement, another million dollars flooded into his campaign coffers.

From what I've seen so far, Buttigieg, seems like-- at best-- a mediocre candidate who is likely to fade quickly. As part of his announcement roll-out, the p.r.-directed campaign made Mayor Pete available for one-on-one interviews all last week. John Harwood of CNBC asked Buttigieg, a former consultant for McKinsey, "what is right about American capitalism."

Mayor Pete by Nancy Ohanian

"American capitalism," he replied, "is one of the most productive forces ever known to man, and there’s so much that this country has been able to unlock, especially in the last century, in terms of technology, in terms of prosperity. Now where it goes wrong is when it’s only being experienced in certain parts of the country or by certain kinds of people, and I think it goes to show just how important it is for capitalism to work that it be backed by all of the other pieces that business alone can’t solve. But when it’s working right, there’s nothing like it. It’s extraordinary. You think about the changes that have happened, the advancements in health, in communications in every field that had been led by our country. What frightens me is it’s no longer obvious that our country will be the most important driver of advancements of humankind in the 21st century. Not unless we do some things differently."

Harwood: Is that because you think the system is in some way rigged?

Mayor Pete: Yeah. It’s pretty typical human behavior for people to try to make sure the rules work to their benefit. That’s why the U.S. is based on the idea of a robust legal system and constraints on the excesses of anybody, especially concentrated wealth. And yet we’re at this moment where concentrated wealth has begun to turn into concentrated power. More than begun. It’s well underway. The thing that makes capitalism capitalism is competition. But as you have more and more corporate agglomerations of power, you’re going to see less and less competition.

Harwood: "Is that the reason why you think we have expanding income inequality?"

Mayor Pete: I think it’s a vicious cycle. This didn’t just happen. The economy is not some creature that just lumbers along on its own. It’s an interaction between private sector and public sector. And public sector policies, for basically as long as I’ve been alive, have been skewed in a direction that’s increasing inequality. And a lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus. There was a period where even Democrats seemed to operate in this framework that assumes that the only thing you’d ever do with a tax is cut it. That those tax cuts were assumed to pay for themselves. The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period that we’re living through.

...Harwood: Jamie Dimon recently put out a letter to J.P. Morgan that said, “The social needs of too many citizens have not been met.” But he also says that tax cut that was enacted late 2017 was the irreducible minimum of what we needed to turn our economy around. What would you say to him?

Mayor Pete: The big problem in this country was not that it was too difficult to be wealthy. It just isn’t the big problem in our country right now. It’s not what led to the political instability we’re seeing. It’s not what’s leading to diminished life expectancy, or the prospect of my generation is going to be the first in history to be worse off economically than our parents. What we could’ve done, especially if we were going to create a trillion-dollar deficit, is make the kinds of investments in infrastructure and education and health that would have made this whole country better off. I also think that, no matter how educated or intelligent some of the people working in these industries are, they can quickly get out of touch with the reality on the ground. If you don’t understand just how much anger there is in, for example, my part of the industrial Midwest-- where it can be used in a very cynical political way to direct it against immigrants, or trade writ large, or against your fellow American, or even against Democrats, just because folks are mad and it’s got to go somewhere-- you’re going to continue to see these destabilizing political outcomes like what we’re living through right now.

Harwood: Others say that the kinds of things you’re talking about would be destructive of capitalism, that it’s a war on the wealthy, that it would bring socialism to the United States. How how do you respond to arguments like that?

Mayor Pete: The crazy thing about arguments like that is how uncoupled they are from evidence. We don’t have to speculate on what happens in a Western society that delivers health care to everybody, or that has more social mobility or that invests at a higher rate in infrastructure or education. We know exactly what happens. What happens is you’re better off. The American dream is slipping away. You’re much more likely to experience that if you’re a kid in Denmark right now than if you’re in America. And while people can think up all kinds of excuses why something that worked in other societies hasn’t worked here, the reality is, when we’ve tried it here in our history, it’s also served us pretty well.

Back to that Emerson poll for a moment. Head-to-head matchups show Trump narrowly beating Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren but losing to Biden, Bernie and Beto. Among these participants, Kamala Harris has a 50-50 shot of beating him. And one more question worth keeping in mind-- with Trump ginning up a military intervention against Venezuela, Emerson decided to poll voters on the topic. 43% do not support intervention to overthrow the Maduro government, 27% do support it and 31% were unsure.