Start Envisioning A President Bernie Sanders-- A Peoples' President Of The United States

The new Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin voters was released yesterday. They tweeted it out. Here's a narrative version of the tweets, starting with how much they find Wisconsin is feeling the Bern. He's in first place leading the field with support of 29% of expected Dem voters in April 7 primary.

Bloomberg is second with 17% followed by Status Quo Joe at 15%, Mayo Pete at 13%, Midwestern neighbor Amy Klobuchar at 11% and the fading Elizabeth at 9%, although she's the second choice of a plurality of voters (23%).

In Marquette's January poll Biden had 23% and Bernie followed at 19%. Since November, support among Wisconsin Democratic voters for Sanders has risen from 17% to 29%, while support for Biden has fallen from 30% to 15%. Here the the favorable/unfavorable opinions of the major candidates among Wisconsin Dems:

• Bernie- 62% favorable, 29% unfavorable
• Status Quo Joe- 61% favorable, 30% unfavorable
• Elizabeth- 56% favorable, 24% unfavorable
• Mayo- 52% favorable, 19% unfavorable
• Klobuchar, 47% favorable, 15% unfavorable
• Bloomberg, 35% favorable, 37% unfavorable (the only candidate underwater)

About 9% of Republicans say they intend to vote in the Democratic primary. No Democrats say they will vote in the Republican primary.

Who would be the strongest candidate against President Trump in Nov.? Among Dems, 34% say Sanders, 18% Bloomberg, 16% Biden.

Head to head match-tops against Trumpanzee shows only Bernie would beat him:

• Bernie- beats Trump 48-46%
• Biden ties Trump 46-46%
• Mayo ties Trump 45-45%
• Klobuchar ties Trump- 46-46%
• Trump beats Elizabeth- 47-44%
• Trump beats Bloomberg 46-44%

That said, New York Magazine looked at the likely November election match-up-- two posts, one by Eric Levitz and one by Frank Rich. Let's start with Rich's-- Is Trump Ready For Coronavirus?-- even though you know the answer is of course not.

With the CDC now asking Americans to prepare for the possibility of a coronavirus outbreak, White House and Cabinet officials seem unprepared-- when they aren’t spreading misinformation or addressing the virus in terms of the stock market. If CDC warnings are correct, will a public-health emergency become a political one?

As far as the White House is concerned, the coronavirus epidemic is solely a political emergency, not a public-health crisis. President Trump’s record speaks for itself. Last night he declared his efforts to date a “tremendous success” and the coronavirus risk to Americans “very low.” He said that the prospect of a Democratic president, not fears of a pandemic, was the main cause of the nearly 2,000 point two-day drop in the Dow. He said a vaccine would be coming in a “fairly quick manner.” He assigned management of the nation’s coronavirus response to his vice president, who, as governor of Indiana, had accelerated HIV infections in his state by opposing needle-exchange programs and turning to prayer.

In other words, not a single thing Trump said or did last night-- with the possible exception of advising the public to wash its hands-- bore any real-world relation to the public-health emergency supposedly under discussion. The only reason he even held the press conference was political: not the number of known American coronavirus patients (which he understated by 75 percent) but the numbers of Wall Street. For Trump, the Dow is the second most important barometer for assessing his political standing after Fox News.

And so, predictably enough, even before the press conference was over, the CDC announced that a new coronavirus patient had been discovered in California with the cause of the infection unknown. The morning after, the market started to tumble again. And Trump tweeted out the “breaking news” that he would be holding a rally in Charleston on the eve of the Democratic primary.

Welcome to what Never Trump maestro George Conway has called “the first time” that Trump has had to “deal with a real crisis not of his own making.” How will he deal with it besides holding rallies to blame the Democrats? In 2018, his government fired the entire pandemic chain of command in the White House, and shut down the global health security unit both at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. The Homeland Security department is now run by an acting secretary who couldn’t cite the barest facts about the coronavirus when testifying before the Senate this week. The acting deputy secretary publicly complained on Twitter that he couldn’t consult a map showing the international spread of the virus because he didn’t have access to a Johns Hopkins website, apparently his only source for the information.

Though many thought Trump might blow up his country and himself with a war against Iran, he is now poised, if things don’t proceed as rosily as he claims, to blow up America with his war against science. Let us pray.

And now Levitz's Why Bernie May Benefit From the Threat of a Contested Convention

Once the threat of a contested convention became tangible, Trump-skeptical Republicans opted to unify behind a nominee they didn’t love-- and whom they’d been given every reason to consider unelectable and unacceptable by party elites and Establishment media-- out of an ostensible aversion to prolonging intraparty discord and embracing an anti-democratic process.

Democratic elites would be wise to mind this recent history.

Or, more precisely, the segment of such elites who disdain Bernie Sanders would have been wise to remember to do so before telling the paper of record that they’re preparing to block the socialist senator’s nomination by any means necessary.

...There are obviously important differences between the voting behavior of each party’s base (Democratic voters have historically been less ideological and antagonistic to their party’s leadership than GOP ones). But there’s little reason to believe that Democratic voters wouldn’t emulate their Republican counterparts, were they presented with a choice between rallying behind their party’s insurgent front-runner, or accepting the inevitability of a contested convention.

After all, most of the distinctions between the two contexts make the prospect of unifying behind Bernie Sanders more appealing for Democrats than unifying behind Trump was for Republicans.

In January 2016, Trump had an exceptionally low in-party approval rating; in January 2020, Sanders had an exceptionally high one.

In fact, multiple recent polls have shown the Vermont senator boasting better favorability numbers among Democratic voters than any other 2020 candidate. Meanwhile, a Yahoo News/YouGov survey released earlier this month found Sanders beating every one of his Democratic rivals in a two-way contest.

After triumphing in early states, Sanders has weathered some attacks from his primary rivals. But none have been nearly as brutal as those that Trump endured. Marco Rubio never insisted that he liked Trump personally before assailing his fitness for the nomination; Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden routinely stipulate their personal affection for their longtime colleague before critiquing his policies. What’s more, the broader Democratic Establishment isn’t nearly as united in opposition to Sanders as the GOP’s was to Trump. Several Senate Democrats told Politico last week that they are confident Sanders can beat Donald Trump. And Nancy Pelosi told her caucus Wednesday that she expects them to “wholeheartedly embrace” the party’s standard-bearer, “no matter who the nominee is for president.”

While the mainstream press has presented Democratic voters with no small number of warnings about the 78-year-old socialist’s general election liabilities, these arguments aren’t nearly as well substantiated as indictments of Trump’s electability were circa February 2016. At this time four years ago, Trump’s net-approval among the general public was -23 percent. Today, Sanders’s net-approval is -2.7. Joe Biden’s, by contrast, is -5.4; Michael Bloomberg’s is -7; and Elizabeth Warren’s is -7.3. Further, hypothetical general elections polls show the Vermont senator performing about as well, if not better, than his rivals against Trump: On Thursday morning, Muhlenberg College (an A+ pollster, per 538) released a poll of Pennsylvania in which Sanders is the only Democrat who bests the incumbent president.

Anti-Sanders Democrats do have a path for blocking his nomination. The last batch of South Carolina polls suggests Joe Biden may pull out a landslide victory Saturday. If so, the former vice-president may be in a position to limit Sanders’s delegate haul on Super Tuesday, and then power past him (perhaps, with the aid of an infusion of Bloomberg bucks) over the ensuing months. Which is to say: If the moderate wing of the party can coordinate well enough to present Democratic voters with a clear choice between Sanders and Biden, they might (emphasis on might) be able to keep blue America from “going red.”

But if the only choice they can offer is one between Bernie Sanders and a contested convention, there is every reason to believe Democratic voters will unite behind their socialist standard-bearer before delegates descend on Milwaukee.