Biden And Black Voters

Ibram X. Kendi is the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. About 5 weeks ago The Atlantic published a piece he wrote about what he fears a conservative Democrat winning the nomination. He refers to the conservative wing-- incorrectly as just as the corporate media wants him to-- as moderates. His analysis is so good, it's a shame he doesn't understand the importance of not ceding that word-- moderate-- to the right. Anyway, he points out that these conservative Democrats who think they own the Democratic Party "are calling for a rematch against Trump in the 2020 election, claiming they are the most electable. The thought is haunting me, like Trump’s hell. As much as moderate Democrats fear that nominating a progressive will ensure Trump’s reelection, I am haunted by the fear that nominating a moderate will ensure Trump’s reelection."

When moderate Democrats assure us that they would win back more white swing voters than progressive Democrats would, I am haunted by the thought that the evidence is hardly so reassuring. I see moderate candidates struggling with younger voters, who are more likely to favor progressive policies, and are more likely than older voters to stay home or vote third party if they don’t like the Democrat. The leaders of nine progressive organizations recently told The Atlantic that a Biden nomination “would trigger a huge deflation in enthusiasm, and a shrinking ... volunteer pool.”

...I don’t prefer the misleading term moderate (or progressive for that matter). Self-identified moderates, independents, and undecided voters are not necessarily centrists. But there are Democratic candidates claiming that they are best equipped to win these moderates, independents, Republicans, and undecided voters. There are candidates opposing Medicare for All, free public college, the Green New Deal, and a wealth tax. I will call these candidates moderates. And these are the Democrats I fear will lose to Trump.

I am not alone. Nearly one-third of Democratic-primary voters fear their party could lose the presidential election if their nominee is not progressive enough. A relatively equal number of Democratic-primary voters fear their party could lose if their nominee is not moderate enough. But it seems like moderate fears have received the most airing. Every time I looked up over the past year, I saw broadcasts of “stark” warnings like “The latest wave of far-left ideas ... could lead to electoral disaster in 2020.” I heard moderate candidates like Biden saying, “Show me the really left-left-left-left-wingers who beat a Republican.” After stepping off a summer debate stage, Senator Amy Klobuchar said on CNN, “People [who] are watching right now” are “moderate Republicans, and we need to win them to win the election.” In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk urged Democrats to win back those Obama-to-Trump voters who “made a real difference” in the 2016 election.

Mounk is right. But maybe the candidate of change-- no matter his or her party-- is the most attractive to these all-important Obama-to-Trump voters, almost all of whom are white. It may have been their campaigns of change, when compared with Mitt Romney and Clinton, that caused Obama and Trump to attract the same white voters. Even their original campaign slogans fit together: Yes, we can make America great again.

After the 2016 election, a young white independent in Michigan said Obama was “really likable” and Trump earned her vote by being “a big poster child for change.” After Obama, Clinton lost ground among young and liberal working-class white voters, the two groups Democrats probably have the best chance of winning back from Trump-- and the two groups moderate Democrats struggle to attract.

In 2016, Trump managed to win 20 percent of liberal white working-class voters, and 38 percent of those who desired policies more liberal than Obama’s policies. How? Obama and Trump “had the same winning pitch to white working-class voters,” according to a New York Times analysis. Obama and Trump successfully cast Romney and Clinton as dismantlers of companies and outsourcers of jobs, and themselves as the defenders of the forgotten people. And, Trump added, they have been forgotten because they are white.

Working class (and non-working-class) white voters were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump if they embraced racist ideas. Maybe Obama’s more liberal economic and foreign-policy appeal-- when compared with Romney-- kept white racist ideas at bay in his 2012 voters. Maybe Trump inflamed their racist ideas in 2016, while being less conservative on economic and foreign-policy issues than past GOP nominees. Maybe a progressive candidate can better expose Trump’s conservatism and corruption on economic and foreign policy to winnable young and liberal white swing voters, which could break their racist allegiances to Trump, which perhaps explains why Senator Bernie Sanders currently leads Trump by the widest margin of all Democratic candidates. Maybe a pro-diversity, pro-corporate, and hawkish moderate Democrat will again alienate winnable white swing voters in 2020.

Maybe it is strategically unwise to build a presidential candidacy based on winning back a sizable number of white voters who supported Obama and flipped to Trump. Roughly seven in 10 Obama-to-Trump voters approve of Trump’s job performance, according to a recent Morning Consult poll of these voters in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. How can anyone who is serious about defeating Trump think Democrats should nominate a candidate on the theory that he can win back voters who Morning Consult says “resemble Republicans” and who overwhelmingly approve of Trump-- over a candidate who can win back voters who “resemble Democrats” and who overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump? Roughly seven in 10 other swing voters-- those who voted for Obama in 2012 and did not vote in 2016-- disapprove of Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Morning Consult called them “low-hanging electoral fruit” in three states Clinton lost by less than 80,000 votes combined.

The low-hanging fruit is disproportionately composed of young voters, and especially young black voters. Democratic primary voters should value candidates’ performance with these other swing voters as much as they value their performance with white swing voters. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are running first and second among voters under 35, according to the latest national poll by Quinnipiac University. Among young black voters, Sanders is outpacing Biden by double digits. Only Warren and the businessman Andrew Yang register more than 1 percent support among this crucial group of swing voters. Black support-- young or old-- for Buttigieg and Klobuchar is nearly nonexistent-- as is their chance of defeating Trump without heavy black support.

Young black swing voters who are not supporting Biden are more likely to be progressive and less likely to identify as Democrats than their elders. They look at Biden’s record-- from pushing “tough on crime” and welfare-reform legislation to mistreating Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings to demeaning black parents-- and are repelled. Like Clinton’s super-predator video, I fear Biden’s record can push the other swing voters into not voting.

...Democrats should be more worried about a moderate nominee being out of touch with winnable voters. If the 2018 midterm elections are any indication, moderate Democrats may also be out of touch with winnable Obama-to-Trump swing voters, according to data from Sean McElwee and Brian F. Schaffner. Eighty-three percent of Obama-to-Trump swing voters who switched back to the Democratic Party in 2018 support Medicare for All, nearly mirroring the overwhelming support among other swing voters who voted Obama, didn’t vote in 2016, and then voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterms. These two groups also opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, supported a $12 minimum wage, and backed a millionaire’s tax at similarly high rates. These two seemingly distinct groups of swing voters (one prototypically white, the other prototypically young and black) may be in line with each other on economic, foreign-policy, and climate issues-- and crucially, also may be most closely aligned with progressive candidates. This pumps the heart of electability-- any progressive nominee would have clear pathways to two of the most important groups of swing voters whom Democrats lost in 2016.

Yesterday, in Grand Rapids, Jesse Jackson endorsed Bernie. Jackson noted that Bernie and he see eye to eye on expanding Pell Grants, nominating African American women to the Supreme Court and to the Cabinet. "With the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate. A people far behind cannot catch up choosing the most moderate path. The most progressive social and economic path gives us the best chance to catch up and Senator Bernie Sanders represents the most progressive path. That's why I choose to endorse him today."

Jacobin's Branko Marcetic sees things a lot like Kendi and Jackson do, pointing out that "Biden’s string of primary victories highlights a central paradox of his career: he has secured the loyalty of African American voters while working nonstop to let them down. Big PhRMA whore Jim Clyburn (D-SC) resuscitated Biden's dead-in-the-water campaign. Clyburn, a prototypical DC establishment shill, doesn't give a shit who Biden really is and how he's betrayed black voters in the past.

[S]urveying Biden’s record, one is left with a different impression: that Biden has, in fact, built a career on the back of steadfast African-American support while consistently betraying those same voters.

Elected as county councilman in 1970, Biden was known as an advocate for public housing, earning him racist abuse from bigoted locals in Delaware. Yet he quickly assured the press about his public housing stance: “I am not a Crusader Rabbit championing the rights of people.”

True to his word, when plans for a controversial moderate-income housing project came to the New Castle County Council in 1972-- one opposed by a crowd of hundreds who attended the meeting-- Biden voted with the rest of the council to table it indefinitely. More accurately, Biden disappeared after a recess, and the vote had to be delayed until he could be found and his vote put on the record. When the county’s housing authority later drew up plans to buy a complex to convert to “non-elderly” public housing, the agency’s outreach to discuss the plan with Biden fell on deaf ears; Biden was too busy campaigning for the Senate.

Upon entering the Senate, Biden went where one would expect a champion of civil rights to go: on the Senate Banking Committee, where he worked on bills to regulate predatory private debt collection and sat on its housing subcommittee.

But not for long. Explaining that “other issues are more important for Delaware-- the issues of crime and busing,” Biden departed Banking in 1977 for the Judiciary Committee. The decision paved the way for him to become the Senate’s leading liberal opponent of busing and architect of mass incarceration, each of his efforts calamitous to the cause of black equality.

The full significance of Biden’s anti-busing crusade has rarely been explored. Though his 1975 anti-busing amendment failed, by clearing the Senate, it was credited by the Congressional Quarterly as signaling the end of the upper chamber’s previous commitment to defending desegregation measures. Meanwhile, his lasting anti-busing achievement-- the 1977 Eagleton-Biden amendment, which barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from using its funding for busing-- became the bane of existence for civil rights activists and school administrators around the country, whom it blocked from fully implementing desegregation plans. That it had no effect whatsoever on the court-ordered busing in Delaware, the ostensible reason for Biden’s sharp right turn on the issue, didn’t prevent him from being pleased with its impact. Biden was so against busing that, on a Judiciary Committee filled with former segregationists, he became the member who would vote against two historic black nominees to the Justice Department because of their stance on the matter.

Meanwhile, as Biden pushed the flurry of tough-on-crime legislation in the 1980s and 1990s that would prove so disastrous for communities of color, he was well aware of its dangers. He referred to the “political hysteria of the law and order campaigns” of the 1960s and later chided Reagan for his punitive approach: “It costs more money to keep a prisoner in jail than to send your son or daughter to Harvard or Yale,” he told a crowd. As early as 1972, as Biden demagogued on the dangers of crime and drugs for his Senate campaign; one expert whom Biden himself deemed “eminently qualified” to talk about crime trends had complained about politicians misleading the public on the issue; he assumed the expert wasn’t talking about him, Biden said.

The carceral avalanche that resulted was one half of a post–civil rights counterrevolution; the other took place in the courts. As a member and later chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden let through several hard-right justices to the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy chief among them. Handpicked by Biden as a nominee acceptable to Democrats, he praised Kennedy throughout his confirmation hearing while feeding him softballs, hoping they could “all get out of here,” declining to investigate his anti-abortion views and earlier controversial rulings. Once on the court, Kennedy completed its right-wing takeover, working with his fellow conservatives to weaken civil rights protections. Biden’s failure was compounded four years later with the Clarence Thomas nomination, when, at Republicans’ behest, he did everything humanly possible to undermine Anita Hill’s testimony about the judge’s sexual harassment.

All the while, Biden lectured Democrats to forget the multiracial coalition that formed the bedrock of their party and move closer to the politics of the suburban South. “You have been where the Democratic Party was, and now the Democratic Party must be where you are,” he told Democrats in North Carolina as he toured with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). At one stop in Alabama, he dropped from his stump speech references to police brutalization of civil rights protesters and his (nonexistent) civil rights activism.

Key to his argument was that Democrats had “lost the middle class” by becoming beholden to “special interests” and “interest groups,” who “had a stranglehold on us.” But Biden meant something very specific with these innocuous-sounding terms. Even earlier in his career, he had referred to “minorities and other vested interests” and blamed unchecked growth in federal spending on constituent interest groups who wouldn’t give up on programs they benefited from. As he told the NAACP Convention in 1986: “You can’t try to pit the Rainbow Coalition, blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, gays, against the middle class.” For good measure, he pointedly snubbed Jesse Jackson by publicly ruling him out as his running mate. Jackson hit back, griping about unnamed deficit-cutters “combing their hair to the left like Kennedy and moving their policies to the right like Reagan.”

“It’s about time politicians stop making pro-black speeches before pro-black groups and pro-labor speeches before the labor groups,” Biden once said. “People don’t want to hear what they think you think they want to hear.”

Yet throughout his career, Biden would routinely and cravenly change his talking points depending on whether he was speaking to a black audience. Upon receiving a 1978 endorsement from Howard Jarvis, the anti-tax businessman who had backed California’s Proposition 13, Biden’s office issued a statement that he was “delighted,” and that Jarvis had “recognized the fact that I have consistently voted for lower taxes and lower government spending.” Days later, talking to a mostly black audience, he warned them about the consequences of measures like Proposition 13, before saying he didn’t “have any feeling about [Jarvis’s] endorsement.” Twenty-four years later, after spending the whole of 2002 pushing for war with Iraq (a conflict hugely unpopular with black voters) and suggesting Saddam Hussein was connected to Al-Qaeda, he turned around a month after voting for the war to tell an audience of African-American columnists that it was “the dumbest thing in the world,” and that he didn’t “consider the war on Iraq the war on terror.”

Then there’s Biden’s infamous 2003 eulogy of segregationist and sexual predator Strom Thurmond, the man with whom Biden had worked to shift the US criminal code in a more punitive, unforgiving direction. Today, Biden’s South Carolina eulogy is viewed as an uncomfortable relic of a less enlightened era; in reality, it was unusual even then. Not only was Biden one of only two Democrats to show up to the funeral (the other, Fritz Hollings, had served with Thurmond for thirty-six years in the state), he was one of a mere seven of 225 living former and sitting senators to do so. Thurmond, who had famously filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act into oblivion, was a “brave man” whose “lasting impact” was a “gift to us all,” Biden told attendees.

That’s not to mention Biden’s long history of taking aim at entitlements like Social Security, a program of enormous importance to African Americans, and which large numbers of black Americans rely on to survive.

It’s one of those strange ironies of history that Biden, having spent a career betraying African Americans on key, consequential issues, now counts them as the main reason for his electoral viability; and that after insisting to Democrats that the party could only survive by prioritizing conservative white voters in the South over its multiracial base, he has been rescued from oblivion by mostly older black voters in the South. The fact that most of those in South Carolina backed him while telling pollsters that the US economic system needs a “complete overhaul” reveals this irony to be a tragedy.

Let me leave you with a few words from Norman Solomon: "Let’s be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a phony. And now that he’s running for president, Biden’s huge task is to hide his phoniness... Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy for regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story. During the 1970s, in his first Senate term, Biden spouted white backlash rhetoric, used tropes pandering to racism and teamed up with arch segregationists against measures like busing for school integration. He went on to be a fount of racially charged appeals and “predators on our streets” oratory on the Senate floor as he led the successful effort to pass the now-notorious 1994 crime bill... Meanwhile, for well over four decades-- while corporate media preened his image as 'Lunch Bucket Joe' fighting for the middle class-- Biden continued his assist for strengthening oligarchy as a powerful champion of legalizing corporate plunder on a mind-boggling scale. Now, Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders... Biden exemplifies a disastrous approach of jettisoning progressive principles and failing to provide a progressive populist alternative to right-wing populism. That’s the history of 2016. It should not be repeated."

Bloomberg Is Still Trying To Buy The Election But Has Still Been Unable To Dominate The Weak Conservative Lane

The most interesting news about Biden I saw today was Branko Marcetic's piece for Jacobin about how Biden pulled the Democratic Party to the right starting in the 1980s when he helped Reagan start dismantling much of the New Deal. Marcetic found an old Biden quote from the Wilmington Morning News that Biden would never say during a primary but that defines him perfectly: "In a strange way the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me... has been going for for the past few years." Marcetic added that "Biden's already growing public discomfort with the New Deal legacy made him perfectly poised to drift rightward with the Reagan years... [admitting in 1981 that] “he was 'not concerned about social programs as much as the direction' the country was going... [During his 1988 presidential campaign], Biden continued to insist that the answers to US economic misfortune lay 'beyond the reach of government' and criticized 'the old Washington-based approach to economic policy.' America’s workplaces needed their own in-house daycare centers, he insisted, but not if the government mandated them; rather, the White House should make its own daycare center, because 'if other chief executives see a president doing it, they will likely follow suit.' He promised to balance the budget by 1993, though without any tax hikes. Other big ideas were poached from his rivals, like having companies give workers ninety days’ notice when they closed plants. And he reminded the public about his conservative positions on busing and abortion."

But that isn't the kind of stuff you'll hear on TV or read about in the corporate media, where they prefer to talk about the horse race. In Biden's case, it was how his six-figure ad buy across the Super Tuesday states is practically meaningless. He's targeting African-American voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, reminding them that it was him, not Bloomberg, who was close to Obama.

According to data compiled by Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm, Biden is spending by far the least on Super Tuesday TV ads out of all the candidates who participated in Tuesday night’s debate in South Carolina.

Bernie Sanders, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination who has blown by Biden in both national polling and the hunt for national convention delegates, has aired or reserved roughly $13.5 million worth of airtime across all 14 of the Super Tuesday states. He’s dropped at least seven figures in three states-- Texas, North Carolina and Colorado-- and mid-six figures in three additional states.

Amy Klobuchar’s campaign has booked about $3.5 million worth of television time, and her campaign says it has invested more in digital spending. Pete Buttigieg, another campaign that went up late in Super Tuesday states, hits about $1.6 million in TV spending, and Elizabeth Warren comes in at a bit over $916,000.

All of them are dwarfed by the two self-financing billionaires in the race. According to Advertising Analytics, Mike Bloomberg has spent over $183 million on blanketing the airwaves in Super Tuesday states-- en route to spending over half a billion dollars in total on advertising for his campaign so far-- while Tom Steyer has spent over $35 million, more than double what Sanders dropped.

Yesterday NBC reported that Bloomberg is absolutely owning black media, "spending a record $3.5 million to advertise his presidential campaign in the black news media in an aggressive attempt to garner African American support in his bid to earn the Democratic nomination." And on Monday, the Hollywood Reporter carried a piece by Erik Hayden about how Bloomberg's TV ad blitz is burying everyone else's efforts in California, having spent $63.2 million on TV alone here.

To compare, the only candidate who's in the same ballpark is fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, who has spent $27.2 million on television ads in California, or less than half of what Bloomberg is spending, the research firm finds. Meanwhile, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has spent just $6.3 million in TV ads in the state so far.

“Bloomberg, Sanders, and Steyer are the only three candidates on air in California," notes Rachel Haskins, marketing manager at Advertising Analytics. "We can’t say if the campaigns have adjusted their spending because of Bloomberg’s totals, but Steyer has been spending in California since December 8, and Sanders went up on January 26, even before the Iowa caucuses."

Haskins added, "In 2016, Sanders didn’t hit the airwaves until May 1-- a month before the June 3 CA primary. Sanders has also spent $6.3 million on TV in California since January; in 2016, he spent $1.8 million in the state.” Others who've spent relatively negligible amounts on TV ads in California include Rep. Tulsi Gabbard ($73,704 last July) and former candidate Sen. Cory Booker ($1,500 on cable in December), per Advertising Analytics.

While Bloomberg is dominating linear airwaves, political spending on Facebook in California is less lopsided. The Bloomberg campaign has spent $5.8 million on Facebook ads in the state, ahead of Steyer ($4.6 million), Sanders ($1.5 million), Mayor Pete Buttigieg ($668,889), Senator Elizabeth Warren ($623,769), former Vice President Joe Biden ($420,183) and Senator Amy Klobuchar ($202,348), according to Advertising Analytics' tally through Feb. 20.

Despite his advertising blitz, Bloomberg is trailing in California support. Senator Sanders leads the field with 27.9 percent, while Bloomberg garners 14.7 percent, ahead of Biden (12.9 percent), Warren (12.4 percent), Buttigieg (11 percent), Klobuchar (5.6 percent) and Steyer (3.2 percent), per Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight state poll average.

Writing for the L.A. Times, Jenny Jarvie reported that Bloomberg has dumped a fortune into advertising in hopelessly red states so he can win delegates on Super Tuesday. His strategy is states like Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas "illustrates a major reason why his big-spending bid for the nomination forges ahead despite his widely derided performance in last week's debate, which caused a significant drop in his national standing in some polls."

As of Monday, Bloomberg had spent more than $191 million on advertising in Super Tuesday states, according to Advertising Analytics. That compares with $36 million for the next-highest spender, billionaire Tom Steyer, $12 million for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and minimal amounts for other Democrats.

In Alabama, he has poured more than $8 million into TV and radio ads in the last two months while Sanders has spent just $142,000 and two of his main competitors, former Vice President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.-- have not advertised. Bloomberg has visited Montgomery twice, opened up four campaign offices and hired 30 people while most of his rivals have two paid staffers or fewer.

Part of Bloomberg’s pitch is that national Democrats have long neglected the South, essentially ceding states like Alabama to Republicans, and he'll change that.

“I believe it’s time for the national Democratic Party to stop ignoring Alabama,” he said earlier this month to the Alabama Democratic Conference.

“I’ve devoted a lot of my resources to those swing states from Michigan and Wisconsin to Florida and Arizona, but I’m also working to create what we call a new generation of swing states-- states like Alabama and Texas, which could very well turn blue if more people voted.”

...Some of the other candidates are organizing here. Sanders has more than 1,000 volunteers contacting voters through phone banks and knocking on doors across the state. The Buttigieg campaign plans 100 events Saturday. Still, Bloomberg has likely amassed the largest Democratic presidential staff in Alabama history, Democrats say.

“His presence is overwhelming,” said Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, who was elected last fall as the first African American in the office.

“It matters,” Reed added. “It helps him gain some traction in communities that may not have been touched by a campaign."

...“The fact is the people in Alabama really don't know Bloomberg — unlike Joe Biden, who has been into Alabama for a long time,” said Sen. Doug Jones, a Biden supporter. In 2017, Biden came to Birmingham to campaign for Jones.

But while Biden has won the endorsement of Jones and some other party leaders, including Rep. Terri A. Sewell and Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, his poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, and his distant second-place finish behind Sanders in Nevada on Saturday, did not help his case with undecided officials.

With no clear front-runner nationally, and little competition here yet, Bloomberg has seized the opening to spread the message that he is experienced, well-funded and the candidate who can beat President Trump.

“His strategy of skipping the first four states is incredibly risky,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University. “But with Joe Biden's campaign having faltered, and perhaps having stumbled irrevocably, his strategy doesn't seem to be as far-fetched or quixotic as it once did.”

A former Republican, Bloomberg faces challenges in courting black voters after strong criticism of his support as New York mayor of stop-and-frisk policing and his suggestion that the end of redlining contributed to the 2008 economic collapse. Yet locals say his wealth allows him to get noticed, especially among older, more moderate black Democrats uncertain whom to support.

“Bloomberg has had a free hand in places like Alabama to be nothing but positive,” said Glen Browder, a professor at Jacksonville State University and a former Democratic congressman. “When Bloomberg comes to town flush with cash, not asking for contributions and just saying, 'I’d like to have your support,' that’s a pretty powerful introduction.

But as people come to focus on just who and what Bloomberg is... his support shrivels and dies. CNBC's Yelena Dzhanova explained how Bloomberg's moment dissipated after voters saw him in action on the debate stage. She wrote that "While Bloomberg has positioned himself as the 'cool' candidate on social media, reaching out to so-called influencers to post endorsements of his candidacy, the effort may be falling flat. Support for Bloomberg began to stagnate around two weeks ago, according to national polls. He’s hovered around the 15% mark since a week before the Nevada debate, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. He had been rising in national support thanks to massive spending on campaign ads. He’s plowed more than $500 million of his own personal fortune into those messages since he entered the race in November.

...Here are some other Super Tuesday states where support for Bloomberg has plateaued:

• Minnesota: Bloomberg’s support has decreased from 9% to 3% in the span of a few days after his first debate. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is in the lead in Minnesota, her home state, with 29%, according to the latest poll conducted between Feb. 17 and Feb. 20.
• Texas: Bloomberg in the most recent poll is in third place with 17%, down from the 18% that he garnered in a poll conducted from Feb. 12 to Feb. 18. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sanders are tied for first place, with 24% each, according to the latest poll from Public Policy Polling conducted between Feb. 24 and Feb. 25.
• North Carolina: Bloomberg remains in third place with 17%, up slightly from 16% in a poll conducted between Feb. 12 and Feb. 18. He trails Biden, who has 23%, and Sanders, who has 20%, according to the most recent poll conducted from Feb. 23 to Feb. 24.
• Oklahoma: Bloomberg remained at 20%, but fell from first place to second behind Biden, who has 21%, according to the most recent poll conducted between Feb. 17 and Feb. 21.

Biden Isn't As Bad As Trump

Trump's family is more disgusting and more crooked than Biden's. Trump is a bigger liar than Biden. Trump seems more senile and off the rails than Biden. Trump is more corrupt then Biden. Trump is more in the pocket of the ruling elite than Biden. Trump is more racist than Biden. But Biden being less horrible than Trump could give us the second worst president in history. The bar is too low. After someone as bad as Trump, America needs someone as great as he is horrid, not someone not quote as bad.





Last week, In These Times published a piece by Branko Marcetic, In His Lies, Joe Biden Is Sounding a Lot Like Trump, concentrating on all the lying. Remember, Politifact, rates the two of them as monstrous liars, each unworthy of public trust and unfit for public office. Trump is worse. Biden is still absolutely horrible and vile. These are the charts of two sickening liars:

Marcetic wrote that "The media, academics, institutions and other prominent individuals have charged that this “post-truth” politics is “dangerous,” rewiring our brains, leading to creeping fascism, and corroding, subverting, and otherwise threatening democracy." As Eugene Robinson pointed out in the Washington Post in October, "Trump’s constant, relentless, remorseless lying is a central feature of his presidency, an unprecedented threat to our democracy and-- in my view-- an impeachable offense. I realize it does not qualify as news that Trump lies all the time. I also realize it is not always possible to draw a bright line between untruths Trump knows are untrue and conspiratorial nonsense he might foolishly believe. But never before have we had a leader who so pollutes the national discourse with garbage that he at least ought to know is false-- and I fear the consequences will be with us long after Trump is gone... When Trump insists on his own invented “facts,” he makes reality-based political dialogue impossible. His utter disregard for truth is a subversion of our democracy and a dereliction of his duty as president. The founders considered themselves men of honor whose word was their bond. They left us the vague, encompassing phrase 'high crimes and misdemeanors' for just such an emergency."

Biden isn't quite that bad. But still bad... really bad. Marcetic asserts that "it’s safe to say that Trump’s mendacity is a large part of the reason many Democratic voters are putting their faith in Biden to unseat the president this year. Yet as Tuesday night’s debate showed, playing unabashedly fast and loose with the facts is one of the very things Biden shares with Trump."

Tuesday’s debate saw yet another instance of Biden being confronted about his role in leading the country to war in Iraq, and choosing to lie about it.

“It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war,” he said in relation to his October 2002 vote to authorize the war. “They said they were not going to war … The world, in fact, voted to send inspectors in and they still went to war. From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake and from that point on, I moved to bring those troops home.”

As fact-checkers have pointed out repeatedly, and as I detailed multiple times for In These Times, almost every part of this statement is a lie. Biden knew George W. Bush’s ultimate goal was regime change because he himself spoke openly about the need to remove dictator Saddam Hussein from power as early as February 2002. By June of that year, when asked about a leaked White House directive for the CIA to help capture and kill Saddam, Biden gave it his nod of approval on CBS’s Face the Nation and said that “if the covert action doesn't work, we'd better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action,” which the Associated Press reported as an endorsement of an invasion. That month, Biden’s aides told Roll Call that the then-senator had told Bush he supported regime change in Iraq.

The next month, Biden said on Fox News Sunday that Bush would have the authority to pre-emptively invade Iraq if it was revealed that Saddam was in league in al-Qaeda-- “justifiably given the case being made,” as he put it. And after voting to authorize the invasion, Biden embarked on a world tour to drum up support for the impending war, traveling to neighboring Jordan, Israel, Qatar and even to Kurdish-run northern Iraq, speaking to the Kurd parliament and assuring them the United States would stand with them.

Once the Iraq war began, far from “making the case that it was a big, big mistake,” Biden remained perhaps its most implacable cheerleader, even as the rest of the Democratic Party rapidly turned against it. Biden insisted in July 2003 that he would “vote to do it again,” referring to the invasion of Iraq, told the Brookings Institution that “Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” and flatly replied “No” when asked if Howard Dean’s steadfastly anti-war views should become the consensus of the Democratic Party. Instead of moving to bring the troops home, in August, Biden called for an infusion of 20,000-50,000 more U.S. soldiers into the country.

Indeed, Biden held his pro-war attitude all the way through 2004 and that year’s presidential election. At the Democratic convention, he told the Pennsylvania delegation that Bush’s only “mistakes” were sending too few troops into Iraq and the administration’s poor planning for reconstruction, warning the delegation not to focus too much on Bush’s blunders lest Democrats “begin sounding like we’re rooting for failure.” As Democratic candidate John Kerry’s foreign policy advisor, Biden vowed to both party members and those watching at home that Kerry would “not hesitate to unleash the unparalleled power of our military-- on any nation or group that does us harm-- without asking anyone’s permission.”

As Bernie Sanders’ campaign assailed Biden for his role in the war ahead of Tuesday’s debate, Kerry, who has endorsed Biden and is now a campaign surrogate, returned the favor, lying about Biden’s record. Kerry has said that the October 2002 vote “didn’t mean you were in favor when the administration made the decision of actually going to war.”

This statement doesn’t square with Biden’s March 2003 vote for a Senate resolution backing Bush’s decision to go to war, or Biden’s words just days before the invasion: “I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead,” and “Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.” Nor does it square with Biden’s March 9, 2003 op-ed for the Wilmington, Delaware News Journal, which began: “I happen to think we will go to war with Iraq. And I happen to think the military phase will go relatively well. It’s a war that is justified.” Nevertheless, Kerry has insisted that “Bernie is regrettably distorting Joe’s record,” and that “Joe spoke out and criticized, Joe was against what they were doing.”

This pattern of dishonesty is nothing new. Biden has come under criticism during the campaign for repeatedly telling a moving war story that never actually happened, at one point telling his audience it was “the God’s truth” and they had his “word as a Biden.” Last year, his campaign made headlines when several passages from Biden’s climate plan turned out to be plagiarized. The candidate has also revived an old lie for this election, telling crowds that he had “come out of the civil rights movement,” and that he had “got involved in the civil rights movement as a kid.”

What’s notable about this particular lie is that it was one of the things that had ended Biden’s election hopes back in 1987. Though that presidential campaign had largely gone down in flames over a separate plagiarism scandal, it had also died a death by a thousand cuts over a series of other revelations calling into question Biden’s honesty.

One of these revelations concerned Biden’s frequent allusions to his supposed civil rights and anti-war activism, deployed particularly-- though not exclusively-- during his years opposing busing. In one Senate hearing, he told the former president of San Francisco State College that he had been a student demonstrator, and he had said during the campaign that “we marched to change attitudes” during the 1960s.

Reporters soon poked holes in the story, and Biden was forced to admit that “I was never an activist,” and that “the civil rights movement was an awakening for me, not as a consequence of my participation but as a consequence of my being made aware of what was happening.” Bobbie Greene McCarthy, a friend of Biden, told the media Biden had been “for a long time pretty much a supporter” of the Vietnam War, and Biden admitted that “by the time the war movement was at its peak, I was married. I was in law school. I wore sports coats,” and so not involved in such activism. He was, he explained, “a middle-class guy” and “not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts.”

In other words, both in Tuesday’s debate and beyond, Biden has exhibited the same kind of disregard for the truth as Trump. And this is far from the only characteristic they share.

Many liberals have despaired at the way Trump’s insults and coarse language have disrespected the office of the presidency, and more generally dragged political discourse into the gutter. Yet in December 2019, a crowd of Biden supporters clapped and cheered as the former vice president responded to a critical question from a voter about his son’s dealings in Ukraine by challenging the man to a push-up contest and an IQ test, before calling him fat. (The campaign later tried to claim Biden had said, “Look, facts”).

Democrats have rightly criticized Trump’s flouting of the rule of law, particularly his calls for his former White House counsel to ignore a Congressional subpoena. Yet Biden initially said he would similarly defy a Republican subpoena to attend Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. Much outrage has greeted the way Trump and his family have profited from his presidency. Yet Biden’s family has long profited from his political career, from his earliest days in the Senate to his final days in the White House. This mixing of family business-dealing and politics ultimately helped embroil Biden in a long-running scandal of his own.

A Biden nomination and (and presumptive victory in November) is still viewed by many Democratic voters as a way to rescue the country from the dishonesty of Trumpism. But it may be time to ask if it would instead simply usher in another version of it.

The Democratic Party Should Not Be Nominating Republicans-- Not For Anything

Like Hillary, Biden started off as a Republican. He found himself in a Democratic environment at work-- and he didn't like Nixon-- so he re-registered as a Democrat. But, issue-wise, like Hillary, he's always been a moderate Republican at heart. He wants to run for president as one too-- and if he does, like Hillary, he will probably lose. Status Quo Joe's only real chance would be if voters decide he's the lesser of the two evils. In a post for In These Times last week, Reagan Lives On In Biden, Branko Marcetic reenforced something Georgia progressive Nabilah Islam wrote earlier today: "Growing up in the South, Democrats are indoctrinated early on to believe a specific type is what is electable. That type is usually white and even more often moderate or centrist. The strategy is to play to the middle and hope to get Republicans to vote for you. That’s not a winning strategy. When Republicans go to the voting booth, they vote for the real Republican, not the fake one." Biden, by the way, is on the record saying Delaware was part of the South and would have joined the Confederacy except Maryland was in the way." He spent a considerable part of his time palling around with Southern racists from both parties; he just gravitated to them. They're his people.

Marcetic cautioned Democrats trying to decide who to vote for in 2020 that "Amid warnings of a coming global recession, it’s worth asking what the 2020 presidential aspirants would do during an economic downturn. When it comes to Joe Biden, we may already know. Biden’s formative political years were spent in the shadow of economic crisis. After more than a decade of economic expansion and blissful, carefree consumerism, recession hit in 1973, the same year Biden entered the Senate. Two years later, 2.3 million jobs had disappeared. Americans also had to contend with runaway inflation that reached double digits by 1974. The United States had barely exited that recession when it plunged into another one in the early 1980s, with unemployment climbing past 10% by 1982. During this economically turbulent decade, Biden fended off Republican challenges to his seat by embracing right-wing doctrine--specifically, that restraining federal spending is more important during economic downturns than priming the pump."

This fiscal austerity would become a core conviction of Biden’s and help animate a lifelong belief that compromise and reaching across the aisle are the perennial solution to what ails America.

Biden had always been a somewhat ambivalent New Deal liberal-- fretting about government spending as early as 1975, even as he garnered positive scores from liberal groups for his voting record-- but the recession and his time in the halls of power nudged him in a more conservative direction.

“I must acknowledge that when I first came to the U.S. Senate at age 29, not too long out of college, many economists had been telling me why deficit spending was not all that bad,” he told the Senate in 1981.

“So I was not very convinced of the arguments made by my friends here, who I must acknowledge, were mostly on the Republican side of the aisle.” But, he went on, “as I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets.”

By the close of the 1970s, Biden began calling himself a fiscal conservative and introduced what he called his “spending control legislation”: a bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically expire. He also voted for a large but unsuccessful tax cut introduced by Sen. William Roth, his Republican counterpart.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, pioneering the economic program of generosity to the rich and stinginess to the poor that became known as Reaganomics. Biden was right there with him.

Biden, Reagan and other conservatives pushed the flawed idea that the government is like a household and must take drastic measures to pay off debt to stay solvent. Six months into Reagan’s first term, Biden called the reduction of deficit spending “the single most important” path toward “an economically sound future.”

To curtail government spending, Reagan severely scaled back or eliminated federal programs-- even as he slashed tax rates for the rich. Biden voted for both (including an updated version of Roth’s failed tax cut). When the president proposed a budget freeze in 1983-- to cut the enormous deficits that, ironically, his tax cut helped produce-- Biden one-upped him, working with two Republican senators to propose an even more aggressive budget freeze doing away with scheduled cost-of-living increases for Medicare and Social Security.

This idea is contrary to what economists and experience tell us is the proper course of action in times of economic downturn. Economist Joseph Stiglitz credits Obama’s 2009 big-spending stimulus for ameliorating the recession (criticizing it only for being too small) and criticized austerity politics for undermining it. Meanwhile, countries like the United Kingdom and Greece stand as living monuments to the economic ravages of budget cutting during a recession, something even the International Monetary Fund belatedly acknowledged.

The economy under Reagan did recover-- even as he slashed programs for the poor and vulnerable, he ramped up defense spending, in effect creating an economic stimulus much larger than what would come in the wake of the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, Biden voted three years in a row for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. When the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world into recession, Republicans again called for cuts to entitlement programs. As ever, Biden stretched out a bipartisan hand. As Obama’s lead negotiator during the “grand bargain” negotiations, Biden-- to his Democratic colleagues’ horror-- capitulated to every one of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s demands, including cuts to Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, and warned in 2013 that, left untouched, deficits “may become a national security issue.”

While that effort collapsed due to Tea Party obstinacy, a President Biden could get one last shot. Following the Reagan playbook, the Trump tax cuts have sent the national debt soaring, and Republicans and conservative groups are now pushing for stringent budget cuts. Biden stands alone among the leading Democratic presidential candidates in his insistence that Democrats can work with McConnell’s GOP. Add a recession into the mix and the temptation to resume what he and Reagan began may be too great. Who says the era of bipartisanship is dead?

Peter Wade, writing yesterday for Rolling Stone, gave another example of Biden's utter unfitness to be the Democratic candidate. During his "No Malarkey" tour of Iowa, the decrepit Status Quo Joe from another era told reporters he's rather share power with Republicans than wild power the way FDR did. I suppose when you have nothing important to do-- and the ego-driven Biden has nothing at all he wants to accomplish other than self-gratification-- you can embrace the kind of dysfunction that plagued the Obama administration. Has he already forgotten how McConnell blocked whatever Obama tried to do-- like the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination? Or, as I suspect, was that just find with Biden? Wade reported that "Biden expressed concerns about Republicans possibly getting 'clobbered' in the upcoming election mainly because" of Trump's toxicity. I can't remember ever seeing someone as politically out of touch with the moment as Joe Biden is today.

The candidate said he’s held back on his “ass-kicker” side because he knows the American people want someone who can get things done and work with the other side.

“I mean look, everybody, anybody who knows me in politics including Trump knows they’re not going to be able to screw around with me. Not a joke,” Biden continued. “But that’s not what this is about. I think what the American people want to know is how am I going to make their life better.”

Biden went on to say that he thinks it’s important to have a political balance and the possible lack thereof concerns him. “I’m really worried that no party should have too much power,” Biden said. “You need a countervailing force. You can’t have such a dominant influence that then you start to abuse power. Every party abuses power if they have too much power.”

This warm-and-fuzzy attitude toward divided government is surprising coming from the former President Barack Obama’s VP. During Obama’s first two years, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and, briefly, had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Despite that, they relentlessly chased Republican moderates, begging to get just one to sign onto a health care plan that included no public option and was modeled after a system implemented by [checks notes] Mitt Romney. All those concessions to the middle gave them exactly zero GOP support.

Instead, they got Republican GOP leadership that decided on Day 1 to block everything Obama did and a tea party movement that claimed Obama was born in Kenya. Democrats lost the House in 2010, and for the final three-quarters of Obama’s presidency, he got damn near nothing of any importance through Congress. And when it was Obama’s turn to pick a Supreme Court justice, Mitch McConnell stole it because he could.

Republicans, meanwhile, used Trump’s first two years in office to ram through absolutely everything they could, including trillions in tax giveaways to corporations and the rich, despite having only the slimmest of Senate majorities.

For Republicans, “sharing power” is only important when Democrats have control-- and Biden should know that better than anyone.

Bernie and Elizabeth have powerful and compelling agendas of things they want to accomplish. Status Quo Joe, much like Trump, just wants to be president. There's virtually nothing he'd do if he were, except some vague, dysfunctional notion of a status quo ante which is at the heart of the rise of Trumpism. I'm sad so many of my countrymen voted for Trump. I'm just as sad that so many of my countrymen are preparing-- a few even eager-- to vote for an utterly worthless sack of crap like Joe Biden.

Supporting The Lesser Of 2 Evils Means You Are Supporting Evil-- Trump Is Worse Than Biden But...

Feeling the pressure from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie-- and the energy among grassroots activities they have inspired-- Biden's team of weasels is talking about making some kind of symbolic gesture so Status Quo Joe can pretend he stands with working families instead of the Wall Street crooks who are underwriting his campaign and who he has always kissed up to. The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported that the crew of crooks who think for Biden is "weighing the introduction of a new tax on Wall Street, as the former vice president now stands alone among the Democratic presidential front-runners in not backing a multitrillion-dollar 'wealth tax' on the richest Americans." Biden, who famously assured Wall Street banisters that if he's elected, "nothing fundamental will change" for them, will never make any moves against Wall Street even if his campaign comes up with some cosmetic bullshit to reassure the dumb Dems who don't pay attention.

Stein reported that "An aide to Biden confirmed that the campaign is working on tax policy proposals but would not confirm that a Wall Street tax is in the mix." Bernie and Elizabeth have been working to implement and perfect these kinds of policies for decades while Biden fought them and killed them on behalf of the banksters. Now his team is trying to put a p.r. effort together to trick low-info voters into backing him. Meanwhile, his campaign is doing something more in line with who Biden is: launching a SuperPAC to try too turn around the negative momentum his campaign has been experiencing in recent weeks as voters have gotten a sense of what a useless turd he is. Biden-- who officially disavows having anything to do with the SuperPAC (just as Trump does)-- has been looking at ways to get around legal and moral fundraising limits and the SuperPAC rand is the one he's decided to take. CNN's Dan Merica reports that Biden allies want to counter all the slime coming out about his family of grifters-- who everyone is seeing are on the same level of Trump's family of grifters. Trump ran-- through his own crooked SuperPAC, Great America-- this disgusting, manipulative and purposely misleading ad about Joe Biden:





As I've been warning, if Biden is the nominee, this election will be all about which candidate is the most dishonest, which candidate is the most senile and which candidate has a more corrupt family. Trump's biggest fear-- that he will have to confront Bernie or Elizabeth on substantive issues that matter to the American people-- will have evaporated.

The possible super PAC is far from operational, but Larry Rasky, a former Biden aide, has led the effort to stand up an outside group that he believes would help the former vice president rebut attacks that could impact Biden's standing in the crowded and contentious Democratic primary. While Biden is still seen as a front-runner in the race, recent polling has shown his once-large lead slipping as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren rises in the field.

"For me, this week puts everything into stark relief," Rasky said. He added that he has begun to think "the campaign was being a little naïve about the resources we'd need to fight this."

"The campaign is fighting a war on two fronts-- the primary and the general election-- at the same time. They certainly need all the support they can get."

..."The attacks aimed at this campaign from dark money groups helping Donald Trump spread his outlandish lies and slander have only served as a reminder of the urgent need for campaign finance reform," Ducklo said. "Which is exactly why since the beginning of this campaign, Biden for President has not and will not welcome the help of super PACs. That goes for those that purport to help him, despite his explicit condemnation of their existence."

A source familiar with the internal Biden campaign strategy, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the outside effort, put a finer point on it.

"The campaign had its best week of fundraising since the second week after launching, and it would be impossible to miss from anywhere on earth that Donald Trump is panicked about Joe Biden," the source said. "The campaign doesn't need or want this effort, and anyone engaging in it doesn't have its best interests at heart."

Rasky said he expected that his prospective effort would be disavowed by the campaign, but he and others still believe the outside group is needed to rebut attacks leveled by Trump and other Republicans.

"We are dead serious about the need to do it," Rasky said. "But we are also mindful of the campaign's position and the Vice President's expressed desire not to have one. That is a lot for us to ponder."

...A source close to the possible super PAC said that while its focus would be to respond to attacks from Trump and other Republicans, they would not rule out responding to Democratic attacks on Biden.

"That's not what it is for," the source said, "but if Biden is attacked, we need to defend him."

And it isn't just Wall Street banksters who Biden is kissing up to. As Branko Marcetic noted at Jacobin Tuesday, In Joe Biden, the Health Care Industry Has Found Its Guy. Short version: "A new survey conducted by a Biden-linked firm is workshopping Biden’s own attacks against Medicare-for-All. His campaign is part of a multi-front corporate effort to defeat the policy."

While billing itself as a “national think tank that champions modern center-left ideas,” Third Way is a conduit for a panoply of corporate interests that campaigns against left-wing policies-- in 2013, two of its highest-ranking officials wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning that “economic populism is a dead end for democrats.” One of those officials, Executive Vice President Jim Kessler, the former longtime aide of Wall Street’s favorite Democrat Chuck Schumer, has admitted the majority of Third Way’s financial support comes from Wall Street, which views the health insurance industry as a great investment. At least as far back as 2013, it was staffed with Republicans and fundraising from a variety of corporations, donations that the companies themselves sometimes listed as part of their lobbying budgets.

Today, one of its leadership team once worked for the National Association of Manufacturers, a Republican-aligned business group that, among other things, fights climate action and in its earlier years was one of the earliest forces to organize against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Meanwhile, Third Way’s board of trustees currently features a former private equity titan, a former Goldman Sachs executive, the head of a major corporate lobbying firm that has counted pharmaceuticals as its clients, and several other private equity and bank executives.

Third Way has openly said it views Sanders alone among the Democratic field as an unacceptable choice for the nomination, so threatened by his campaign that they’ve now come around to even longtime nemesis and Sanders rival Elizabeth Warren. In 2018, the organization convened a meeting of 200 elected Democrats, political operatives, and donors to “launch a serious, compelling economic alternative to Sanderism,” as Kessler put it.

Although health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry are funding a variety of Democratic candidates-- all of whom are now either attacking or backed away from their earlier support for Sanders’s Medicare for All bill-- the primary conduit for their campaign against the policy appears to be Biden. Health insurers were thrilled when Biden entered the race, seeing his campaign as a bulwark against Sanders’s plan for Medicare for All, and an In These Times investigation from July found that Biden received the most money in the Democratic field from insurance and pharmaceutical employees, while Sanders received the least. He kicked off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by a health insurance executive, and one of Biden’s campaign aides is a former health care lobbyist.

Not only that, but Biden’s advisor and chief pollster John Anzalone is the president of the firm that authored Third Way’s survey, Anzalone Liszt Grove Research (Anzalone’s partner, Lisa Grove, conducted the polling). Anzalone joined Trade Works for America earlier this year, an organization co-founded by Vice President Mike Pence’s current chief of staff that’s partly funded by the pharmaceutical industry and is pushing for Trump’s sequel to NAFTA.

The results of the survey, which found majority support for Medicare for All among those polled, including 75 percent of Democratic primary voters, potentially give us a sneak preview of the negative campaign the health care industry and the candidates it funds will embark on.

Polling showed that solid majorities thought statements arguing that Medicare for All would “end Medicare as we know it” (54 percent), produce lower-quality care and longer wait times for seniors and the disabled (60 percent), and that it would cost an extravagant amount and require doubling payroll taxes (59 percent), were all convincing arguments against the policy. Most potent were statements pointing to issues with the chronically underfunded Veterans Affairs health care system (64 percent), and fearmongering about the wait times of the United Kingdom’s far superior (and deliberately underfunded) government-run health care system (61 percent). Deemed least convincing were arguments that Medicare for All would empower bigoted politicians to control Americans’ health care (39 percent) and that it would be a “giveaway to employers” (49 percent).

We’ve already seen the Biden campaign and other candidates deploy some of these arguments. Biden has made the ten-year $30 trillion cost of Medicare for All a core part of his attack on the bill, saying that the tax hikes needed to fund it are too expensive, that it would mean “Medicare goes away as you know it” and that “all the Medicare you have is gone,” and, as he told a forum hosted by seniors advocacy organization AARP, that it would create “hiatuses” in care. He even briefly deployed the argument that the policy would let employers “off the hook.” There is a remarkable convergence between Biden’s talking points and those tested by the organization’s survey.

...The 2020 election is less a contest between different candidates and more a battle between big business and the working class, with the issue of health care-- the number one concern among voters-- at its center. On one side is Joe Biden’s campaign, which, whether he’s conscious of it or not, is in reality one part of a multifront operation by the private health care sector to derail Medicare for All. On the other side is Bernie Sanders’s campaign, which has sworn off big money donors, is aligned with a variety of grassroots groups pushing for Medicare for All, and has emerged as a nationwide tribune of working-class anger.

Somewhere between these two fronts is Elizabeth Warren, who is now genuinely surging in the polls after months of artificial elevation by a sympathetic media. Though Warren holds similar policy positions to Sanders, she has been inconsistent in her support for single-payer health care, calling it “the most obvious solution” in a 2008 book, before refusing to endorse it in her 2012 Senate run, and repeatedly waffling on her support for Sanders’s bill to the point that even mainstream news outlets have taken notice. She also continues to rely on big money donors, anchoring her current run in a $10 million transfer from her Senate coffers that was raised from wealthy fundraisers and tapping a major big-dollar fundraiser to be her treasurer, and she refuses to rule out funding her general election campaign with big-money donors. Should Warren win the nomination, now a distinct possibility, this could offer another point of leverage for the health care sector to defeat Medicare for All.

Defeating Joe Biden’s campaign, an unabashed electoral channel for all manner of corporate interests hoping to defeat Medicare for All and other left-wing policies, should be the number one priority of the broad left. But even after Biden’s gone, we’ll have to exert all the pressure we can to keep Medicare for All on the table in any future Democratic administration.