The Primary Takes Shape-- Biden, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren

So many new polls! And they all pretty much say the same two big things, neither of which, so far out from the primaries, let alone the 2020 election day, should be taken as a sure thing:

• Any Democrat could beat Trump
• Status Quo Joe will be the nominee

Before we look at the newest polling data, let's take a quick peak at the RealClearPolitics national polling averages (which already include the Fox poll numbers).

• Status Quo Joe- 32.2%
• Bernie- 15.8%
• Elizabeth Warren- 11.2%
• McKinsey Pete- 7.8%
• Kamala- 6.6%
• Beto- 3.6%
• ooker- 2.4%
• Klobuchar- 1.2%
• Yang- 1.0%
• Gillibrand- 0.6%
• Castro- 0.6%
• Tim Ryan- 0.6%
• Michael Bennet- 0.6%
• Tulsi- 0.4%
• Jay Inslee- 0.4%
• Delaney- 0.4%
• Frackenlooper- 0.4%
• de Blasio- 0.3%
• Marianne Williamson- 0.2%
• Eric Swalwell- 0.2%

Fox's numbers are national and CBS' are of the early battleground states. We'll look at Fox first but one more thing before we do-- the Señor Trumpanzee internal polling numbers, you know, the ones that Trumpanzee denied even existed after they started leaking out. Yesterday, writing for NBC News Chuck Todd, Kristen Welker and Ben Kamisar reported that the Señor Trumpanzee campaign fired the pollsters of the "nonexistent polls," polls that showed Bernie and Status Quo Joe kicked Trump's fat ass. Trump is flipping out because all their internal leaked polls show him trailing across swing states seen as essential to his path to re-election and in Democratic-leaning states where Republicans have looked to gain traction and also show him "underperforming in reliably red states that haven’t been competitive for decades in presidential elections."

This morning, the Washington Post reported that "Trumpworld is trying to wave a red flag in front of the president to warn him that his 2020 reelection battle is going to be a tougher fight than he’s willing to acknowledge. That’s why, people close to the campaign, said that unflattering internal poll numbers leaked about matchups with Joe Biden and other Democratic contenders in key states. Trump at first denied the internal numbers existed (his campaign manager Brad Parscale confirmed they did indeed exist, but were from March) and his campaign then took action to dismiss those suspected of revealing them." Meanwhile a UT poll released by the Texas Tribune and mind-blowing results for the GOP: "Half of the registered voters in Texas would vote to reelect President Trump, but half of them would not. Few of those voters were wishy-washy about it: 39% said they would 'definitely' vote to reelect Trump; 43% said they would 'definitely not' vote for him. The remaining 18% said they would 'probably' (11%) or 'probably not' (7%) vote to give Trump a second term." Among independents, the news was even worse-- 45% said "definitely not" and just 26& said "definitely." Joshua Blank, manager of polling and research for the Texas Politics Project said that "Overall, Texas independents tend to be more conservative than liberal and tend to look more like Republicans than like Democrats ... and things have gotten worse among independents."

So... shoot the messenger, always the first sign of an executive with the worst leadership skills imaginable. Trump is down double digits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan. Without at least 2 of those states, there is no path to victory for Trump in 2020. On top of that, he's down against Biden in Iowa by 7 points, in North Carolina by 8 points, in Virginia by 17 points, in Ohio by 1 point, in Georgia by 6 points, in Minnesota by 14 points, and in Maine by 15 points. That's an end-of-the-world scenario for Trump, although... it could get worse. Trump is only ahead of Biden by 2 points in Texas. The last time a Democrat won there, it was Jimmy Carter against Jerry Ford in 1976. Trump's response after being questioned about why he is losing so badly was to deny, deny, deny, calling polls showing him losing as "fake polls" conjured up out of thin air by his political foes and claiming his campaign has "great internal polling... We are winning in every single state that we've polled. We're winning in Texas very big. We're winning in Ohio very big. We're winning in Florida very big." The only thing big in his polling are the lies he tells about it.

After Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, tried explaining the bad results in rationale terms (they're old, they're incomplete, they were done before Mueller cleared Trump...), he was forced by the White House to issue a typically absurdist Trumpist statement: "All news about the President’s polling is completely false. The President’s new polling is extraordinary and his numbers have never been better." If Shakespeare were to write a play based on the statement would it be a tragedy or a comedy. How about Arthur Miller? Sam Shepard? Stephen Sondheim? Rodgers and Hammerstein? Andrew Lloyd Webber?

I'll guess that regular readers of Fox.com went into shock yesterday when they opened to the headline: Fox News Poll: Democrats want a steady leader, Biden leads Trump by 10 points. It wasn't so much that "Democratic primary voters want someone who will unite Americans, provide steady leadership, and who has high ethical standards," as it was that "Democrats best President Trump in hypothetical matchups and keep his support at 41 percent or lower... Biden tops Trump by 10 points (49-39 percent) and Sanders is up by nine (49-40) -- both of these leads are outside the poll’s margin of error. Warren has a two-point edge over Trump (43-41), and Harris (42-41) and Buttigieg (41-40) are up by one (within the margin of error)."

But... it is Fox, so a few words of encouragement for the racists and fascists who get their news from Trump-TV:

The president’s current standing is actually better than where he stood at this point in the cycle four years ago. In June 2015, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 17 points.

"Trump's current position in the polls is far from ideal," says Shaw. "But he's definitely in the game. His base is on board and he'll have ample opportunity to frame the choice set moving forward while the Democrats battle for voter and media attention in the debates."

A 60 percent majority doesn’t think a politician with low moral standards can be a good leader, yet voters say they will place greater importance on supporting a candidate who shares their views (55 percent) than one who is highly ethical (40 percent).

...Some 70 percent of Democrats don’t believe a politician with low moral standards can be a good leader compared to just 48 percent of Republicans.

Democrats prioritize supporting a candidate who is highly ethical over one who shares their views on major issues by 6 points. It is more lopsided, in the opposite direction, for Republicans, as they put issues over ethics by 42 points.

Perhaps more important than people-polling at this point might be banister polling-- and only checks count, Shane Goldmacher reported for NY Times readers that Wall Street has placed its bets: Satus Quo Joe, Kamala and McKinsey Pete (who speaks their language of deception). "The behind-the-scenes competition for Wall Street money in the 2020 presidential race," he wrote, "is reaching a fevered peak this week as no less than nine Democrats are holding New York fund-raisers in a span of nine days, racing ahead of a June 30 filing deadline when they must disclose their latest financial hauls... Among those spreading the money around is Brad Karp, the chairman of the Paul, Weiss law firm and a top attorney for Wall Street institutions. He is hosting Mr. Biden for a reception at 9 a.m. on Tuesday; he is a co-host for a “lawyer’s lunch” for Ms. Harris that same day, according to invitations obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Karp, who donated to Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Booker in the first quarter, did not respond to a request for comment. The momentum of big money in New York toward Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Harris is mirrored in contributor circles nationally, according to donors and campaign advisers, as well as in poll results: The trio is usually among the top five candidates in early primary states and national surveys... Biden made explicit at a fund-raiser last Monday in Washington that he does not plan to demonize the financial industry like some rivals have, saying that 'Wall Street and significant bankers' can 'be positive influences in the country.' (As a senator for Delaware, Mr. Biden was regarded as an ally of financial institutions in the state, such as the credit card industry.)"

What Goldmacher couldn't say but our own Skip Kaltenheuser did: "Considering that the greatest threat to our democracy is the rapidly increasing wealth and commensurate political power of the finance sector, and the likelihood of it ushering in another economic debacle, it’s very easy to winnow the democratic party candidates for President. The chaff to be removed are those candidates, tin cups in hand, doing a kowtow to an approving Wall Street. All that primary voters need to know to make their first cut is who is in the pocket of the Big Money, and who isn’t. The short list of major players who will owe nothing to the finance sector is Sanders and Warren, both of whom terrify Wall Street. We want candidates who terrify Wall Street, not who are terrified by it."

CBS' polling was about early states, not about the even less useful national surveys.

Democrats across the early contests say their field is too big, so they're focused on a narrower list of options. They're hoping to find the person who can beat President Trump, which is their top criteria.

Democrats have different thoughts on what "electability" entails, on what swing voters will want, and there is some division over what the party's message ought to be. They are split on whether the party's message should emphasize returning the country to how it was before Mr. Trump (47%), or whether they should argue for an even more progressive agenda than they had under President Obama (53%.) This something-known-versus-something-new dynamic helps explain some of the candidate preferences across key states.

Former Vice President Joe Biden does extremely well with those preferring the return argument, and he is in much tighter competition with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the group who want a more progressive argument. In fact, a slight majority of those who want a more progressive agenda are not considering Biden at all, and most of them are considering Warren.

Democrats are already assessing each candidates' chances against Mr. Trump and what specifically they believe it will take to win: they think their nominee ought to be a known national figure, not someone new to politics; someone who can motivate other stay-at-home Democrats to turn out.

When Democrats imagine what will appeal to America's swing voters next November, they believe the swing voters who'd consider gender would prefer a man more than a woman; that swing voters who'd consider race would prefer someone white more than someone of color; and those who would consider ideology would pick a moderate centrist more than a progressive.

Seventy-eight percent of Democrats say it's extremely important that a nominee must convince them of their ability to beat Mr. Trump to earn their primary vote. And when they assess the chances for candidates they like actually doing so, Biden stands out. Seventy-five percent of those considering Biden think he probably would beat Mr. Trump, a far higher number for Biden than among those considering other candidates.

Thirty-nine percent of those considering Warren say she'd probably win. More-- 50%-- would put her chances at "maybe"-- and 51% of those considering Sanders say he'd probably win.

But what exactly makes a candidate "electable"? Seventy-four percent say that starts with someone known in national politics, and 67% say that involves motivating their fellow Democrats who stayed home in 2016, even more so than trying to win over Trump voters.

Biden backers are a bit more likely than those supporting Warren or Sanders to say that a nominee needs to win over some 2016 Trump supporters.

The 2020 Democratic field is the most diverse in history, but we asked these Democrats what they believe swing and undecided voters would ultimately want in a candidate in terms of race, gender, age and ideology.

Many Democrats felt race or gender won't matter to others. But they think swing voters who do consider those factors would lean toward a white male, moderate candidate: a white candidate over a candidate of color by a by a six-to-one ratio; and that a man would be preferred by swing voters over a women by a four to one ratio, among those who'd care about gender.

Voters have some different reasons explaining their candidate picks. When voters in these states considering Biden are asked why, almost nine in 10 pick his time as vice president as a reason (86%), outranking his policy stances (57%), his time in the U.S. Senate (54%), and that he's familiar to them (49%).

In the survey, respondents were permitted to pick more than one reason. But voters considering Warren and Sanders are more likely to cite these candidates' policy stances as a reason why. A third of Democratic voters considering Warren say they are considering her because she is a woman (a similar percentage of those considering Kamala Harris say the same about her.)

Buttigieg stands out in that six in 10 of those considering him like his style of campaigning. Most also like his background before entering politics, and his policies.

Which Democrat Will Drop Out First? Kirsten Gillibrand Says Don't Look At Her

I've written a lot about why I don't think Kirsten Gillibrand would make a good president and there's no need to reiterate all of that again here. But one thing I never doubted was her skill as a politician. I've seen it first hand for over a decade. So why is her campaign failing so abysmally? Why are people saying she should drop out before she further embarrasses herself? Yesterday Shane Goldmacher tried to get to the bottom of that for NY Times readers.

First of all, for all the corporate and Wall Street cash she's rolling in, grassroots donors have abandoned her. She may not even qualify to make it to the debate stage! Goldmacher explained that "In the two years leading up to her 2020 run, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand spent millions of dollars building up a network of online and grass-roots donors who could power her coming presidential campaign... but her expensively laid plans unraveled as those potential contributors all but vanished. [She] raised less money from small contributors in her first quarter as a presidential candidate than she had in six of the eight previous quarters when she wasn’t running for president, according to federal campaign records. The poor showing has left the New York senator short on one of the Democratic National Committee’s key criteria-- having at least 65,000 donors-- to qualify for the party’s official debates that begin next month. And she has seen herself lapped in the small-donor chase by lesser-known names, including two Democratic neophytes, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur with the tagline “humanity first” advocating a universal basic income, and Marianne Williamson, an author and spiritual guru."

So how is that possible? What about her or her campaign has turned off the party's grassroots. She claims it's discrimination against women, although Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are doing extremely well and most of the other women running have surpassed her in terms of grassroots donors. Is it all because people are angry about how she treated Al Franken? I doubt people remember her earlier flip-flops, her days as a Blue Dog, her campaign against immigrants, her status as a spokesperson for the NRA or her dishonest advocacy for tobacco giants. This is a person unable to look inward, always blaming someone or something else for problems of her own making.

Goldmacher wrote that she's "reorganizing her online operations and trying to turn around her political and financial fortunes with her high-profile criticism of the new laws in Georgia, Alabama and other states that drastically restrict abortions. As she sounds the alarm, and raises money off her fight, she is trying to attract new supporters to a campaign in great need of them."

All told, 12 candidates have said they acquired at least 65,000 donors ahead of Ms. Gillibrand-- former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced doing it in less than 12 hours-- despite her decade-long standing as a senator for one of the most donor-rich Democratic states in the nation.

Missing the donor mark is just one aspect of a campaign that has struggled for traction from the outset. What little national attention Ms. Gillibrand did receive early on was often soaked up by old questions, from voters and the media, about her past, especially her switched positions on guns and immigration a decade ago, as well as her push in 2017 for Al Franken to resign from the Senate following accusations of sexual misconduct.

Mired near the bottom of most polls at 1 percent or less, she has drawn thinner crowds on the trail than the top contenders, and her televised CNN town hall event drew the worst ratings of any weekday town hall that the network has hosted. She has struggled to secure home-state support and also faced a complaint about her own office’s handing of a sexual harassment complaint that eventually resulted in the departure of the aide in question.

All the while, she spent 80 percent of every dollar she raised through March, among the field’s fastest spending rates.

“It is surprising to me she hasn’t resonated with the electorate,” said Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic strategist and campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2008. “She’s had the resources, she’s had the time, she’s also had a national profile, particularly on issues that truly resonated at least in the 2018 midterms: a strong advocate on sexual harassment and women’s issue’s writ large.”

She has also run into some bad luck. Any would-be momentum from a small but splashy launch rally in March outside a Trump property in Manhattan was smothered when, hours later, the first summary of the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference was released. And her proposal for “democracy dollars”-- giving voters money to donate to campaigns-- came as news broke that the special counsel objected to that initial summary.

Ms. Gillibrand’s argument that she is the advocate in chief for women has been clouded by the fact that a historic number of women are running, including three Senate colleagues: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

...Her campaign says she is connecting one voter at a time in coffee shops and living rooms. But in a celebrity-fueled climate dominated by mass media and viral moments online, it is not clear such a pathway exists in 2020. Ms. Gillibrand has taken to calling the primary a “marathon and not a sprint,” a tacit admission she has fallen behind.

...On the trail, Ms. Gillibrand has tried to put on a happy face. She has played beer pong in New Hampshire. She swapped dresses with a drag queen in Des Moines. She arm-wrestled with a college student in Ames, Iowa.

Still, the sting of failing to hit financial goals has been the source of particular consternation inside the campaign, people familiar with the operation said.

Ms. Gillibrand herself has long used her fund-raising as a measure of success. She wrote in her memoir, Off the Sidelines, that after she was appointed to the Senate to replace Mrs. Clinton in 2009, she changed her computer password to “3M1stQ” to serve as a constant reminder of her financial target: $3 million in the first quarter of the year.

A decade later, that is all she raised when running for president.

Her $3 million quarterly haul was about half of what some rivals raised in their first 24 hours.

Now, Ms. Gillibrand is making some changes. Her campaign is winding down the role for one of her longest-serving political and digital firms, Anne Lewis Strategies, where she spent $5.6 million in 2017 and 2018. That was nearly 60 cents of every dollar she spent, much of it to buy Facebook ads. Ms. Lewis’s firm received another $826,000 in Ms. Gillibrand’s first two-plus months as a presidential candidate-- by far her single largest expenditure.

...Gillibrand, who has run on the tagline “Brave wins,” has said she has suffered for calling for Mr. Franken to resign. “Democratic megadonors are blacklisting me because I refused to stay silent,” read online ads asking for $1 to ensure she makes the debates.

That didn't help her. It reminded voters that they love Franken and were pissed off that her never-ending opportunism drove him out of the Senate where he was needed far more than she is. Her Facebook ads were a waste of nearly a million dollars. She could have handed out $10 bills at her events instead and wound up with higher poll numbers. Her approach to 2020 campaigning is a decade out of date. Anne Lewis? Why? Is Gillibrand on autopilot? Neal Kwatra, a New York-based Democratic strategist, told Goldmacher that Gillibrand is "in a precarious place in a modern presidential campaign where we have elite consensus emerging about who the top-tier candidates are." No one thinks she is any longer. Can she turn that around?

Gillibrand has billed herself as an electable Democrat who won a conservative upstate New York House district in 2006. But that focus has highlighted how her stances then-- she had an A-rating from the National Rifle Association and spoke against illegal immigration-- contrast with her record now as a progressive senator who voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Trump’s nominees... [She] charged in a recent CNN interview that there was some “gender bias” among those who underestimate her. Jennifer Palmieri, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s communications director in 2016, agreed that there had been some biases at play.

“I think that the women candidates have a harder time of breaking through early,” Ms. Palmieri said. “Even though some of the men are fresh faces, we recognize them in a familiar role.”

Ms. Gillibrand is plowing ahead. After fund-raising in New York and Connecticut this weekend, she will campaign in Iowa each of the following three weeks.

“I have faith in the process,” she told reporters in New Hampshire recently, “and the American people.”

Those are the sounds of a sinking campaign. I'm not ready to bet money she'll be the first to drop out-- but she's definitely in contention. She's lucky that the Republican Party in New York is essentially dead and can't mount a credible statewide campaign any longer. Her next step will undoubtably be to cast herself as the victim/hero of the Republican jihad against women's Choice.

It's Sunday-- What's Wrong With Status Quo Joe Today?

Biden's actual campaign kickoff was on Thursday, April 25-- a fat cat-only fundraiser in the Philadelphia mansion of Comcast executive and lobbyist David Cohen, co-hosted by every crooked Democrat he could find, from establishment scumbag Ed Rendell to union-busting attorney Steven Cozen. ($700,000 came in from these rich folks for Biden that night.) But 4 days later, Biden made his way to a Pittsburgh union hall for a Potemkin Village version of his campaign kickoff event, claiming that was the "real" start of his campaign, one that would saddle the Democratic Party with another establishment loser. He claimed to be "a union man" during his speech. Is their a union for corrupt politicians? What other union could Biden be talking about?

Writing yesterday for New York Magazine, Eric Levitz noted that although Status Quo Joe is "campaigning as an old-school liberal," Biden, a warrior for trade policies that ship American jobs overseas to cheap labor markets, has been no friend to working families.

Organized labor opposed NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, all bills Biden told them to shut up about and follow his (and the plutocrats') lead. In 2016 it was Hillary's posture on those same policies that allowed Trump to "effectively used NAFTA as shorthand for the Democrats’ purported betrayal of its traditional working-class base. And those attacks, combined with his demagogic messaging on immigration, helped to reduce the salience of class resentment in the 2016 election, and send a critical mass of midwestern Obama voters into the GOP coalition."

Thus, it makes sense that Bernie Sanders is already focusing his fire on Biden’s “fair trade” bona fides. Casting the Democratic front-runner as a serial betrayer of industrial workers doesn’t just undermine Biden’s standing with a key interest group in the primary, but also challenges his claim to electability-- which, polls show, is the No. 1 quality that Democratic voters are seeking in their standard-bearer this cycle.

Shortly after Biden launched his campaign at a union hall in Western Pennsylvania this week, Sanders went on CNN and assailed his rival’s views on trade. “When people take a look at my record versus Vice-President Biden’s record, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA; he voted for NAFTA,” Sanders said. “I helped lead the fight against [permanent normal trade relations] with China; he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; he supported it.” The Vermont senator proceeded to release a video spotlighting this point, and a news release calling on his fellow Democratic candidates to embrace his trade agenda. When Biden suggested Wednesday that China was not a serious competitor to the United States, economically or geopolitically, Sanders immediately fired back, tweeting, “Since the China trade deal I voted against, America has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs. It’s wrong to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors. When we are in the White House we will win that competition by fixing our trade policies.”

Sanders is hardly alone in seeing trade as Biden’s Achilles’ heel. As Politico notes, a wide variety of progressive activists and organizations, including some aligned with Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, are mounting a similar line of attack.

“There are many reasons Joe Biden is the least electable Democrat our side could possibly nominate,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports Elizabeth Warren. “Being seen as cozy with big corporations and loving to cut backroom deals with political insiders are two of those reasons-- and they are exactly what trade deals like the TPP represent. That’s the opposite of the outsider zeitgeist Trump tapped into in 2016 and will try to repeat in 2020.”

This argument appears sound enough on the merits. In current polling, Biden does look like the strongest Democratic candidate against Trump, not least because of his relatively high support among whites without college degrees. But it is true that he boasts the very same trade record-- and cozy relations with financial-industry titans-- that Trump used to mitigate the Democrats’ advantage among economically liberal, working-class voters.

What’s more, if history is any guide, no one wants to run as a champion of the existing trade system in a Democratic presidential primary, especially those who support said system. In 2008, Obama assailed NAFTA as “devastating” and a “big mistake.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton disavowed Obama’s TPP, a trade deal she had previously hailed as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Ostensibly, Clinton and Obama did not adopt these positions for kicks, but rather, for electoral advantage.

But this time might be different. As the Republican Party’s standard-bearer has claimed the mantle of protectionism, negative partisanship has led a significant number of Democrats to embrace the opposite view. In 2009, 34 percent of Democratic voters told Pew Research that free-trade agreements had “generally been a bad thing for this country”; last year, that figure fell to 19 percent.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have spurred a backlash in several midwestern states, where agricultural interests have lost more from the president’s policies than industrial workers have gained. It’s possible that these trends will reduce the potency of anti-NAFTA arguments in the Democratic primary, while the same Obama nostalgia that’s propelling Biden’s candidacy will take the bite out of attacks on the TPP.

That said, it’s quite possible that Democratic voters will be responsive to a critique of Biden’s trade record on electability grounds, even if they aren’t on substantive ones. Surveys suggest a large majority of Democrats are looking for the candidate who’d be most likely to defeat Trump, not the one who best represents their own views. If Sanders can convince these voters that Biden’s support of NAFTA makes him a less-than-ideal general-election candidate, then they may start viewing Uncle Joe’s other betrayals of core Democratic constituencies-- from consumers to African-Americans to feminists to retirees-- in a less forgiving light.

Have you noticed how the prominent centrists in the race-- Biden, McKinsey Pete and Beto-- would rather talk about "values" (which you can think are anything you'd like) than about specific policies? Biden's repulsive 4 decades-long record shows what his values-- and his policies-- are, rather than his smarmy old-school campaign techniques. Democratic primary voters too scared to look at Biden's career of racism and corporatism are exactly the ones who are headed towards giving us another 4 years of Trump.

There I go again-- blaming the voters, not the candidates... as though all the problems in America are the fault of the people who voted for Trump, rather than Trump (and Putin and Comey and Hillary and Wasserman Schultz). But, come to think of it, isn't that exactly what the problem really is-- a poorly-educated electorate backing a fascist? Yesterday, The Times' Shane Goldmacher, embedded with Biden and reporting from Dubuque, noted that Biden blames it all on Trump's aberrancy and not on Republican voters he's hoping to woo over to his own brand of establishment status quo-ism.

Biden: "Limit it to four years. History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration. This is not the Republican Party... my Republican friends in the House and Senate."

Goldmacher is clear, of course, that there's no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Trump, but he claims that "Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary." Deeper thinkers, like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren see Trump "as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship." For them, driving Trump out of the White House is the beginning, not the end. In Biden's case, there really is nothing more to his campaign than to get rid of the aberration that is Trump. So Goldmacher asks the obvious Biden/Bernie question: "Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?"

“Make no mistake about it, this struggle is not just about defeating Donald Trump,” Mr. Sanders declared in his own kickoff speech in Brooklyn. “This struggle is about taking on the incredibly powerful institutions that control the economic and political life of this country.”

After more than 40 years in Washington, Mr. Biden has forged more and deeper relationships with Republicans than any other Democrat running. In the Obama White House, he was known as the “McConnell whisperer” for his skills in striking agreements with the often recalcitrant Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. Mr. Biden spent decades cutting deals in the Senate.

Mr. Biden’s opening pitch as an electable pragmatist who can reach across the aisle has resonated with many Iowa Democrats who are desperate to end Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“I just want to see decency again,” sighed Jimmy Stumpff, who wore a “Make Lies Wrong Again” shirt to Mr. Biden’s event in Cedar Rapids this past week. “I feel Biden’s our best chance to beat Trump-- by far.”

John Anzalone [pollster to the Blue Dogs], a Democratic pollster who has previously advised Mr. Biden, said it should be no surprise that bipartisan appeals sell, even in a party primary. “Guess what,” he said. “Democratic primary voters agree with the fact that a Democratic president should work with Republicans to get things done.”

“There is this narrative about Democratic primary voters that they’re all about anger and the fight, or principles,” Mr. Anzalone added. “But real voters know one thing: If anything is going to get done to help them, it’ll have to be done across party lines.”

On the trail, Mr. Biden has made no secret that he plans to narrow the focus to a Trump-Biden matchup. From his campaign’s opening video montage, he has purposefully targeted Mr. Trump while ignoring the wider Republican Party and his own Democratic rivals, a strategy that allows him to project himself as the front-runner and direct attention to his perceived electability.

It seemed no accident that Mr. Biden quickly took his deal-making case from the swing state of Pennsylvania to Dubuque County, which flipped from the Democratic column to Mr. Trump in 2016, and sits in the middle of the densest stretch of counties in the nation that made the same shift to Mr. Trump.

Yet many on the left believe that Mr. Biden’s nostalgia for a bygone era of comity, compromise and civility-- while appealing-- is misplaced, or even naïve. They question whether historic pragmatism can even be considered pragmatic anymore in an era of norm-busting hyperpartisanship.

“Joe Biden knows better,” said Brian Fallon, a former top spokesman for Hillary Clinton and Senator Chuck Schumer, “because Joe Biden was the wingman for Barack Obama, who in his first year in his presidency had Mitch McConnell say his No. 1 objective was that Barack Obama wasn’t re-elected.”

Mr. Fallon acknowledged the political temptation to be “less partisan sounding,” by condemning only Mr. Trump in an attempt to appeal to disaffected Republicans. “I’m not saying a candidate needs to go around preaching doom and gloom,” he said. “But for the good of the country-- beyond the short-term political calculus-- we need someone who is cleareyed about the situation they will be inheriting if they win the White House.”

Some Democratic strategists point to Mayor Pete Buttigieg as a candidate who grasps the challenges to bipartisan deal-making. While he has offered rhetorical gestures to Republicans-- casting himself as a consensus-seeking executive in a red state, Indiana-- he has embraced more radical ideas that would help Democrats bypass the opposition party, such as eliminating the filibuster and stacking the Supreme Court with additional justices.

It took Ms. Warren only two days after the 2016 election to cast Mr. Trump as an outgrowth of an electorate demanding change. “The final results may have divided us-- but the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system,” she said then.

Joe and Jesse-- does it warm your heart to see them all buddy-buddy?

Mr. Biden’s graciousness toward Republicans has gotten him into trouble with Democrats who see him as overly solicitous to an intransigent party. Last year, he gave a paid speech in Michigan in which he praised an endangered Republican congressman only weeks before the election. His remarks were spliced into ads for the Republican candidate, who narrowly won re-election.

More recently, he said his successor, Vice President Mike Pence, was a “decent guy,” prompting criticism that forced him to backtrack and say that “there is nothing decent about being anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

This week, his critics unearthed a 2015 video clip of Mr. Biden praising his own predecessor, Dick Cheney-- “I think he’s a decent man,” Mr. Biden said. It drew widespread attention on social media, and condemnation from the left.

As Mr. Biden has elevated the urgency and centrality of defeating Mr. Trump, he has sought to play down the policy differences with his Democratic rivals.

“We agree on basically everything, all of us running-- all 400 of us,” Mr. Biden said in Dubuque.

His Democratic rivals would disagree, however, and there are real ideological divides in the party.

Mr. Sanders, for instance, is the chief advocate of imposing a sweeping new Medicare-for-all health care system that would guarantee coverage and end the current system of private insurance. Mr. Biden is advocating a more incremental approach: adding a “public option” for anyone to buy into the current Medicare system, without unwinding the existing insurance marketplace.

Early polls show why Mr. Biden would want to elide any disagreements. Only 23 percent of Democrats said he had the “best policy ideas” in a recent poll by Quinnipiac University. But 56 percent of Democrats said he had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump.

Some Democrats say the idea of trying to predict electability and casting Mr. Trump as an “aberration” was tried by Mrs. Clinton in 2016-- and it failed.

“I feel like the party went through this and the 2016 election showed that Trumpism isn’t just Donald Trump-- it’s the entire Republican Congress, too,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive Democratic strategist unaligned in the 2020 contest. “Until there is someone in the Republican Party who can stand up to Trump, then none of them are better than Trump.”

Republicans aligned with Mr. Trump say that, whatever the president’s failings, he has overseen a growing economy, the appointment of a vast array of conservative judges and a huge tax cut. They note that they offer dissent when they disagree with his policies; Mr. Trump recently suffered setbacks on his desired nominations to the Federal Reserve, for example, because of Republican opposition.

In a 21-candidate Democratic field, Mr. Biden, of course, is not the only candidate running as a potential healer. Senator Cory Booker has described seeking “to channel our common pain into common purpose.” Senator Amy Klobuchar talks up her bipartisan credentials. And Senator Michael Bennet entered the race this past week making the case for moderation as a “pragmatic idealist.”

But Mr. Biden is, by far, the most prominent... “We have to unify this country,” he said. “It’s not just about-- the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition. And folks, we’ve got to take it on, we’ve got to take it on in a real way.”

This afternoon, Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, reiterated that "This election needs to be about so much more than beating Donald Trump. It is a mistake to think that this election is simply about beating one man-- an aberration of a president-- and that everything will simply return to 'normal.' The reality is that 'normal' in our country before there was a President Trump still meant an immoral lack of healthcare, unlivable low wages, rampant corporate greed, a racist criminal justice system, and a corrupt political system. So, no. It is not enough to just defeat Donald Trump. Returning to 'normal' is not acceptable." This is pretty harsh in terms for the "back to Normalcy" candidate, Status Quo Joe Biden, who has absolutely no reason to be running for president outside of his own inflated ego.

Biden is a partisan hack who is full of shit. There are no values; there are no policies-- he has been clear, he would be the first to compromise away Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, gay equality... anything that doesn't touch him-- there is only a toxic careerist drive for another utterly worthless politician, whose grasping for short-term comfort helped Fred Upton win reelection in Michigan last year.

When Will Gillibrand Drop Out? (Asking For A Friend)

National and early-state polling for New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has quite consistently been going up and down between zero and 1% since she announced she wants to be president a few months ago. The Harvard-Harris poll in late February showed her at zero percent, while the slightly more recent Morning Consult poll shows her at 1%.

The good news for her is that voters don't know who she is (yet). The bad news is that when they find out about her, they walk away with a negative impression usually tied to her unfair treatment of Al Franken or her career flip-flops. She's doing the worst of all the senators who have jumped into the race-- worse than Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris at the bottom end and far worse than Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders at the top end. One respected Democratic operative told me her game plan is no longer about the 2020 nomination but about making herself a contender for Biden's VP pick. "She's already got that loser stink about her," he told me... "She's not even making headway in her own state." Reporting for Politico, Elena Schneider and Laura Barrón-López wrote that she hasn't been able to get a single endorsement from her home state congressional colleagues, not even from like-minded establishment types-- despite trying really hard. "[S]o far," the wrote this week, "no one has jumped on board."

Gillibrand’s efforts to get home-state colleagues committed to her presidential campaign reflects some members’ wish to see the field develop, as well as the complex internal politics of New York’s huge Democratic delegation-- and the fact that Gillibrand could face presidential competition from within the state. Gov. Andrew Cuomo hasn’t conclusively closed the door on a run and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio travels to early caucus and primary states. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg bowed out of the 2020 primary only on Tuesday.

But Gillibrand’s hunt for support stands in stark contrast to neighboring Sen. Cory Booker, who locked down the entire New Jersey Democratic delegation within a month of his presidential launch, as did Sen. Bernie Sanders in (much smaller) Vermont. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was introduced by Rep. Joe Kennedy, a Massachusetts colleague, at her official launch event last month, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar shouted out to freshman Reps. Angie Craig and Dean Phillips as she announced her campaign in a driving snowstorm in Minnesota.

And while Sen. Kamala Harris has not yet received the support of most of her California colleagues, she has locked down endoresements from five House members there.

Rep. Brian Higgins (D-NY) noted that “the governor could still be in play” for a 2020 presidential bid from New York, but that he’s open to supporting Gillibrand.

“It’s too early to make any kind of decisive commitment without knowing the full lay of the land,” Higgins said. “It’s early and there’s seemingly new candidates coming in every single day.”

“It’s early. I’m taking my time,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY). “I don’t know all the candidates yet. I’m going to wait to see who all of the candidates are.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader and New York’s senior senator, is also expected to remain neutral in the 2020 primary.

And Rep. Carolyn Maloney said Gillibrand hasn’t asked for her endorsement yet. “She’s working hard, she’s been going into South Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa,” said Maloney-- who was more critical in a recent New York Daily News story, questioning whether Gillibrand could beat President Donald Trump in Midwestern states key to victory in 2020.

And some members of the New York delegation are waiting to see whether Beto O’Rourke jumps into the presidential race, citing their close relationship with the former House member from Texas.

“No one seems to be willing to stick their neck out for” Gillibrand, said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic consultant.

Katz noted that Gillibrand’s 2017 comments that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal “might be part of the hesitation.”

But Katz said that “if you build it, they will come,” and if Gillibrand “resonates in Iowa and New Hampshire, then I’m sure the New York delegation will take notice.”

Some House members privately noted that Gillibrand’s relationship with other New York Democrats isn’t as strong as Schumer’s. “We see and deal with him a lot more,” said one member, granted anonymity to discuss internal delegation dynamics.

But Gillibrand is reaching out to her colleagues. On Tuesday, Gillibrand invited members of the New York delegation to an impromptu event with New York county officials at Bistro Bis, a restaurant on Capitol Hill. But only one member showed up to the early evening event, which coincided with House votes, after Gillibrand’s office extended the invitation two hours earlier, according to people with knowledge of the invitations.

Progressives weren't happy with her typically self-serving criticism of Ilan Omar, right at the point when Omar most needed support from within her own party. That's typical Gillibrandian behavior-- throwing a colleague under the bus to curry favor with a segment of the population opposing that colleague. "She's a real piece of work," a congressional staffer whose boss Gillibrand has been wooing, unsuccessfully. "No one in the House really likes or trusts her... maybe she's done better in the Senate, although I don't see any of them clamoring the endorse her either."

On Thursday, Shane Goldmacher reported for the NY Times that "No one from New York’s 21-member congressional delegation is yet backing her bid for president. And neither is New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, or its other senator, Chuck Schumer, who as minority leader is staying neutral because numerous senators are in the race." He noted that her "missing support back home is revealing of both her New York relationships and how she has constructed her national profile, often by staying far from the state’s notoriously fractious and rough-and-tumble fray... In 2018, a New York-based political magazine, City and State, published a ranking of the city’s most powerful people in politics. Ms. Gillibrand ranked 16th, one spot behind Mr. de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray. (The top four were, in order, President Trump, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Schumer.)

In an interview with Gabe Debendetti for New York Magazine this week, Gillibrand was still very defensive when asked about the switcheroo from New York's most conservative Democrat in Congress to (fake) liberal, immediately showing herself asa transaction careerist with no fundamental ideological foundation, just someone willing to back any agenda that would further her ambitions, the reason so many people are repulsed by her candidacy.

Well, it’s certainly the talking points from the Republican Party. It’s what they’re putting out there. But, you know, my background, and where I’m from, is very much part of my story. The fact that my first campaign was in a two-to-one Republican district, and I was able to win that against an entrenched Republican incumbent who’d been in Congress for eight years is part of who I am. The fact that he was a bully and demeaned me and tried to dismiss me with comments like, “You’re just a pretty face” shows not only my resilience, but how I treat a bully-- I talk past them. When he says, “You’re just a pretty face,” you say, “Well, thank you, but let’s now talk about how we get out of Iraq and my own out-of-Iraq policy, and why I believe this is the most important thing we do right now.” And my second campaign was no different. My opponent was a philanthropist, had a lot of personal money and wealth, and he decided to spend $7 million, almost exclusively on negative campaign ads. I was a mom with young kids at the time, I had just had Henry. So I’m walking around the district with a toddler-- Theo was 4, Henry was just a baby-- and we learned something in politics: that you cannot win a campaign [against a mother] with a toddler and an infant on negative campaign ads, because nobody believes you.

...[S]o when I became senator ten years ago, I realized that only protecting the Second Amendment and, you know, hunters’ rights, wasn’t enough, and that I needed to really absorb the pain and suffering and challenges of other communities that had deep gun violence and gang violence, and meeting even just one family who had lost a daughter when a stray bullet hit her in the head, and meeting her whole class, made me recognize immediately that I had to be a champion for her. And that meant writing my first piece of legislation on ending gun violence, which was an anti-trafficking law, because Commissioner [Ray] Kelly-- at the time, our New York City police commissioner-- along with a lot of parents who had lost their children said: This is the thing. These guns are coming in from out of state. They’re almost all illegal, and they’re almost going right into the hands of gang members. So when I meet a mom, more recently, who lost her 4-year-old on a park bench in Brooklyn, that’s something you don’t recover from. You have to speak a truth and say, “This must be addressed.”

What's being addressed is her authenticity, which is reflected by that zero to 1% backing she's finding in the polls and the lack of enthusiasm for her campaign among her home state colleagues. And everything is everyone else's fault, never an attractive trait in a politicians (see Donald J. Trump).

2020 Primary Challenges Could Get Pretty Ugly-- No, No... They Will Be Ugly For Sure

No one can put the Ocasio-Crowley primary in a box and sell it in other districts

Last week the New York Times published a lazy piece by Shane Goldmacher, The Ocasio-Cortez Effect: Wave of Challenges Hits Entrenched N.Y. Democrats, that defines superficial reporting. It should be lost on no one that Ocasio Cortez's stunning and successful campaign against New York's ultimate congressional insider ("the next speaker of the House"), Queens County machine boss, Joe Crowley, was utterly missed-- if not purposefully ignored-- by her hometown paper. Perhaps they're making a half-assed attempt to make up for it by covering some generally non-existent primaries in the area. "Half assed" is better described as quarter-assed... if that. The first sentence may be correct-- let's hope: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be just the beginning." But Goldmacher goes nowhere from the correct way to begin his piece.

Blue America has been involved, on one level or another, in every successful Democratic primary against a conservative incumbent since 2006-- Donna Edwards, Beto, Matt Cartwright, AOC... We have also been involved on a ton of them that haven't been successful. If I've learned one thing it's that they succeed when a determined and capable challenger (very, very hard to find, let alone invent) takes on an easily-defined villain with an established bad record. That was certainly the case with Edwards in Maryland, Beto in Texas, Cartwright in Pennsylvania and Ocasio Cortez in New York. Each of them is an extremely talented and charismatic politician and each ran against a corrupt, out-of-touch conservative who was supported fully by an establishment generally loathed by the grassroots.

Goldmacher generally neglected to look at any of that and instead spouts irrelevant nonsense like "Party insurgents are plotting and preparing to battle with the entrenched establishment-- targeting as many as a half-dozen Congress members in and around New York City-- over what it means to be a Democrat and a progressive in the age of President Trump. The coming New York uprising could result in a series of races that lay bare some of the same generational, racial, gender and ideological cleavages expected to define the 2020 presidential primary. The activist left, in particular, hopes that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory will inspire a brush fire of Democrat-on-Democrat campaigns that will spread from New York across the nation."

"Party insurgents?" Really? Grass roots activists might be a better way to describe the point he's fumbling towards. As for "generational, racial, gender and ideological cleavages," which worked in Ocasio Cortez's campaign, we'll have to look at each race Goldmacher is reporting to be a potential primary battle. He's certainly right when he claims "serious primary challengers for House seats have historically been rare, and it is almost unheard of for so many to emerge in one region so early in the election cycle." And they haven't emerged, except on the page in the Times his piece was published on.

The first member Goldmacher identifies as a potential target is Jerry Nadler-- who represents a district that includes areas of Manhattan (the Upper West Side, Soho, Chelsea, the Village, the Financial District) and Brooklyn (mostly Borough Park). His super-highly educated Manhattan constituents are not likely to be persuaded he's a villain at all. His ProgressivePunch score is "A" and has always been "A" and his voting record is ranked-- and has always been ranked-- among the 20 most perfect progressive records in Congress. I don't think Nadler or his team ever thought he could be primaried from the left. His last primary was in 2016 when the far right Hassidics who run Borough Park recruited and supported a candidate, Mikhail Oliver Rosenberg, son of a millionaire, to run against Nadler when he voted for the Iran nuclear deal. It looked like if they could order their zombie followers to go out and vote against Nadler-- in what was predicted to be a low-turn-out election, they could pull off an upset. (They even persuaded racist former comedian Jackie Mason to cut a robocall for their candidate.) Instead it was the second highest turn-out primary in the state that year and Mason and the zombies were nowhere to be seen.

Rosenberg fancied himself the new generation (and a part of a strong LGBTQ community) up against an old and tired Nadler. (Nadler has been in the forefront of every pro-gay initiative in his career and gay organizations backed Nadler.) Rosenberg campaigned on a solid green energy platform, on legalizing marijuana, and as an advocate for Israel. 85% of his campaign expenditures ($366,852) came from his own bank account and, like Trump, he claimed he wouldn't be beholden to special interests. Nadler beat Rosenberg in a landslide-- 88.78% to 10.26%.

Goldmacher reports that next year "Nadler could face a primary from Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who appears to want to run on a platform of "I'm a woman and he's not."

She said she was considering a run after watching the 2018 midterms, as “these women decided not to wait their turn because it was never going to be their turn.”

“I just can’t justify having my daughter watch me sit on the sidelines,” she said.

A huge X-factor in any Nadler primary would be the billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who has pushed for the impeachment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Steyer has already polled the popularity of impeachment in the district and is launching a $200,000 direct mail, television and digital ad campaign this week urging Mr. Nadler to begin impeachment hearings in his committee.

Goldmacher identified Tom Suozzi, Eliot Engel, Yvette Clarke, José Serrano, Carolyn Maloney and Kathleen Rice as likely targets. Suozzi, Engel and Rice are New Dems with relatively conservative voting records. Serrano, Maloney and Clarke are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Engel is rumored to be buying his way into the Progressive Caucus so he will be able to use that membership to claim he's progressive. These are the crucial vote scores for all 7 candidates identified in the piece.

• Yvette Clarke- 95.88- A
• Jerry Nadler- 94.98- A
• José Serrano- 93.71- A
• Carolyn Maloney- 86.47- C
• Eliot Engel- 85.30- C
• Kathleen Rice- 63.16- F
• Tom Suozzi- 54.05- F

"Not every challenge in New York," wrote Goldmacher, "will be run on ideological grounds. Some will be powered by more local disputes, longstanding grudges or just timely ambition. But for many progressives, the goal is to police the Democratic Party ideologically, much in the way the Tea Party pushed Republicans to the right."

“We are trying to elect more Alexandrias,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, the insurgent group devoted to recruiting progressive primary challengers nationally. “She is an example of what one victory can do. Imagine what we can do with more primary wins across the country.”

After Mr. Crowley’s defeat almost no one is seen as untouchable.

“They should be afraid,” Maria L. Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, which backed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, said of incumbent House Democrats.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez herself appeared in a promotional video for Justice Democrats and on an organizing call for the group last November during which Saikat Chakrabarti, now her chief of staff, declared, “We gotta primary folks.”

True, but targets should be carefully chosen. It amazes me, for example, that Justice Democrats and DSA have seemingly ignored, at least so far, corrupt New Dem Gregory Meeks. Nadler and Serrano may not be perfect-- but they certainly are in comparison to Meeks, who seems to exist in Congress primarily to collect bribes. A member of the House Financial Services Committee, he's taken $3,665,788 from the Finance Sector, including $564,100 in the last cycle. What's more, Meeks' likely challenger is the ideal candidate for the seat. Khaair Morrison is a 25 year old African-American attorney born and raised in the district, which, he told me yesterday "is ripe for a fresh leadership after having ineffective leadership for 20+ years. Working class neighborhoods like South East Queens, Nassau, Valley Stream, and Far Rockaway have had an up-close seat to the major issues of our time. After Hurricane Sandy, areas are still rebuilding as we see the effects of Global Warming. We were the epicenter for the foreclosure crisis and many have still not able to get their homes back. We see the brutality of broken windows and mass incarceration as our kids are constantly targeted for low-level offenses that ruin opportunities for black and brown lives to be productive members of our society. We have seen how poor infrastructure and lack of planning can ruin a neighborhood's vitality. We have seen the decrepit state of public housing and are still without creative ideas to make housing more equitable. It is time we do things differently and that we speak truth to power." True, that-- and time for a self-serving do-nothing congressman like Meeks to bow out and let a fresh can-do kind of guy like Morrison take the seat.

Meeks is one of the New York congressmembers who Goldmacher was no doubt referring to when he wrote that they "have sought to establish personal or professional bonds with Ocasio-Cortez, signing onto her Green New Deal, for instance-- recognizing the power of her megaphone. In an interview in January, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she had 'put zero energy' into the question of primarying colleagues. She said the freshman class had 'already changed the opinions and commitments of a lot of incumbent members already. And I think that is something we should absolutely consider.' Whether or not Ms. Ocasio-Cortez gets personally involved, insurgent groups are plowing ahead."

Let me jump to Carolyn Maloney, a difficult target ideologically put perfect for a reformist challenger to take on based on ethics. Her corruption is just mind-boggling, even if her voting record is pretty good. She's not just a member of the House Financial Services Committee, she's the chair of the Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship, and Capital Markets-- and exploits that to the max in her fundraising efforts. Among current members of the House, only 3 have been bigger Finance Sector money pigs than Maloney. A case can-- and should-- be made that these are the half dozen most corrupt members of Congress, at least in regard to Wall Street banksters, and that they should all be carted off to jail holding tanks before their trials:

• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $8,086,692
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- $6,865,814
• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)- $6,376,379
• Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)- $6,309,318
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- $5,627,242
• Steve Stivers (R-OH)- $5,620,077

Suraj Patel ran against Maloney in 2018 and may do it again next year. He ought to. NY-12 is a solidly blue district (D+31) that spans Manhattan (Yorkville, the Upper East Side, Midtown, Kips Bay, Gramercy Park, Alphabet City and the Lower East Side), Queens (Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside) and Brooklyn (Greenpoint and north Williamsburg). Interstate 278 separates Maloney's district from Ocasio's in Queens. Of the 251,604 people who voted in 2018, 190,771 were in Manhattan, 35,728 in Queens and 25,105 in Brooklyn. The district has changed-- and rapidly, as Ocasio's had-- and in similar ways. First of all, though not most important per se, the D+27 PVI in 2017 jumped to D+31 in 2019. That's a big jump and it's the other changes that account for it. The white population is smaller but still dominant, though the fastest growing demos are Asians, Latinos, Arabs and-- very significantly-- highly educated and politicized millennials. Patel: "The status quo isn’t good enough. Our values are under attack by leaders that don’t share or understand our lived experiences, and it’s going to take new ideas and louder voices to make real change... We deserve a congressperson who isn’t recklessly indifferent to the less privileged."

Patel ended up with a bit over 40% of the vote, a great accomplishment against a forever incumbent on a first try. Goldmacher interviewed Sean McElwee, who has been involved in finding primary challengers in New York and who was a co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress. McElwee told him that "in deep blue states, Republicans increasingly don’t exist. We spend a lot of time thinking about why we have right-wing corporate Democrats selling out our interests." McElwee told him the push to recruit a challenger to Engel, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has been in Congress for three decades (and who represents the Likud Party of Israel and their lobbyists, AIPAC, far more than he does the folks who live in the 16th district (including Riverdale, Fieldston and Eastchester in the Bronx, abutting Ocasio's district, and New Rochelle, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Mamaroneck, Scarsdale and up to Rye and Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester.

Blue America has been trying to find a local elected official to take Engel on for years, but with not a nibble. McElwee calls finding a primary opponent for him a "top priority" and recently commissioned a poll there. The district used to be overwhelming white but now whites only make up 39% of the population. Blacks, Latinos and Asians make it a minority-majority district. McElwee is eager to find "a younger candidate of color in 2020; only about a half-dozen white Democratic men represent a more diverse district in Congress than Mr. Engel," wrote Goldmacher.

One potential challenger mulling a run is Andom Ghebreghiorgis, a Yale graduate and 33-year-old educator in Mount Vernon, who said that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez "showed there’s a hunger, especially here in New York, for representatives who reflect the changing progressive politics of their communities."

In a statement, Mr. Engel praised the party’s "new energy" and said the fact that anyone can run "is the beauty of our electoral system." But, he added, "think we’re doing the people we represent and the country a disservice by focusing on 2020 primaries when we have so much to do right now in Washington."

Yeah-- but not in NY-16. There are 4 congressmembers who represent parts of the Bronx, Ocasio, Engel, Adriano Espaillat-- a relatively new member, a progressive and a very good fit for the district-- and José Serrano (NY-15) in the center of the borough, in some ways the furthest left district in New York. The PVI is D+44, the bluest in the state and Trump only managed to win 4.9% of the vote in 2016 (slightly better than Romney did, but still Trump's worst performance anywhere in America. Only 2% of the population is white. The last Republican who won this district was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. The Bronx Machine has been eager to take Serrano out for some time but no one wants to run against him. In 2014 his primary opponent, Sam Sloan won 9% of the vote. His 2016 primary opponent, Leonel Baez won 10.8% and in 2018 there was no primary opponent. In the 2018 general election, the Republican candidate was Jason Gonzalez and Serrano beat him 124,469 (96%) to 5,205 (4%). City Councilman Ritchie Torres, a 30-year-old often described as a rising star, is weighing a run based on the whole "it's my turn, you're too old" thing.

Yvette Clarke, who won with only 53%, is facing a rematch with Adem Bunkeddeko, the Harvard-educated son of war Ugandan refugees who had been endorsed by the New York Times. "We’re at a moment of reckoning. Some people get it and some people don’t. Maybe someone’s seventh term is the charm? But most of us aren’t holding our breath." Goldmacher spoke with her and she told him that "she had reorganized her district office following the 2018 close call and is aggressively selling her progressive credentials in the more gentrified and liberal parts of the district, such as Park Slope. 'I definitely will not be caught by surprise.' She has among the dozen most progressive voting records in Congress. Bunkeddeko's point is that she's basically just a backbencher who votes well and doesn't do much for the district.

The last two likely primary races are on Long Island-- Tom Suozzi and Kathleen Rice, both New Dems who are going to be challenged from the left. I'm going to do a separate post on these two races because both are swingy districts that could, at least in theory, flip red if the incumbents are beaten.


UPDATE: Democratic Primary In Arizona

At dawn today, the Arizona Republic reported that Eva Putzova, a former Flagstaff city councilwoman, is running for the AZ-01 seat currently held by reactionary Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran.

Putzova, who announced her candidacy in January, said her top priority in Congress would be to address the process immigrants have to go through to become citizens. She said the current system takes too long and leaves people at the mercy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for far too long.

She also wants ICE restructured.

“Nobody is saying that enforcement in immigration is not important, but ICE as an agency is rogue,” she said. “It needs to be completely restructured.”

..."A #GreenNewDeal should be every candidates priority in 2020," she tweeted Feb. 10 in support of the "Green New Deal" environmental plan championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Her campaign website lists other top issues: universal health care, tuition-free college, indigenous peoples' rights, "meaningful climate action," "no more wars," women's reproductive health and workers' rights.

...O’Halleran, the two-term incumbent, appears to have the support of national Democrats.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently added him to its "Frontline" program.

The DCCC's Frontline program is designed to help provide Democratic members of Congress with the support they need to win re-election. O’Halleran is now one of 44 members of Congress in the program.

“Tom O’Halleran wins tough races because he understands the concerns of hard-working Arizonans, and because he never forgot where he came from,” Rep. Cheri Bustos, the 2020 cycle's DCCC chairwoman, said in a written statement.

“We’re proud to stand with Tom as a member of our Frontline program to ensure he has the support he needs to win and keep working for Arizona,” Bustos (Blue Dog-IL) added.

Blue America has already endorsed Eva Putzova and if you'd like to see another member of Congress who supports Bernie's platform replace an "ex"-Republican Blue Dog, please click on the ActBlue Primary A Blue Dog thermometer on the right and contribute what you can.