Will African-American Voters Help Reform The Democratic Party?

Tuesday night, progressive reformer Morgan Harper lost her congressional primary to a corrupt, middle of the road Democratic incumbent, Joyce Beatty in Columbus, Ohio. The final result was a two-to-one rout-- 43,727 (68.29%) to 20,301 (31.71%). As of the April 8th FEC reporting deadline, Beatty had spent a massive $2,149,875 to Harper's $696,001.

The third district is entirely in Franklin County and was created to concentrate Democratic voters, allowing Republicans to protect the 12th and 15th districts. OH-03, almost the whole city if Columbus, has a PVI of D+19, while OH-12 and OH-15 each has a relatively safe R+7 PVI. The Democratic primary is dominated by African-American voters and they've been electing and reelecting Beatty, despite her utter worthlessness as a Representative, since 2012. A shill for shady financial interests, Beatty has been a darling of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

It isn't just the CBC, of course, protecting their incumbents, regardless of how bad the incumbent is or how good the challenger is. After all, Morgan Harper, also an African American woman, has been considered one of the brightest stars running for Congress this cycle. At 36, the former Obama administration official at the CFPB, has no ties to the incompetent and fully corrupt Ohio Democratic Party. She ran a campaign based on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Jobs Guarantee, tuition-free public college, universal child care, racial justice, affordable housing and a living wage-- all things that separate old line liberals, like Pelosi, Hoyer and their clique from today's progressives. The Ohio Democratic establishment has all but destroyed the Democratic Party in the state. Many people say it is the worst state party in America with one corrupt idiot following another, each losing more and more of the state to the Republicans. But they would much rather fight progressives-- who they routinely trash-- than Republicans.

There wasn't a crooked Democratic pol in the state who didn't back her, even if, during Rick Neal's campaign against Republican hot-shot Steve Stivers in the next district over, Beatty helped Stivers, making joint appearances with him, pushing "civility." Beatty has been heavily supported by the Columbus Partnership, the corporate powers-that-be in central Ohio, and she was the only Democrat who Victoria's Secret billionaire Les Wexner-- another character in the Jeffrey Epstein saga-- donated to since she was elected. Wexner and his wife have hosted fundraisers for Beatty at their home and contributed large sums of money to her. Their L Brands PAC is one of Beatty's largest donors along with Nationwide Insurance, JP Morgan Chase and other banks, American Bankers Assoc. etc.

Beatty is probably best known for having been a steadfast ally of payday lenders-- which Morgan has fought so hard to to rein in. (Beatty's husband was a payday lenders lobbyist-- a step up from his father who just flat out ran numbers.) While minority leader in the state legislature, Beatty held up a bill that would have regulated payday lenders. Her net worth an estimated $6 million. The district, though, ranks among the poorest congressional districts in the country (#378 out of 435)-- 60,000 children living in poverty. She uses her perch on the House Financial Services Committee to protect predatory banksters and further kick her own working class constituents to the curb.

And there was Beatty's picture at the top of a Politico story on Tuesday, Black Caucus seeks to squash liberal insurgents. Reporters Ally Mutnick, Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris wrote that "Senior black Democrats are mounting an aggressive defense of Rep. Joyce Beatty in Tuesday's delayed Ohio primary, hoping to quash not only her left-wing primary challenger but the liberal insurgents gunning for a number of their colleagues. Leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus have framed the fight as greater than just defeating Beatty’s opponent, Morgan Harper, a well-funded attorney backed by the progressive group Justice Democrats. They are eager to show they can smack down any primary challengers nationwide who conspire against senior members of color who have spent decades fighting to the top."

“What is that all about? Is it attacking us?” Beatty said in an interview. “Well, let me make the message strong and clear: When you attack a hard-working member of the Congressional Black Caucus, we fight back. We are the conscience of the caucus, and we represent people.”

The CBC is stepping up to protect Beatty in an unpredictable race that some Democrats privately fear could be close, with turnout expected to be far lower amid the coronavirus outbreak that has shut down much of Ohio since mid-March.

Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a former CBC chairman, is among several top Democrats who has helped marshal support for Beatty from both Washington and Ohio in recent months, frustrated by liberal outsiders with lengthy progressive wish lists seeking to oust party elders.

"Being 'anti' is not enough. This is about results and not just rhetoric,” Richmond said. “And just because you run with a bunch of rhetoric doesn't mean you can get results. There are people here that are effective members of Congress.”

Richmond is a bullshit artist and New Dem, the conservative Democrat tasked early on with roping in anti-progressive Democratic House members for Biden. He's tight with K street and tells lobbyists who's for sale and who's not. Other conservative Democrats backing Beatty included Oralndo's Val Demings (who some are touting, besides the fact that she is a severe sufferer from brainlessness, as a VP contender for Biden), the Queens political machine boss Gregory Meeks, and Brooklyn's Hakeem Jeffries, a contender for the post-Pelosi speakership.

Beatty's primary is the first salvo in the primary battle between the CBC and liberal groups trying to oust longtime incumbents. Besides Beatty, at least four other members of the caucus in New York and Missouri will face credible primary challengers throughout the summer.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), chairman of the CBC’s political arm, is a longtime critic of the progressive groups’ approach to primaries and hopes Beatty’s victory on Tuesday will be a shot across the bow to other challengers.

“We worked hard,” Meeks said in an interview. “We’ve done it the old-fashioned way. And so, for people who seem to come out of nowhere, who have done nothing, have nothing to show for, to say, ‘We’re just going to challenge you for the sake of challenging you.’ Does that make sense?”

Meeks added that he has retooled the CBC’s political arm this year to better defend incumbents facing primary challenges. That includes hiring a dedicated political director for the PAC who will help boost digital and on-the-ground operations.

Harper, who said she launched her grassroots campaign last July with “no coordination with the Justice Democrats,” pushed back against the suggestion that her sole purpose was to attack a member of Congress. And Harper has pushed back when pundits have called her out for targeting black lawmakers, at one point, retorting on Twitter: "I am also black."

“I think we need to reframe that, in the idea that this is somehow a targeting of an individual,” Harper said in an interview last week. “Our campaign, we are presenting an alternative policy platform to the people of the 3rd District and that is not a personal exercise.”

Back in early March, Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report looked at why so many African American voters are supporting conservative Democrats over progressives this cycle. Referring to how Biden beat Bernie in conservative South Carolina, he wrote that "Although the craven Black Misleadership Class will no doubt shout hallelujahs that 'hands that picked cotton now pick presidents' and claim Black voters exercised brilliant 'strategic' judgment in making themselves indispensable to the corprate Democratic party establishment, the true motivator of Black Biden supporters is a pervasive and deeply corrosive fear. Not just dread of four more years of Trump, although that is central to Black political behavior, but abject terror at the very thought that the Democratic Party-- 'our' party, in many Black folks’ minds-- might fracture under the challenge of the Sandernistas."

Voluminous data over many years has shown that African Americans are to the left of Hispanics on issues of bread and butter and, especially, war and peace, and far to the left of white Democrats. But, unlike Hispanics, Blacks cannot be depended on to uphold their own historical political consensus in Democratic Party primary elections for fear of weakening the chances of defeating The White Man’s Party. Hyper-conscious of their minority and despised status-- and surrounded by hostile, race-obsessed white Republicans in the southern states-- older Blacks cling to Democratic Party structures as if their lives depend on it. The ascent of Donald Trump has only tightened the duopoly trap, causing Blacks to invest their votes in candidates they perceive as 'good for the party,' as if that is synonymous with Black interests.

...The rot is deep, a product of generations of capital-subordinate Black politics that followed the violent suppression of Black self-determinationist movements and the imposition of a counterinsurgency, mass incarceration regime at the end of the Sixties. Rather than resist the New Jim Crow/Same Old Rich White Man’s Rule, the Black Misleaderhip Class eagerly offered themselves as co-managers of oppression-- for a small cut of the spoils, and the privileges of racial "leadership."

It has always been clear to Black Agenda Report that the post-Sixties betrayals of the Black Misleadership Class necessitated that a future Black liberation movement must be largely an internal Black struggle to uproot the corrupted elements in our polity. False unity has become Black folks’ Achilles Heel, allowing Black charlatans free rein in our communities and reserving most elected positions for servants of Capital. The Democratic Party is a predatory edifice of Black disempowerment, from which our people must either free themselves, or become agents of their own perpetual oppression and accomplices in the degradation of humanity, worldwide.

Black youth see the truth, and will act on it, we are certain.

Agents Of Our Own Oppression

Did you happen to notice the Wall Street Journal headline just before voting closed in Michigan yesterday-- Black Voters Hope To Deliver Key Victory For Biden In Michigan? And they did. Biden took Michigan and 3 of the other 4 primary states. Washington state is too close to call and Bernie appears to have won the North Dakota caucus.

• Idaho- 48.86% to 42.48%
• Michigan- 52.87% to 36.50%
• Mississippi- 81.04% to 14.89%
• Missouri- 60.12% to 34.56%
• Washington- 32.75% to 32.54% (Bernie leading)

• North Dakota- 48.54% to 42.38%

In 2016, the Michigan primary was a godsend to Bernie. He beat Hillary 595,222 (49.8%) to 576,795 (48.3%)and the headlines we're all about how he won. The reality wasn't as sanguine. Clinton and her DNC allies has already fixed the primary so that Bernie got 65 delegates to her 73 delegates. But that wasn't what the headlines were about the next day.

Bernie won a lot of rural counties and a lot of white counties and Hillary won a lot of counties with big African American populations. She beat him handily in Genessee County (Flint)-- 31,284 (51.7%) to 28,117 (46.5%). She beat him in Oakland County (Detroit suburbs)-- 92,296 (51.4%) to 84,158 (46.8%). And, most of all, she beat him in Wayne County (Detroit), where over 40% of the residents-- and more than half the Democrats-- are African-American.

Last Thursday, Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report explained why African American voters-- especially the most dependable voters, seniors-- support status quo establishment candidates like Hillary... and Biden. "Black voters in South Carolina," wrote Ford, "kicked off Joe Biden’s political resurrection last Saturday, and stuck with the worthless corporate hack through Super Tuesday’s primary contests. Although the craven Black Misleadership Class will no doubt shout hallelujahs that 'hands that picked cotton now pick presidents' and claim Black voters exercised brilliant 'strategic' judgment in making themselves indispensable to the corprate Democratic party establishment, the true motivator of Black Biden supporters is a pervasive and deeply corrosive fear. Not just dread of four more years of Trump, although that is central to Black political behavior, but abject terror at the very thought that the Democratic Party-- 'our' party, in many Black folks’ minds-- might fracture under the challenge of the Sandernistas."

Voluminous data over many years has shown that African Americans are to the left of Hispanics on issues of bread and butter and, especially, war and peace, and far to the left of white Democrats. But, unlike Hispanics, Blacks cannot be depended on to uphold their own historical political consensus in Democratic Party primary elections for fear of weakening the chances of defeating The White Man’s Party. Hyper-conscious of their minority and despised status-- and surrounded by hostile, race-obsessed white Republicans in the southern states-- older Blacks cling to Democratic Party structures as if their lives depend on it. The ascent of Donald Trump has only tightened the duopoly trap, causing Blacks to invest their votes in candidates they perceive as "good for the party," as if that is synonymous with Black interests.

"Older Blacks cling to Democratic Party structures as if their lives depend on it."

Ruling class panic at the prospect of losing control of the top of Democratic ticket has deeply infected the party’s most loyal constituency. Thus, Black folks over 40, and many younger ones, are behaving like Malcolm X’s “house Negro,” who asks with genuine concern, “Is we sick, boss?” when the master is feeling poorly. The screechingly raucous, out-of-control Democratic debate in Charleston just days before the South Carolina primary appears to have scared the hell out of Black voters--and lots of white ones, too-- who perceived “their” party coming apart at the seems and blamed the mayhem on Bernie Sanders. With Sanders and Michael Bloomberg bearing the brunt of the assault, Joe Biden appeared like the tranquil eye of the storm, a safe haven for fearful party loyalists. Biden’s endorsement by Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg on the eve of Super Tuesday, enveloped Obama’s former vice president in an aura of consensus.

Bloomberg’s presidential persona was punctured, but he wasn’t really in it to win it. The odious oligarch knew he couldn’t win the nomination of a party whose rank-and-file overwhelmingly support Sanders’ austerity-busting agenda, even if they doubt Bernie’s chances against Trump or his ability to get his program through Congress. The formerly Republican Bloomberg’s candidacy was a necessary (and affordable) charade to certify him as a born-again Democrat, thus legitimizing his billion-dollar bid to buy control of the party’s machinery to insulate it against infection by more upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her mentor, Sanders.

"Joe Biden appeared like the tranquil eye of the storm, a safe haven for fearful party loyalists."

On Tuesday night CNN pundit and former Virginia governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe confirmed that the party welcomed Bloomberg’s billions. Bloomberg had already promised to pay the cost of 500 political operatives answerable to the DNC through the November election, no matter who wins the nomination. McAuliffe looked forward to Bloomberg putting his entire state-of-the art New York City headquarters in service to the party. The aim is to progressive-proof the Democrats by making the party a hostile environment for leftish politics.(See BAR, Feb. 19, “Bloomberg Wants to Swallow the Democrats and Spit Out the Sandernistas.”) Bloomberg’s presidential run is a way to “launder” his billion dollar purchase of the party infrastructure. Other oligarchs can be expected to make it a joint venture to shore up their class’s hegemony over the U.S. electoral system, to safeguard the ruling class agenda of endless war and the global Race to the Bottom.

The allure of Bloomberg’s gold has exposed the cockroaches of the Black Misleadership Class, hordes of whom scurried across the linoleum to enlist as mercenaries of Obscene Capital. This is the undiluted essence of Black Democratic “strategic” politics. Four members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- Meeks (NY), McBath (GA), Plaskett (VI), and Rush (IL), plus the despicable former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, and the Black mayors of Little Rock AR, Compton CA, San Francisco CA, Stockton CA, Charlotte NC, Columbia SC, Houston TX and Washington DC, plus former mayors of Columbus OH, New York City, Baltimore MD, Philadelphia PA, and Flint MI-- whored for Bloomberg, and can be expected to be at his and the other oligarchs’ service for the duration of the party’s battles with leftish interlopers.

"Bloomberg’s gold has exposed the cockroaches of the Black Misleadership Class."

Bloomberg’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Biden only further sanctifies his larger mission to purge the party of any taint of leftism. Elizabeth Warren will now choose how she will express her “capitalist to the bone” sentiments. The Black Lives Matter elements-- notably, Alicia Garza-- that joined the party when they left the "movement," will follow.

The rot is deep, a product of generations of capital-subordinate Black politics that followed the violent suppression of Black self-determinationist movements and the imposition of a counterinsurgency, mass incarceration regime at the end of the Sixties. Rather than resist the New Jim Crow/Same Old Rich White Man’s Rule, the Black Misleaderhip Class eagerly offered themselves as co-managers of oppression-- for a small cut of the spoils, and the privileges of racial “leadership.”

It has always been clear to Black Agenda Report that the post-Sixties betrayals of the Black Misleadership Class necessitated that a future Black liberation movement must be largely an internal Black struggle to uproot the corrupted elements in our polity. False unity has become Black folks’ Achilles Heel, allowing Black charlatans free rein in our communities and reserving most elected positions for servants of Capital. The Democratic Party is a predatory edifice of Black disempowerment, from which our people must either free themselves, or become agents of their own perpetual oppression and accomplices in the degradation of humanity, worldwide.

Black youth see the truth, and will act on it, we are certain.

Of Crowns and Kings: Behind The Seen by Dr. Fahamu Pecou

UPDATE by emorejahongkong: After-Bern: Burn It down? Depends On What "It" Is-- And Will Be

• The Democratic Presidential primaries are proceeding without any waivering of the establishment’s determination to prevent nomination of Bernie Sanders by deploying all its powers-- whether formal or informal, and legal or illegal). In response, Bernie’s supporters will need to decide whether to obediently accept another lost game of "chicken," or to "burn down" the Democratic half of the two-party game that is sustained partly by their continued participation. The decision, of whether or not to "burn it down," largely depends on how they view the definition of "it"-- in the present and in the future.

• MainStream Media description of "it" is: anti-Bernie Democratic leaders in a loose and pragmatic coalition in which many are at least trying (constrained by their good-faith view of voter preferences) to deliver at least some progress towards:

• less economic inequality (less-dictated by identity),
• more climate and habitat preservation, and
• less global unilateralism,
• etc.

• An alternative description of "it" is: a top-down herding, into an increasingly conscious conspiracy, of political and economic power-holders and power-seekers, to continue doubling down on “manufacturing consent” while pushing in the following directions:

• Prioritizing the political class’s need, to "leave no Big Donors behind," over everybody else’s need to stop Big Pharma and health insurers from impoverishing and killing not only much of the American population, but also many other American industries;
• Subordinating the economic and health needs, of most people of every ethnic/etc. identity, to the political “benefits” strengthening and co-opting elite "representatives" of each ethnic/etc. identity; • Subordinating the climate & environment damage, to the global strategic “benefits,” of extracting, processing and exporting fossil fuels from North American shale and tar sands;
• Maximizing expenditure on military, surveillance and intelligence infrastructure and activities against foreign and domestic “enemies” (while blurring lines between these activities);
• Redefining dissent and debate as anti-American and anti-democratic (while blurring lines between allegations of conscious treason and unconscious dupe-ism);
• Redefining surveillance and censorship as "protecting democracy" (while eliminating transparency of vote counting and voter opinion monitoring);
• Formalizing National Security Bureaucracy’s power to decide even broad strategic goals of foreign policy (asserting this power was the tail wagging the "personal benefit" dog of testimony at impeachment hearings),
• Demonizing and provoking Russia (up to elevating, to top strategic priority, the "urgent need to fight Russia in Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine") even after collapse of a multi-decade strategy to strategically co-opt China; and
• Coronating, as Democratic Congressional candidates, many veterans (if they are not continuing formal or informal agents) of the Intelligence Community.

• Many elements of the above directions:

• Can be seen as a logical path of least resistance in response to (a) long-term trends, among "Left" and "Right" voters, towards opposing never-ending military interventionism abroad, and (b) feuding (originally driven by Trump’s personality, but potentially outlasting Trump’s individual role) between the National Security State and the Republican President.
• Can be understood as replacement, of the old two-party domination of electoral politics, with new domination by a single "Centrist" umbrella party, which can continually reinforce its power through feedback loops between a party-supporting-government and a government-supporting-party; and
• Can be summarized as a merger of the National Security State with the Democratic Party establishment and with the anti-Trump remnants of the Republican Party establishment.

• If the real "it" is closer to the above "merger" than to the MSM’s sports-style cheer-leading, then which would be more harmful, to Progressives’ local battles and national transition to post-Bernie leadership, between the following choices?

• Four more years of Trump feuding with the National Security State; or

• Eight years for the newly reconfigured system to fine-tune its elite consensus, to expand its technical and psychological capabilities, and to propagandize, bribe and bully the public into accepting the system as being inevitable and immutable and even as embodying "Progress."

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."

When Will Rural And Small Town Elderly African American Voters Embrace Bernie?

Tulchin Research is best known as the pollsters for the Blue Dogs but, that said, they don't skewer data the way Rasmussen does. Their new poll for California is certainly not a Blue Dog poll! Bernie, in fact, has overtaken Status Quo Joe.

• Bernie- 28%
• Status Quo Joe- 24%
• Elizabeth Warren 12%
• Mayo 8%
• Bloomberg 6%
• Yang 5%
• Steyer 3%
• Klobuchar 2%

But what about South Carolina, snear the Biden fans. What about it? Trump's going to win it in November, just like he did in 2016, when he beat Hillary 1,155,389 (54.94%) to 855,373 (40.67%), even if Trump was the first Republican to worm his way into the White House without winning in Charleston County since Herbert Hoover in 1928. The state PVI is R+8. Before a Democrat wins in South Carolina, he or she will probably be concentrating on Florida (R+2), Ohio (R+3), North Carolina (R+3) and Georgia (R+5) first. After that, it will be time to investing the millions dollars it will take to win the two R+8 states, South Carolina and Texas.

But the DNC chose South Carolina as an early state for a different reason that to win it. They wanted to give Africa-American voters a say in the early states, although not the left-leaning African-American voters in many states, but the conservative, rural, religious African-American voters who make up much the South Carolina Democratic base. In 2016 the establishment exactly what they were looking for:

Hillary Clinton- 272,379 (73.44%)
Bernie- 96,498 (26.02%)

Where else can the establishment expect to find an outcome like that? Hillary won every single county in the state. In two-- Clarendon and Allendale-- Bernie didn't even break into double digits. Perfect for Biden. And, in fact, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows him ahead 32.0% to 15.0%.

Richland County (Columbia), the second most populous county in the state, is almost half black-- and overwhelmingly blue. Hillary beat Trump there 108,401 (64.0%) to 52,753 (31.1%). Dalhi Myers is a moderate county council member for the 10th district. On Wednesday, according to the associated Press she unendorsed Status Quo Joe and switched her allegiance to Bernie. She said she decided to make the change because she values what she sees as Bernie's ability to go toe-to-toe with Trumpanzee.

“I looked at that, and I thought, ‘He’s right,’” said Myers, a black woman first elected to the Richland County Council in 2016. “He’s unafraid and he’s unapologetic. ... I like the fact that he is willing to fight for a better America-- for the least, the fallen, the left behind.”

...In December, Myers, a corporate lawyer in Columbia, was among more than a dozen South Carolina elected officials to endorse Biden, saying at the time in a release from the Biden campaign that he was “the only candidate with the broad and diverse coalition of support we need to win” against Trump in the general election. Initially, Myers said she backed Biden because she saw him as a candidate who could possibly appeal to Republican voters disenfranchised by the president.

“It was a compromise choice,” she said. “I didn’t find anybody’s candidacy electrifying, but I did find Joe Biden’s candidacy to be reassuring in a sort of normal, American kind of way.”

But over the ensuing weeks, Myers said she started to feel that Biden’s candidacy, while familiar and perhaps comfortable, wasn’t going to be enough to inspire the young voters whom she sees as necessary to a Democratic general election win.

When questioned how someone who considered herself a conservative Democrat could support a candidate like Sanders, whose proposals including “Medicare for All” suggest government growth on an as-yet unknown scale, Myers said she did have some concerns but expressed doubt that such measures would ever become law without changes.

“Medicare for All will have to go through Congress,” she said. “He’s not going to pull a Donald Trump.”

Ultimately, Myers said her decision wasn’t necessarily about her personal preferences.

“I’m a 50-year-old-black woman, and I tend to be middle of the road,” Myers said. “I’m voting what I think is best for all of us, not just me... I’m not a left-wing liberal. I’m not even a left-wing Democrat. But I am a realist.”

Reporting for Politico yesterday, Laura Barrón-López wrote about a touchy subject, why his rivals have been unable to break Biden's hold on black voters. The hold is particularly strong among elderly black women. She started, though by writing about an old (74) black male, Julius Stephens, who identifies as a "liberal," although he isn't, in Greenville, South Carolina. Stephens was more enthusiastic about Elizabeth and Bernie from a policy perspective, but then told Barrón-López that the country "would never vote for a woman and a liberal that’s been branded a socialist." He told her he was going to vote for Biden. Many older black voters in South Carolina doubt Bernie and Elizabeth can deliver the sweeping remake of the government they’re campaigning on.

The reluctance to consider candidates other than Biden was borne out in interviews with dozens of black voters in South Carolina over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and is confirmed in polling. Time and again, African American voters said it isn’t that they don’t like Sanders or Warren. But they know what they’re getting with Biden, who has a relationship and familiarity with black voters, especially older black voters, that extend beyond his time as Barack Obama’s No. 2.

That's word-for-word the line from the Status Quo Joe team. They repeat it by rote every time they see a reporter. And many reporters have begun repeating it too. Apparently though, these voters who are supposed to remember Biden before he was the guy Obama picked to balance his ticket, must have liked... what? Biden's bankruptcy bill? His treatment of Anita Hill? His role in starting the Iraq War? His making common cause with the KKK caucus in the Senate? His years and years spent opposing integration? What exactly is it that older black voters remember about Biden pre-Obama that they like? There's no indication that Barrón-López bothered to ask anyone outside of Biden headquarters.

“Black people are rightfully suspicious of things they don’t know, so that’s why name recognition becomes critical,” [Elizabeth Warren surrogate Leslie] Mac said... So she asks people: “Do you want more of the same or do you want to dream bigger than what we have?”

But battling Biden’s name ID isn’t easy. And the air of inevitability around Biden is based largely on the collective knowledge that he is far and away the leading candidate with black South Carolinians.

Antonio Robinson, 42, who works in education and lives in Goose Creek, wants to vote for Andrew Yang, but he’s come to accept that Biden is a foregone conclusion in South Carolina.

“[People] don’t know Elizabeth Warren, they don’t know Yang,” said Robinson.

“In South Carolina we were taught to vote straight party. You see black people [on the ballot], you see Democrat, you vote straight party. You’re not used to seeing 10 damn candidates in the first place,” added Robinson. The menu of choices plays to Biden’s benefit because he’s a known commodity, Robinson said.

It’s a situation that irritates JA Moore, a Democratic state lawmaker who previously backed Kamala Harris and is now being courted by other hopefuls. Moore said Biden's supporters have perpetuated the narrative that he’s unbeatable in the state, so voters should just get on board.

“It’s a disservice to all South Carolinians for elected officials, especially African American elected officials,” Moore said, adding that if South Carolina is seen as being in the bag for Biden it makes the state less relevant in the battle for the nomination.

Moore said he has a hard time relating to inevitability after overcoming what appeared to be insurmountable odds to defeat the Republican state House majority whip in 2018. He relayed his discomfort to Biden during a phone call last weekend, and the former vice president responded by citing polls that show him ahead in the first four states and Super Tuesday states.

...Warren isn’t alone in her battle to win over black voters in South Carolina. Sanders’ surrogates also made stops in the state over the weekend. At an NAACP banquet in Laurens, S.C., last weekend, a top Sanders’ surrogate, Nina Turner, delivered a rousing speech that took subtle jabs at Warren and Biden.

And during his speech in front of Columbia’s statehouse, Sanders said of King: “This was a man who stood up to the entire establishment of his time.”

Yesterday Eric Levitz, in a column for New York Magazine, pointed out that the left-wing realignment of American politics has already begun. Obama, he claims, tried to change the trajectory of politics, as Reagan did-- but in the opposite direction. Obama failed and was soon seeking accomodation with the reactionary right. "Two years into the 'New New Deal,'" wrote Levitz, "with unemployment still near double digits, the Democratic president was struggling to persuade Republicans to help him cut Social Security... Now, 12 years after the financial crisis, and three years into Donald Trump’s post-truth presidency, there are mounting signs that these empirical realities are finally making a dent in political ones-- that Obama’s prophesied realignment may be making its belated arrival."

In the summer of 2012, Mitt Romney told African-Americans that if they wanted “free stuff” from the government, they should “vote for someone else.” Months later, the GOP nominee derided 47 percent of the U.S. public as incurable layabouts, whose sense of “personal responsibility and care for their lives” had eroded so completely, the Republican Party no longer had anything to offer them.

Seven years later, Romney signed onto a bill that would hike inheritance taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and use the revenue to provide unconditional cash assistance to all low-income parents, regardless of their employment status. The Romney-Bennet refundable child tax credit would be the first in American history to provide financial relief to the very poorest families in the U.S. In lending his name to the policy, Romney adopted a position on child welfare to the left of many congressional Democrats.

Romney’s change of heart on the propriety of cajoling indigent parents into the labor force by condemning their children to poverty is idiosyncratic in Washington; no other Republican has signed onto his bill. But it is nevertheless indicative of a broader, leftward current in GOP economic policy thinking.

Earlier this month, GOP state legislators in Kansas agreed to expand its Medicaid program without work requirements, as long as the state also increased subsidies for those purchasing private insurance. Meanwhile, in D.C., House Republicans began work on a conservative alternative to the Green New Deal. According to Axios, the emerging legislation would double “federal investment in basic research and fundamental science”; establish special “lower tax rates for U.S. companies exporting clean energy technology”; expand tax credits for firms that sequester CO2; “redirect foreign aid to help countries that have rivers most polluted with plastic”; and provide unspecified incentives and funding to spur the planting of 1 trillion trees. As a response to the climate crisis, this is comically inept. But as a House Republican policy priority, it is bizarrely constructive. The GOP leadership has tacitly affirmed the need for the U.S. government to increase its investments in scientific research, and pursue a green industrial policy-- which is to say, catalyze growth in the clean-energy and carbon-sequestration sectors through targeted interventions in the market economy. The kind of industrial policy they propose is deeply inadequate to the scale of the ecological problem. But the legislation’s ostensible goals-- encouraging the rapid development and export of clean-energy technologies in order to reduce the carbon intensity of economic growth in the developing world-- are vital ones (and broadly similar to those in Elizabeth Warren’s green industrial policy).

Viewed in isolation, each of these developments could be dismissed as a meaningless gesture. After all, stray messaging bills aside, the Trump-era GOP’s economic policies have been historically reactionary. The party very nearly threw millions of Americans off of public health insurance, slashed taxes on the wealthy, and left corporate foxes guarding each of the regulatory state’s hen houses. On low-visibility matters of executive branch policy, the Trump administration has been almost comically regressive, fighting to expand the liberty of coal companies to dump mining waste in streams, let financial advisers gamble with retirees’ money, and free employers from the burden of logging workplace injuries, among many other things. Meanwhile, on the similarly low-salience subject of federal judicial appointments, Trump has been stacking the courts with plutocracy superfans.

The GOP is not becoming any less interested in taking from the poor (or working class, or environment, or future generations) to give to its top shareholders. The party’s influence peddling remains unconstrained by egalitarian inhibitions. But its economic policy-making is becoming a bit less constrained by Ayn Randian scruples. Romney is alone in supporting refundable child tax credits for the nonworking poor. But a broader swath of the GOP is warming to small-bore, family-based social welfare policies, including refundable child tax credits for working parents and modest forms of paid family leave. Kevin McCarthy’s climate bill may be a mere stunt, but the House Minority Leader is not alone in signaling a heretical interest in (nonmilitary) industrial policy; Republican senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have made similar noises in recent months, with the Florida senator issuing a report on the harms of neoliberal “financialization” that actually cited the work of socialist economists. In other words, while Republicans remain happy to do the bidding of libertarian billionaires when it suits their political interests, they appear more willing to opportunistically flout the Koch Network’s preferences than they were during the Obama years.

This fact may reflect the changing class composition of the GOP coalition as affluent suburbs defect to blue America, or the increasingly conspicuous tension between cultural conservatism and market fundamentalism, or the trauma of the failed Obamacare repeal effort and ensuing midterm blood bath. Or it may simply reflect the fact that a Republican is currently in the Oval Office; the right has always looked more kindly on deficit spending and social welfare provisions when its people are at the wheel.





The times, they are, uh, changing?

But even if the GOP’s flirtations with a post-Reaganite economic paradigm prove limited and conditional, they could nevertheless be of real consequence. For one thing, Romney and Rubio’s leftward drift helps fortify the Democratic Party’s more robust one. What passes for “centrism” in the 2020 Democratic primary would have been coded as progressivism in 2016, 2008, or any other cycle in my lifetime. Today, Joe Biden’s climate plan is more comprehensive than Bernie Sanders’s was four years, according to the left-wing think tank Data for Progress. Michael Bennet-- whose anemic campaign is sustained by its sheer incredulity at the left’s imprudence-- is nevertheless running on a $6 trillion expansion of the social safety net financed by progressive tax increases.

Given the biases of the Senate, the significance of the Democratic field’s leftward lurch largely hinges on whether the party’s most conservative senators start bending in the same direction. And when Mitt Romney makes unconditional assistance to poor families a bipartisan concept, or House Republicans tacitly affirm the need for Uncle Sam to “pick winners and losers” in the energy market, it becomes a bit easier for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to swim with the progressive tide.

Similarly, if even two or three Republican senators retain their heterodox hobbyhorses when a Democratic president takes power, our government will regain the capacity to meaningfully legislate in times of divided rule. The fundamental obstacle to federal progress on climate or poverty or health-care reform over the past decade has not been the GOP’s stubborn insistence on inadequate solutions, but rather, its fanatical commitment to making our problems worse. There can be no bipartisan compromise on climate if the Republican position is that the government should do everything in its power to maximize carbon emissions-- from subsidizing failing coal plants to rolling back fuel-efficiency standards in defiance of the auto industry’s preferences. And there can be no consensus approach to reducing poverty if the GOP’s prescription is to coerce the unemployed into the labor force by denying their families’ access to health care and housing. By contrast, if the partisan divide on climate and poverty is merely over exactly how much to subsidize green technology, increase foreign aid to climate-vulnerable countries, ramp up federal spending on basic research, and expand cash support to the neediest, then it should be possible for Congress to mount a productive legislative response to America’s most pressing challenges.

To be sure, the ifs in that last paragraph are big. Although the parties may be growing marginally less polarized on some economic issues, the cultural antagonism between red and blue America has rarely been fiercer. The notion that the Democratic Party-- and thus, any elections it wins-- are fundamentally illegitimate appears more widespread in conservative circles than ever before. Just because Marco Rubio’s staffers have read some iconoclastic economists doesn’t mean that the GOP’s “fever” is about to break.

Yet when one puts the GOP’s recent post-Reaganite gestures next to the left turn in mainstream economic thought, the Davos set’s growing interest in shoring up the legitimacy of the order they sit atop with palliative policies on climate and inequality, the British Tories’ recent triangulation on economics in response to its own influx of non-college-educated voters, and the resurgent hegemony of tax-and-spend liberalism within the Democratic Party’s tent, it’s hard not to entertain the possibility that these times are different-- and that the 2020 election just might put America on a “fundamentally different path.”

Mayo Is White And Formless-- Ever Hear Of Anyone Ask For A Mayonnaise Sandwich On Wonder Bread?

In 2016, Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes went to Trump. He bear Hillary in a fairly solid blue state 1,405,284 (47.22%) to 1,382,538 (46.45%). That's 22,746 votes. Participation in black neighborhoods in Milwaukee was way off. Voters didn't switch the Trump they just stayed home. What happened? Were people so sure Hillary would win that they didn't both to show up? Were GOP voter suppression regulations aimed at African-American voters successful? Or did black voters find Hilary as meh a choice as lots of white Democrats did, myself included?

Milwaukee County delivered Wisconsin for Obama both times he ran, with 319,819 votes in 2008 and 332,438 votes in 2012. In 2016 though, Hillary only took 288,822, enough to win the county, of course, but not enough to win the state. In 2008, 475,1892 voters participated. Four years later, voter participation shot up to 492,576. It collapsed when Hillary and Trump were the candidates-- down to 441,053. (Both McCain and Romney out-polled Trump.)

Conventional wisdom accepts that white working class voters rejected Hilary's status quo message. How about black working class voters? Black women didn't and they turned out and voted for her. Black men on the other hand... they started away and the Trump vote was higher among black men then it was among black women. Nominate Mayo Pete is you want to see that black women's vote shrink down almost as much as the black male vote did-- and will do even more if Mayo's the candidate. We'll come back to him in a moment. Let's look at Alexi McCammond's Axios post, 2020 Democrats turn focus to black men first. "Black voter turnout," he wrote, "declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years. And 13% of black male voters supported Donald Trump-- over three times the rate of black women who did the same. An estimated 30 million black Americans will be eligible to vote next year. While black men share some of the same concerns as black women at the ballot box, they are not the exact same voting bloc."

In the 2018 midterms, the overall turnout was 53%, while among blacks, 55% of women voted but only 47% of black men. McCammond asserts that "Black men may be more likely than black women to stay home or cast a vote for the GOP-- but represent more untapped potential for individual candidates.

Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC: "We have seen some movement across black voters, frankly, in not as strongly identifying with the Democratic Party as they may have previously. Where that sentiment is the strongest is among black men... There is a concerted effort to try to win over black men by the Trump campaign... Black men feel like they’ve been forgotten about within the party and when it comes to this election."

Outreach from Bernie's campaign towards black men has been very strong and an out-sized proportion of the Biden support among African Americans is among women and seniors. Before throwing in the towel yesterday, Kamala Harris was also making a big push to win over black male voters, at least in South Carolina, in the hope of breathing life into her already moribund campaign.

Mayo Pete has the least support-- like virtually none-- from black voters. He tried to explain it away by calling them bigoted against gay people but that didn't work out too well and he's been trying a new tack lately. He's skipping the voters in South Carolina and trying to charm the influencers instead, inviting them to small, more intimate, invitation-only soirees.

In recent weeks, Buttigieg’s missteps with African American voters-- both in his campaign’s outreach to them and his own previous statements about the black community in South Bend-- have threatened the picture of a candidate on the rise in the early states. In the November debate, Buttigieg’s rivals were asked about his campaign’s usage of a stock photograph of a Kenyan woman. South Carolina officials said Buttigieg botched the roll-out of local endorsements for his Douglass Plan, a policy aimed at lifting up African Americans, by putting out a list of supporters that included some people who said they weren’t backing his policy plan.

Meanwhile, video footage of the mayor’s 2011 comment that low-income, minority students lacked role models triggered a scathing essay in The Root, followed by another post, released hours later, that featured a conversation between author Michael Herriot and Buttigieg.

To fix those mistakes in the minds of African American voters, Buttigieg has had to go person-to-person to “clean it up. Clean it up,” said Louise Brown, an 84-year-old union activist who came to see Buttigieg speak at a 30-person “Fight for $15” town hall event in North Charleston on Sunday.

“You aren’t going to convince people who are skeptical of you by holding some big town hall in some big venue where two or three hand-selected people get to ask a question,” said state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, who is not planning on endorsing a Democratic primary candidate.

...The small, invitation-driven events also avoid the awkward dynamic that plagued past Buttigieg events in South Carolina, where mostly white audiences showed up at events in mostly black cities. In May, Buttigieg  held a meet-and-greet in Orangeburg, a city that is 76 percent black, and an overwhelmingly white crowd showed up.

...Buttigieg’s push in South Carolina won’t come just from events. The campaign announced its first statewide TV ad in South Carolina Monday morning, part of a $2 million ad buy. The spot features Buttigieg quoting Scripture at the Iowa Liberty and Justice dinner earlier this fall.

On this swing through South Carolina, Buttigieg also brought South Bend City Councilwoman Sharon McBride, who is African-American and wanted “to be a witness” to the Buttigieg’s work with people of color in South Bend. After Jennings’ question in Allendale, McBride took the microphone and called Buttigieg’s lack of support a “myth.”

“A lot of things that you’re hearing on the national media and a small portion of people who are negatively talking, that’s their reality and maybe their truth, but my experience of being on the council has not been that,” McBride said.

But Jennings, for her part, still found the mayor’s answer “not entirely satisfying.”

“He really did say nobody knew him, and that is the truth,” said Jennings, who is still undecided in the primary, but likes Biden and Sen. Cory Booker. “No one knows him, and it’s going to be difficult to get that done by the primary. That’s going to be difficult.”

Mark Ruffalo endorsed Bernie today and explains why in this video below. Please watch it. "We need a movement leader," he said. "We need a movement organizer. We need a leader who’s actually one of us, and Bernie is one of us and he’s always been one of us." In every way, Bernie is the polar opposite of Mayo:





According to the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Mayo is in the 4th place, after Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth. And that's where he is in South Carolina as well, but in single digits. And he's one of the 6 who has qualified-- at least so far-- for the Democratic debate this month, the other 5 being Status Quo Joe, Bernie, Elizabeth, Klobuchar and get spending billionaire Tom Steyer. My friend Roland suggests that Yang will qualify if he adds a free narwhal tusk for every voter-- along with their thousand dollar check-- as part of his platform.