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According to Rudge, a brusque high-school senior in Alan Bennetts play The History Boys, history is one fucking thing after another. In the past few days, Democrats have been reminded of what Rudge meant. On Monday, the failure of a data-sharing app plunged the Iowa Democratic caucus into a state of paralysis. On Tuesday, a Gallup poll showed Donald Trumps approval rate rising to forty-nine per cent, the highest mark of his Presidency. Later that day, Trump delivered a State of the Union address packed with falsehoods and demagoguery. On Wednesday, his impeachment trial came to an end, with the G.O.P.-controlled Senate voting to acquit, and only one Republican dissenting. Trump reacted by tweeting out a meme of his Presidency going on forever.

With nine months to go until the Presidential election, Trumps celebratory gesture was premature, to say the least. But anyone who wants to deny him a second term needs to be clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. Most Presidents who run for relection win. Given his incumbency and an economy that is still growing steadily, Trump has two key advantages on his side. Defeating him is going to take a mighty effort from the Democrats and their supportersone that combines energy, cleverness, and discipline, rather than the disorganization and dysfunction displayed in Iowa.

Since the Second World War, only three sitting Presidents have run for relection and been defeated: Gerald Ford, in 1976; Jimmy Carter, in 1980; and George H. W. Bush, in 1992. Nine of the twelve incumbents who sought relection won. In two of the three races where incumbents were defeated, the economy wasor was perceived to bein serious trouble. With policymakers at the Federal Reserve expecting G.D.P. growth to continue at a rate of around two per cent this year, what about this November? Ray Fair, an economist at Yale, built a statistical model that seeks to forecast elections on the basis of incumbency and G.D.P. growth. Over the years, the Fair model has had a mixed record, reflecting the fact that these factors arent the only ones which impact elections. But the model does provide a handy way of summarizing some key factors, and it is now predicting that Trump will win the popular vote comfortably. If that happened, he would win an even bigger victory in the electoral college.

This forecast shouldnt be taken literally. In an era of intense polarization, there is evidence that economics doesnt play as big a role as it used to in driving voting patterns. On his Web site, Fair stresses that his model also doesnt take into account the personality of individual candidates, which is obviously a key factor in the case of Trump. Throughout his Presidency, his job-approval rating has lagged far behind his approval rating on economic issues. Thats still true. In the aforementioned Gallup survey, sixty-three per cent of respondents said that they approved of Trumps handling of the economyfourteen points above his job-approval rating.

It should also be noted that the Gallup job-approval rating is an outlier. A new Reuters poll puts Trumps rating at forty-two per cent, and an Economist/YouGov poll puts it at forty-four per cent. On Thursday afternoon, the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines the findings from many individual surveys findings, had Trump at 45.2 per cent, with a disapproval rating of 51.8 per cent. Four months ago, his approval rating was 43.6 per cent, and his disapproval rating was 53.7 per cent. These numbers tell us that Trump is still unpopular, but that he has become a bit less so recently. Whether that shift reflects positive economic news or the impeachment trial, or both, isnt clear.

The key point is that Trump is now sufficiently popular, and the economic environment is sufficiently benign, to make his relection a real and live danger. (In the online betting markets, for what they are worth, he is already a strong favorite to win.) This year, again, the result will most likely come down to ten battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and, of course, the three Rust Belt states that Trump flipped in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to the data-research firm Morning Consult, Trumps disapproval rating currently exceeds his approval rating in all of these states apart from Florida. But the gap has narrowed in a number of places, including Arizona, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

The identity of the Democratic candidate will obviously be vitally important, but so will the manner in which the campaign is conducted. Everyone associated with the Democratic Partyfrom grassroots activists to elected officials and Party operativeswill need to unite behind the winner of the primary, whoever it is, and avoid scoring any own goals. During a hard-fought primary election, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the various candidates and their supporters to project this sort of unity and discipline. But other Democrats are showing how it can be done.

During the impeachment trial, the House managers, and particularly Adam Schiff, laid out their arguments with such professionalism and care that even some Republican senators conceded that they had made the case persuasively. (Except in the case of Mitt Romney, of course, this wasnt enough to persuade them to find Trump guilty.) And, after Trumps State of the Union address, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, delivered a Democratic response that deserved much more attention than it got.

Rather than engaging with Trump directly, Whitmer highlighted Democratic efforts to reduce gun violence, invest in infrastructure, lower prescription-drug prices, and expand access to health care. She also contrasted these initiatives with the Trump Administrations record of showering tax cuts on the wealthy and trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, including the protections it afforded people with prexisting conditions. Its pretty simple, she said. Democrats are trying to make your health care better; Republicans in Washington are trying to take it away.

You can argue about whether the sorts of policies that Whitmer lauded are sufficient to rebalance a society that has been so grossly distorted by political corruption, record corporate profits, and rising inequalitythis debate lies at the heart of the divide between the Bernie SandersElizabeth Warren and Joe BidenPete Buttigieg wings of the Democratic Party. In terms of campaign strategy, however, keeping the focus on everyday issues and on the mendaciousness of Trump and the Republicans offers the best prospect of defeating them in November. Despite it all, they are still beatable. Democrats need to get their act together and concentrate on the common enemy.

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The Challenge Facing Democrats in the 2020 Election - The New Yorker

If the Democratic primaries were a sporting event, they would look something like an ultra-marathon followed by a series of punishing wind sprints. Campaign staff spend a full year door-knocking, phone-banking and organizing in Iowa and New Hampshire before setting off on a mad dash through the parts of the country where 98% of Americans actually live.

Staying competitive in this feat of endurance requires fueling your foot soldiers. So what are the campaigns feeding their staff and what, if anything, does it tell us about them?

Campaigns are required to submit detailed records of their spending to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) each quarter, showing how much money they raised from donors and what they spent it on. We used those filings to analyze the remaining candidates expenditures on all things edible from Starbucks coffee runs and airplane snacks to and steakhouse dinners and pizza pies. This analysis covers spending from each campaigns launch through 31 December 2019.

A caveat: each campaign uses slightly different categorizations in its FEC filings. We excluded expenditures if they included event space rentals or appeared to refer to catering for fundraising events. This decision primarily affected the analyses for the Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Andrew Yang campaigns, since Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are not holding high-dollar fundraisers.

Overall, we examined $1.9m in spending on food and beverages by these eight campaigns. Heres what we found.

About $1m of that spending went to catering companies or restaurants that we characterized as generally American. Of the other $900,000, Mexican food was the top choice. Democratic campaigns spent $92,120 at Mexican restaurants throughout 2019, led by the Warren campaign, which accounted for more than a third of that total.

Soul food and barbecue were popular choices in South Carolina, another state with an early primary. Andrew Yang, whose parents emigrated to the US from Taiwan, spent the most on Chinese food, followed by Tom Steyer, Warren, Biden and Sanders. Yangs campaign was also the only one to show expenditures from Korean and Creole restaurants.

The Warren and Sanders campaigns also demonstrated notable diversity in their choices. Sanders staffers shelled out for Thai, Jamaican and Middle Eastern food. Warren workers dined on Filipino, vegan, Thai, and Indian food.

Meanwhile, Bloombergs campaign dominated the spending on Japanese food, shelling out $16,877 at a single sushi restaurant in the six weeks after he launched his run in late November. That restaurant, Hanabi Japanese Cuisine, is just a few blocks away from the Bloomberg Philanthropies offices, which are housed in a 19th century Italianate mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (The Bloomberg campaign is paying rent to the Bloomberg Philanthropies building, according to the filings.)

Lest you think the campaign blew all that money in one sitting, Hanabi is no Nobu. The storefront restaurant offers specialty rolls at prices ranging from just $7 to $13.

Bloomberg staffers might have a taste for mid-range sushi, but his campaign is not exactly pinching pennies when it comes to meals. Despite only having launched in late November, the campaign has already spent about $310,000 on food. Most of that went to office catering services, but one notable line item was more than $10,000 to Air Culinaire, an in-flight catering service for private jets. Options for travelers out of New York range from a seared wagyu steak with foie gras, morels and potato hash to sous-vide black chicken thighs with green onion salad, beetroot puree, jasmine tea-infused rice and sesame dressing. Each menu also features extensive options from Petrossian Caviar, Air Culinaires caviar partner.

The other self-funding billionaire in the race, Steyer, spent more than half a million dollars on food and beverages. Much of that spending went to catering and restaurants, but there were also some notable expenditures:

$14,474 on fruit delivery

$23,562 on a premium third wave office coffee service, and

$31,428 on delivery apps, including $20,731 just on the grocery delivery service Instacart

For those campaign workers who dont work for billionaires, however, meals of pizza, sandwiches, and bar food were much more common.

The Sanders campaign spent the most on pizza about $30,000 while Dominos racked up the most orders of any pizzeria.

Americas most disappointing sandwich chain,Panera Bread, meanwhile, accounted for $50,450 in spending across all the campaigns.

Campaign staff typically work exceptionally long hours, and you cant make it through the day without a strong breakfast. The most popular breakfast choice was Dunkin Donuts, followed by a number of bagel shops, and Starbucks.

The Buttigieg campaign also spent $2,160 at a specialty croissant bakery in morthern California.

As for afters, two campaigns dominated the dessert menu Klobuchars and Sanders. The Minnesota senator spent more than $10,000 at the Cookie Cart, a Minneapolis not-for-profit bakery that provides job training for teenagers.

Meanwhile, Sanders campaign has spent $13,837 on Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream. He is from Vermont, after all.

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Pizza, sushi, Ben & Jerry's: what 2020 Democrats are feeding their staffers - The Guardian

At a forum by abortion rights groups in New Hampshire on Saturday, Bernie Sanders urged the Democratic Party to take a note from Republicans with regards to nominating federal judges. Sanders said that conservatives have been successful at securing judges because they cultivate them from the ground up and liberals should too.

When asked why Democrats aren't as successful as Republicans in nominating federal judges, Sanders pointed to the Federalist Society. The powerful right-wing legal organization has long-championed conservative judges, and was utilized by President Trump to nominate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh's confirmation made him the fifth Justice with ties to the Federalist Society, out of just nine seats on the court, according to Politico.

Sanders said Mr. Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were "ready to go on day one" with Federalist Society-approved "right-wing" judges.

"They have thought this through," he said of Republicans.

Sanders asked the audience, "You know what we do every day in the Senate?" then answered his own question: "We nominate right-wing judges."

"You got the Federalist Society, an extremely well-funded right wing group who works with young lawyers, nurtures them, takes them along, nominates them and gets them to the Supreme Court and to the circuit courts and the district court," Sanders said.

The Federalist Society began as a student group at Yale University in 1982. A 2018 Politico article titled, "The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics," catalogs how three young law students created arguably the most influential conservative legal group in the country. Politico reporter Michael Krusetold CBS Newsin 2018 that the liberal equivalent, The American Constitution Society, founded in 2001, has never gained the same extent of influence.

Sanders on Saturday said Democrats have to start "taking a look at good young legal minds all over this country and cultivating them to the courts."

"We can learn some lessons from what the right wing is doing in this country," he said. "Republicans have been effective in politicizing the judiciary in a way Democrats have not."

Sanders also elaborated on concepts he's spoken about before regarding the highest court in the country. He said he's against packing the Supreme Court, and supports the idea of having a rotation of judges.

"What the Supreme Court says is that a federal judge has a lifetime appointment. Doesn't say that that lifetime appointment has got to be on the Supreme Court, it has to be on a federal court," Sanders said. "And there are some minds out there, legal scholars, who think you can rotate judges out of the Supreme Court to the circuit courts or the district courts, that is something I certainly will look at."

At Friday's Democratic debate, Sanders said he would have a litmus test on abortion for his Supreme Court picks.

"I will never nominate any person to the Supreme Court or the federal courts in general who is not 100% pro-Roe v. Wade,"he said.

Saturday's forum was sponsored by abortion rights groups National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Demand Justice, Center for Reproductive Rights, and the All Above All Action Fund.

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Sanders says Democrats should do the "same thing" as right-wing Federalist Society in nominating federal judges - CBS News

On December 11, 1999, about eight weeks before the New Hampshire primary, then-President Bill Clinton endorsed Vice President Al Gore as his preferred successor.

At the time, Gore was running for the nomination against Sen. Bill Bradley, the former New York Knick turned senator from New Jersey.

Clinton didnt bash Bradley. But he also made a clear choice. After all, he had selected Gore for a role that presupposes he could be president in the middle of a giant national crisis. The move probably wasnt as obvious as it seems now the personal relationship between the two was somewhat strained at the time because Gore had distanced himself from Clinton in the wake of his impeachment but Clinton was effusive in his praise of Gore, calling him the most effective and influential vice president who has ever served.

Bradley wasnt a profound ideological challenge to the party establishment as Sanders is today, but nonetheless, there was a distinct closing of the ranks around Gore. By the time Clinton endorsed him, the Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate had already backed him. Major donors marshaled their resources behind him.

Nothing like it is happening in the 2020 cycle. Instead, mainstream Democrats openly wring their hands about the prospect of a Bernie Sanders nomination. Though Sanders supporters are borderline paranoid about anti-Sanders sentiment, theres virtually no actual anti-Sanders organizing.

Meanwhile, the rival campaigns still number in the double digits. Several of them have many passionate followers, and one of them might beat Sanders. But their sheer multiplicity and key leaders refusal to decide among them is a sign that anti-Sanders zeal, though real, is also quite limited.

Definitively stopping Sanders would require a clear choice, yet party leaders have clearly decided they cant be bothered.

To see how Biden is faring compared with Gore, just look at his list of endorsements.

He is, of course, the unquestioned endorsement leader if you follow the FiveThirtyEight endorsement tracker. They include Cindy Axne, the first-year House member from Iowa; Leroy Garcia, the president of the Colorado state Senate; Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan; Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont; and Alabama Sen. Doug Jones. My colleague Laura McGann points out hes the favorite choice of frontline House Democrats who need to win in tough races. But Bidens endorsers are mostly people nobodys heard of.

We live in a nationalized media environment where politically engaged citizens have emotional and intellectual relationships with nationally known political figures. Gore had figures like that behind his campaign Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt but today, Biden doesnt have Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi.

Obama hasnt endorsed his own VP pick, even though Obama likes me is central to Bidens pitch. Clinton, who clearly has a problem with Sanders, hasnt endorsed his biggest rival either, even though she could help shore up support with college-educated women currently backing Elizabeth Warren. Chuck Schumer and Pelosi havent endorsed. Nor has former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or Gore himself. John Kerry is backing Biden but then was overheard seemingly musing his own run, undermining the Biden effort.

Solid backing for Biden from high-profile Democrats wouldnt make Sanderss factional support dry up. But it would deliver a clear and unambiguous signal to Democrats to rally behind Biden instead of fracturing across three or four candidates.

And, of course, it would help with money.

Sanders has created a fundraising juggernaut grounded in a huge national base of small donors.

But as great as small donors are, rich large donors have a lot more money and should be able to ensure a solid cash advantage. Instead of helping the former vice president match Sanders in fundraising, though, Democrats traditional bundlers and large donors have largely rallied to the banner of the former mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana making Pete Buttigieg the No. 2 fundraiser in the race.

Buttigieg seems like a nice guy, a smart guy, and a good politician who I think would do a fine job as president. But as a coordination point for a party elite thats supposedly trying to close ranks and stop a socialist insurgent, hes a frankly bizarre choice, starting with his thin rsum and his issue gaining support from black voters.

Its much easier to imagine Biden, whom many black voters like, beating Sanders in a head-to-head matchup than it is to imagine Buttigieg doing so. And if Buttigiegs money had gone to Biden, Biden could use that money to help beat Sanders. But instead, donor money is going to help Buttigieg poach white moderate votes from Biden, creating a fragmented field that could let Sanders win purely by consolidating progressives.

To make matters worse, Democrats have two separate ego-fueled billionaire vanity campaigns in the field.

Because Mike Bloomberg is ridiculously rich, he keeps putting ads on TV in random places.

Theyre good ads, well-targeted at the views of Democrats who think that Donald Trump is extremely bad. Bloombergs actual record both in business and in politics from sexual harassment to stop-and-frisk to endorsing George W. Bush is complicated, and theres plenty for normie Democrats to dislike. But the ads are good. Theyd also be great ads for Joe Biden if Bloomberg wanted to generously finance a pro-Biden Super PAC.

Right now in the polling averages, Sanders is just below 25 percent while Biden is just below 30 percent. To beat him handily, all Biden needs to do is consolidate the bulk of the non-Bernie vote. Bloombergs ads and money could be very helpful in doing that. But instead, Bloomberg is spending the money on himself, rising to 8.3 percent in the polls not nearly enough to win but enough to cut Bidens lead over Sanders.

Then, absurdly, Tom Steyer, who is both less rich than Bloomberg and much less qualified for the presidency, is also dumping tens of millions of dollars on a pointless quest to further divide the field.

Many Sanders fans I know seem to experience this cavalcade of wild ideas Maybe well promote an underqualified mayor! Maybe well run two billionaires simultaneously! as a sign of how desperate the donor class is to defeat Sanders. But in its practical impact, its precisely the opposite. The financial fragmentation thats left Biden outspent by both Sanders and three moderate rivals is overcomplicating any effort to stop the red tide.

One possible interpretation of all this is that top Democrats have profound doubts about Biden that they didnt have about Al Gore.

If thats the issue, then the failure to coordinate and convey that opinion to the public in a clear way is an even bigger bungle. Most Americans like to think of themselves as independent-minded people, which is one reason endorsements often dont seem to matter that much. But if Obama had said that he thought Biden was too old and Democrats should go in another direction or if hed said that Buttigieg is too young and inexperienced then rank-and-file Democrats surely would have listened.

Instead, party leaders allowed the well-known and well-liked Biden to get left out in the cold and for enormous sums of money to be spent on fragmenting the anti-Sanders vote.

Whats more, all efforts to take down Sanders are counterproductive. Clinton, for starters, cant seem to restrain herself from venting bitterly about Sanders. And Obamas heavy-handed intervention into the Democratic National Committee chair race several years ago, similarly, did an enormous amount to poison the well. But while these kinds of moves do annoy Sanderss biggest boosters, they dont actually hurt Sanderss campaign.

What would hurt Sanderss campaign would be elite coordination toward a single candidate. That hasnt happened.

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Obama, Clinton, and other top Democrats arent stopping Sanders - Vox.com

Acronym was able to drum up eye-popping donations from very wealthy people, such as billionaire Seth Klarman and venture capitalist Michael Moritz, because it adopted the vernacular of startup culture, promising to disruptand innovate inthe formerly staid world of political advertising. As an Outline story revealed, though, it doesnt seem to do much innovating; it basically just gives a roomful of millennials no other direction or strategy than to create anti-Trump content. They call it a startup environment as an explanation for why no one knows whats happening, one staffer said. Acronym apparently told donors that it would create content, which would gin up a lot of impressions on social media, and that this, far more than any traditional advertising strategy, was a better investmentbut to date, Acronym, according to the Daily Beast, has not managed to spend very much of the money it promised to devote to taking down Trump.

So where is that money going, exactly? Acronyms principal is a political operative named Tara McGowan, who had worked for Priorities USA, the main super PAC supporting Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign. She is also the owner (and apparently the sole employee) of Lockwood Strategies, a for-profit digital consulting company that, as it happens, received $1 million from Acronym in the fall of 2018. In other words, almost immediately after she failed to win the most important election she had ever worked on, McGowan managed to convince some of the wealthiest liberals in the country to shower her with money to produce ineffective trash. This is called disruption, and it now powers the American economy.

Most galling of all, McGowan has promised to raise $25 million for Courier Newsroom, a liberal news network, or perhaps more precisely, a sketchy network of content mills producing newslike content in various swing states, overseen not by anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper but by a former Vice editor andmore to the pointmarketing and communications professional who was once recognized by Ad Age for her role in creating one of the 10 Best Branded Content Partnerships of 2017. The idea was to create content and pay Facebook to place it high up on peoples news feeds; in reality, Acronym is asking donors for money by promising both to beat the right-wing disinformation network and to save that precious commodity rich people know the United States needs more of but dont feel much like subsidizing: local news.

Twenty-five million dollars could support an enormous amount of actual news, just as it could be put to much more potent political messaging purposes. But because of the deeply broken state of our money-choked and mostly unregulated election machinery, those funds go instead to people like McGowan, who wield power within the party because they are able to raise money, not because they have shown any real ability to spend it in ways that help Democrats win elections. This machine is designed to extract cash from people with too much of it and distribute it to insiders in the permanent campaign. If an election gets won here or there, its mostly incidental.

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Democrats Embrace the Grift - The New Republic