I didn’t say it was the darkest timeline. Such as it is, this is likely the best option we have remaining. But that doesn’t make it a great option I feel super confident with.

The argument that Sanders has a better chance of beating the president must be premised on the notion that he brings in a greater turnout from historical non-voters than he loses by alienating moderate voters. Not simply that he does so nationwide, he has to pull off an unprecedented turnout among non-voters in key…

Hope and Change is not populist rhetoric. Populism functions on a binary us vs. them worldview. It generates support by directing ire at the corrupt and evil elites while it promises to fight for and speak for the common people—both of which the populist views as functionally homogeneous groups that must always be at…

I’ve been saying for a few weeks that even if she does drop out, I don’t think she’ll endorse anybody. Obviously, she’s more ideologically aligned with Sanders, but I do get the sense that her reticence about a Sanders nomination in the face of the challenge of winning back the senate is genuine.

I always thought that was his aim, but in practice, he probably harmed Biden way more than he strengthened him. If Bloomberg never gets into the race, or if he pulls out a couple days ago, does Biden come close to sweeping Super Tuesday?

I suspect it will be Harris. Or maybe Castro. People have been saying Stacey Abrams, but I’m a Georgia resident who voted for her in the primary and general in 2018, and putting her on the ticket just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Okay. So this makes it more or less officially 2016 all over again. All of Bloomberg’s, Buttigieg’s and Klobuchar’s pledged delegates will be freed to vote for Biden.

I think that’s the reasonable interpretation of the inherent flaw in her strategy from last year, and when the voting started, I think the behavior of her voters indicated that what remained of her support was not an ideological monolith waiting to vote for Sanders if given the okay (as so many Sanders supporters seem…

When Sanders starts winning states that Democrats need to win but are reasonably likely to lose, then I’ll start to listen to people who claim it’s all just scare tactics employed by the oligarchy. Until then, as the resident of a state Democrats are likely to lose (but could plausibly win with the right candidate),…

I mean, he’s a technocrat, so it wasn’t the most effective foray into populism, but yeah. His acceptance speech at the DNC in 2000 used the repeated rhetorical device “They’re for the powerful; we’re for the people.” It was hamfisted, like a lot of Gore’s campaign, but he ran against W (who was the first MBA…

I’ve more or resigned myself to voting for Biden if I don’t vote for Warren. I mean, I live in Georgia, so Biden is likely to win by 20-40 points regardless, but I genuinely believe that Sanders is a fundamentally weak general election candidate, and I think the primaries thusfar have offered a pretty good test of his…

As I said, I wish he were not the candidate. But I don’t get to choose between Joe Biden and candidates who likely have at least as strong an appeal in states Democrats must win as Joe Biden has. I get to choose between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and (maybe) Elizabeth Warren. And the argument that Sanders is anywhere…

I think that’s overly simplistic. I think it’s closer to the truth to say that Democrats are so discomforted with the idea of having to try to win a national election with candidates that risk alienating winnable voters in swing states that they’re easily persuaded by a candidate with a lot of money who hired an…

Obama wasn’t a populist. He just wasn’t. You may not be old enough to remember, but Gore was much more of populist than Obama.

I wish it weren’t Biden, either. But I think the hope over fear binary is a bit silly. Anybody who looks at the remaining list of candidates and isn’t a little bit afraid about any of them being the nominee is being blinded by something, and I’m not sure it’s hope.

On her heels? Assuming the California results remain more or less fixed, she only finished as high as third in four contests, and one of those was Vermont, where she still fell below the line of viability. She spent the last two debates dunking on him and theoretically weakening his support in these states, but he…

Though Bloomberg had a weaker night than polling indicated (which I think most people anticipated), the fact that he outperformed Warren in most states is a real punch in the gut.

You’re responding two years later on a defunct website? Weird. You’ll take a geriatric Sanders. But you won’t really have that option. You’re going to have to live with geriatric Biden because name recognition still trumps most everything else in a primary.

Sorry, but for national elections, they’re not wrong. The American system of elections, as you surely know, empowers a small few (inhabitants of “swing states”) to determine who is going to be president.

Nah, it’ll be a brokered convention. A contested convention simply means that nobody has a majority of pledged delegates. A brokered convention describes what happens next. After nobody secures the nomination on the first ballot, you have a process of the people in the building deciding on their own what the ticket…