We’re still about 5 or 6 days from having the full results for this Kentucky Senate Primary race, but it looks like things are a lot closer than anyone had expected.
Despite being hailed as an early favorite of the Democratic party, Amy McGrath has consistently struggled with the very voters that the focus groups say she’s supposed to bring in.
Polling consistently showed McGrath with a significant lead in Kentucky’s Senate Primary race, but the trend reversed suddenly as protests and riots rocked the nation. Quite contrary to the expected backlash that moderates feared, this outbreak of protests has seemingly pushed the electorate toward the left. Self-identified centrists suddenly saw the winds shifting to the left, and they’ve come along for the ride.
Will Booker prevail? Again, it is too early to know for certain. He appears to be absolutely dominating among in-person voters in Lexington and Louisville, but there was also a huge surge of mail and absentee voting that has yet to be counted. Since Booker’s surge has been so recent, it’s quite possible that many of these mailed in votes were submitted before the protests shifted public opinion.
I woke up with hope. I woke up inspired. I woke up humbled to just be a part of this moment. I woke up ready.
I hope you feel it too. I hope you are fired up to fight like never before.
I love you, and I’m proud to be by your side. Let’s do this.
Regardless of who wins in the primary, there will still be an uphill battle to unseat McConnell. The moods and winds have shifted though, so this challenge no longer seems impossible.
Despite a strong start for Bernie Sanders and his revolution, the establishment forces have convincingly coalesced around Joe Biden.
Facing non-viability on the eve of Super Tuesday, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg both suddenly ceded their campaigns to endose Joe Biden. Rumors circulated that Obama had nudged some reluctant competitors toward accepting their fate.
Regardless of who called the shots and who pulled the strings, the sudden alignment of such seemingly bitter rivals helped to propel Biden toward a significant lead over both Bloomberg and Bernie. While Sanders managed to hold an edge in California, his margins were ultimately slim, and Joe carried the night in most of the other contests.
Tonight wasn’t much different. Bernie seems to have small leads on the west coast, but the prospect of a united Democratic front has won over swing voters and the once-mythical “Never-Trump Republican.” These oft-discussed but rarely seen conservatives believe in right wing values like limited government and economic non-intervention, but they draw the line at the crass and brutal methods that a populist like Trump carries them out with. Unsurprisingly, these voters are just fine with Biden while fears of Bernie keep them up late at night.
Biden seems immune to criticisms on policy, competency, or even basic awareness of his surroundings. It has been suggested that we wouldn’t see much of him during his administration, while various factions of the old Obama coalition wage a sort of civil war for influence behind the scenes.
Voters seem to hope that he is a figurehead – a blank slate and symbol of, well, decency? Joe might not be the smartest guy in the room, or the hippest, or the most connected, or the coolest… but dangit, he’s probably a good guy and he’s been through some shit.
That might be exactly where the median voter is right now, so if this race is anybody’s, it’s Joe Biden’s to lose.
The final state-wide polls for the Nevada primary caucus have shown a huge surge for Bernie: from 25% to 30% in just the last week. Individual polls have shown numbers as high as 35%, but there aren’t enough samples to know if these are outliers or indicators of a strong upward trend.
Entrance and exit polls – although notoriously unreliable – are also showing a strong Bernie performance:
Beyond early guesses at who will win tonight, and with what margins, there are some other interesting data points we can clean from the flurry of polls aimed at primary participants:
From the entrance poll, among the 34% of NV Dem caucus participants who call themselves moderate or conservative:
Conservative Democrats have long cited the large number of Democrats who identify as conservative and moderate in their opposition to Bernie (ie: strong liberals do not have a majority).
But what this really shows (and it can also be derived from support for M4A) is that a lot of Democrats who call themselves moderate also favor progressive values and politicians. The reality of 2020 is that moderate Democrats are, for the most part, progressives. Of course, I’m talking about voters & not representatives, because we’ve still got a bit of a gap there.
While the deadline for candidates to contest results in Iowa still isn’t here yet, New Hampshire almost is. Voting will occur on Tuesday – and we’re hoping the results will actually be available in a timely fashion.
Iowa is a complete dumpster fire right now, and the failure of the state party echoes the many failures of the national party over the last decade: most notably, the failure to stop Trump’s ascent to national political supremacy.
While the party admits that many of the results are faulty or based on flawed mathematics, they also appear to be taking a stance that their count is final and cannot be contested further. The acceptance of formal complaints appears to be a mere formality at this point. If I’m wrong, I’ll be pleasantly surprised…
Anyway, these Iowa results seem to have two major winners and one big loser.
The winners are Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, and the loser is Joe Biden. Both Pete and Sanders are seeing significant gains in last-minute New Hampshire polling, while Joe’s prior standing has utterly collapsed. Just as many on the left predicted, Biden’s campaign relied too heavily on the idea of electability. As soon as he suffered his first defeat, there was no charming personality or popular policy to fall back on.
Pete now has the mantle of electability among centrist Democrats – and he seems to have plenty of allies on non-Fox cable news outlets, as well. He’s exactly the kind of candidate that the op-ed pages at the New York Times and Washington Post have been waiting for. Whether or not he has a fan base beyond that demographic is yet to be seen. There haven’t been a whole lot of national polls since then, but the distribution of the numbers in NH and SC seem to indicate that Pete’s support remains regional (and by regional, I mean that he only does well with white people).
Bernie has also received a modest boost from his strong finish in Iowa. He seems to have picked up some of Biden’s prior supporters – people who liked Bernie’s ideas but feared he couldn’t win elections. Seeing him then defeat their exemplar of electability probably converted at least a few.
Warren’s campaign appears to have run out of steam. Some of her tactics have been questionable at best, and it just doesn’t seem to be working out for her. In particular, she attempted to approach the debate with a fiery tone but moderate solutions. That’s backwards: if your tone implies urgency, then the solutions must be urgent.
Amy Klobuchar appears to have played the act a little better – at least at the debate – as her poll numbers are actually up a little bit despite her poor ranking in Iowa.
New Hampshire is just around the corner, and hopefully in a few days we’ll have new insights in to the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Right now it definitely looks like a contest between Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, but Pete has big weaknesses once we leave the midwest and rural New England. In the national rankings, Bernie looks increasingly dominant – and his path to nomination seems to be laid out with little to stand in his way.
It’s been a wild few days for those of us who are wondering who won Iowa – and we still don’t have a final, official count.
While Pete Buttigieg appeared to take an early lead, Bernie continued to surge as more results trickled in.
In the last few hours, results have started coming in from satellite caucuses – eligible Iowa voters who weren’t able to participate in the regularly scheduled events. Some of these included Iowans abroad, as well as those who work non-standard shifts. An anecdote from the field helps explain why Bernie did so well with these voters:
For several nights, they canvassed outside the factory from 10 PM to 3 AM, engaging workers in conversation as their shifts ended. The campaign organizers spoke to workers in multiple languages about their lives, their work, and Sanders’s platform and campaign.
Pete Buttigieg also declared an early victory in Iowa – the night of the election, even. He’s been riding a big wave of momentum since then, but it turns out he may not have won after all.
So after about two and a half days, the status in Iowa is as follows:
Buttigieg – declared victory with 2% of votes released
Sanders – declared victory with 97% of votes released
Warren – mostly quiet, although she has canceled some ad spend
Biden – mostly in disarray
But who knows? Tom Perez suddenly wants a recount just as soon as it became clear that Bernie would win:
Enough is enough. In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.
After many years of anticipating a challenge to Trump, all eyes have turned to Iowa for the opening caucus of the 2020 Democratic primary season.
Recent polls have shown a bit of a last minute surge for Bernie Sanders while Biden has slipped to second. Pete and Warren have held steady so far, but they’ll need to do better than that if they want to pick up the win each campaign desperately wants. And a win in Iowa can be a major moment for any candidate. People like to back a winner, and as of tonight only one candidate will be able to claim that mantle.
If Bernie does win tonight, he’s likely to also pick up the win in New Hampshire next week. The polls there show him with an even larger lead than current indicated in Iowa. Two early victories are still a long way from winning the nomination, but it puts a serious damper on Biden’s electability argument and it would effectively eliminate Pete Buttigieg who has, so far, bet big on those early victories and the implied momentum they bring.
Surprises and last minute attacks
A few odd events have transpired in the last few days. The Des Moines Register poll – considered the gold standard – has broken with its 76 year tradition and pulled their results instead of publishing. Some concerns had arisen that not all choices were read to all participants, and the decision was made at the last minute to bail on the poll rather than publish results that may have tarnished their long established reputation for accuracy.
Biden has also continued waffling along in his own weird way. After aggressively turning away potential supporters who asked for clarifications of his stances, he is now lowering expectations for Iowa performance. The rumor from the trail in Iowa is that his volunteers are mostly no-shows and his campaign has been struggling to provide transportation to the polls. Everyone seems to want the assistance, but no one is willing to lend a hand.
John Kerry was also overheard in Iowa suggesting that he might just have to run for president, himself. While there’s something deeply ironic about the guy who lost to Bush thinking he’s the only one who can stop Trump, he’s attempted to quash these rumors publicly by reaffirming his support for Biden.
Project Veritas has also launched an attack on Warren, but that’s hardly worth mentioning and it’s unlikely that it will have much impact (given both the reputation of the source and the thin nature of the attack content).
Just the first step
Regardless of who wins tonight, the primary nomination process has a long way to go. But for now, all eyes are on Iowa. Pundits will fill volumes tomorrow analyzing and interpreting what happens tonight, and many may even be filling out updates resumes and job applications.
While it’s unlikely that any candidates drop out immediately in response to Iowa’s results (New Hampshire is just next week, after all) it could provide a big clue as to who will be forced to drop within the month. Pete and Warren, in particular, could be extremely vulnerable to lost momentum in the case of under-performance.
Well, it is official: Â Santorum has dropped out of the 2012 Republican primary race, and Romney stands alone as the only candidate to have won a significant number of state contests. Â Although Gingrich and Paul are still technically in the race, there’s no way they can win outside of an incredibly rare and unlikely brokered convention.
However, this victory for Romney is a Pyrrhic one:  every nationwide and state-by-state poll shows Obama winning in November by a comfortable margin.  According to the state electoral tracker at Real Clear Politics, Obama already has the 271 electoral votes required to win re-election.  Even if Romney could carry every single toss up state, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
The big shift in this election may be looked back on as the time when the evangelical-led, socially conservative movement finally died. Â Before birth control resurfaced, Romney had a slim margin among women voters. Â After the ridiculous attack from the right against womens’ reproductive rights, this marginal support turned in to a 2:1 landslide in Obama’s favor.
The first primary event kicks off later today, and the polls seem to indicate that the race has come down to Romney and Ron Paul.
The big money is on Romney, but my hope is on Ron Paul because he’s the only candidate:
Against the Patriot Act
Against SOPA
Against the never-ending wars and imperial foreign policy
Against the war on drugs
and in favor of human rights, in general
There are plenty of issues where I disagree with Ron Paul, but Obama has proven to be on the wrong side of these very important policies. Â Not only is it a matter of freedom, but for many it is a matter of life and death…
