It’s more likely to go the other way – tech companies will continue to build in where the talent is. Talent is a scarcer resource than land. Moving HQ to a bass-ackwards rural area just means you shed anyone good enough to get a job somewhere else.
Cost of living is starting to be an issue, and remote work is a thing. I work 100% remotely, and living in rural PA saves us more than a bit of money.
This has already been going on in Utah for decades. The tech industry is pretty huge here, but there’s a lot of native educated workers to fill the jobs. No need to import labor from the coasts.
Yeah, in the software industry, there are a number of things which makes living somewhere other than the major metro areas viable.
One, there are people who grew up here, and have ties to the region. If you have interesting tech work, you can how some of these folks because while they are gifted engineers, they don’t want to leave the area.
Two, a lot of engineers are somewhat introverted, and maybe don’t care that much about the nightlife in a big city.
Yup, we just staffed up a group in Provo.
Consider that Presidential candidates rarely even stump in California and our issues aren’t fore-fronted during election years because we’re in the bag for Democrats. That’s the issues of 40 million citizens ignored. We’re nearly one and a half times bigger than the next biggest state and have a GDP bigger than every country on earth except the US, China, Japan, Germany and UK. Seems perverse to leave us out.
I am an engineer and have worked with and around engineers for my whole career. My experience is that engineers are no more introverted than anyone else. This stereotype needs to be retired.
Nearly every engineer I’ve ever worked for or with has been introverted, so lets bring that stereotype back from retirement!
Superdelegates have never been consequential for any election. They are superfluous, and they leave the party open to charges of insider tampering. Democrats won’t elect someone like Trump. That’s a large part of the reason why I’m a Democrat.
Yup - The US wasn’t meant to be a country to be ruled by a minority party - but that is what we have. Gerrymandering has given the minority party a grip in the House. The Senate is doing it’s job as a balance against majority rule. And the electoral college has given the minority party the whitehouse. The minority party has a tight grip on the judiciary, and could likely gain an ironclad majority over the court in the next few years.
System is broken folks!
Yeah, they’re unnecessary except as a final defense against some weird effect pushing a completely unqualified candidate through the primaries. But yet every election year I have people who completely misunderstand what they are for telling me how they are stopping their candidate from winning (clearly the largest count of these times was for Bernie, where it became a national story). They don’t serve much purpose, and confuse people.
Honestly, they wouldn’t matter at all if they didn’t fucking declare who they’re voting for before the first primary (even though they always vote for the primary majority winner) and the media started adding them to delegate totals for the candidates. Sigh.
Let’s do some history.
In '92, '00, and '04 they were nonfactors. In '92, they held off, because they were waiting for more Bimbo Eruptions regarding the Clinton campaign (a NYT story a week or two after Tsongas dropped out when Super Tuesday closed the deal and made Bill Clinton the defacto nominee highlights the reluctance of supers to declare). In '00, they held off for a bit to see if Bill Bradley was going to be able to challenge Al Gore. Once that writing was on the wall, they broke like a wave to Gore, but Bradley’s national campaign was already collapsed and without financing. In 2004, those willing to declare themselves in a January 16 NYT story were surprisingly strong for Howard Dean, though Kerry had support as well. Again, after Kerry buried the competition on Super Tuesday, the superdelegates broke towards him, but things were inevitable by then.
So that leaves two cases where the role of supers were highlighted, 2008 and 2016. In 2008, Hillary Clinton got a lot of superdelegate support right from the outset. But Obama was running a strategically and tactically superior campaign to hers, and managed to pick up two important and influential superdelegates after the South Carolina primary: Ted Kennedy and Byron Dorgan. After Obama kung-fued the Clintons on Super Tuesday and then ran the table on the I-95 primaries and in Wisconsin, supers started to flip over to him.
And so 2016. Clinton once again picked up a huge number of superdelegates almost from the outset, but a great deal of that was when it was thought that this was going to be an Al Gore '00/GWB '88 kind of campaign, where things are “open” but not really on the incumbent party’s side. And so everything I’ve read in retrospect about the 2016 campaign for Sanders makes a couple of things fairly clear: 1. he had a tremendous message, far more suited for the zeitgeist of the time than Clinton or the Democratic establishment at large, but 2. His campaign was ill-equipped to deal with how effective his message and delivery of that was and ill-equipped to turn that into a serious challenge. Jeff Weaver, in other words, is not Axelrod and Plouffe. What also was a difference between Bernie '16 and Obama '08 was that Bernie’s money didn’t really start flooding in until late summer/fall of '15. Obama was raking cash hand over fist from the start of '07. That early funding advantage allowed Plouffe and Axelrod to set up a campaign infrastructure across the country with field offices everywhere, trained staff (and trained campaign personnel to train volunteers), and merchandise ever at the ready. That was huge. When Obama won in Iowa, his campaign was ready to stand toe-to-toe with Clinton. Sanders simply didn’t have that same infrastructure advantage, and if there exists a logistical campaign genius who could have set something up in an incredibly short period of time…Jeff Weaver wasn’t it.
But that wasn’t the only thing, either. Obama – for all his “Change” rhetoric – was also part of the Democratic Party establishment. Bernie Sanders relationship with the Democrats is a lot more complicated and goes back decades. And for lack of a better term, there was (justifiable) mistrust between both of those entities. Bernie (rightly so) found the Democrats to be ossified, slow-reacting, party-first pragmatists who were slow to adapt to the views of their base. Democrats (rightly so) found that Sanders too often would have his own agenda even on important legislation that was important to the Democratic base. And, in fact, neither entity could even agree on what the Democratic “base” really entailed.
In any event, I have no idea how the 2020 race develops yet, or plays out. But even if Bernie runs for nothing else again, the upshot of his influence can be seen in the following ways:
- Open primaries have become more of a thing
- States like NY with ridiculous voter registration/party affiliation laws have begun to adjust them (some, like NY, with the speed of an ocean liner trying to make a U-turn…but other states have quickly adopted same-day voter registration)
- Superdelegates – created in response to the Mondale and Dukakis nominations, and then never again needed – have gone away.
That’s a pretty good legacy on just the voter rights front. Now if he (and Obama, frankly) would just come out against caucuses as being almost as bad in their own way as closed primaries…but that’s another kettle of fish.
Have they? I think caucuses are terrible, but open primaries are also a bad idea. You should have to register as a party member to vote in a party primary. That only makes sense. I think shortening the registration period, even to same day, is good. But you shouldn’t be able to vote in a party primary as an unaffiliated voter. The worst possible system is California’s top-two jungle primary. Note that Clinton did better in states with primaries than Sanders did, and that opening every primary to independents wouldn’t have made a difference to her nomination. Clinton was simply more popular among Democrats than Sanders was.
I really enjoyed your post, thanks for the info. I kind of don’t see you disagreeing with me, so I’m just sort of spinning in the wind trying to figure out how to quote you and disagree back and do the internet arguing thing, such is the mood I am in, in 2018.
I’ll go one farther and say that he fucked everything up in many ways. I can’t stand the guy.
I also agree with this.
What’s interesting (and I may be wrong on this entirely, but we’ll never know now!) is that I think that enough superdelegates (not all, by any means; ego is a thing) learned lessons in 2016. And I think media did too, with regards to including superdelegate totals in with binding delegate totals from primaries and caucuses, that they might’ve ended up a nothingburger in 2020.
Maybe not, but I have a feeling that 2016 turned them into a third rail that no one was real eager to go jump on again.
I have heard it stated many times that the real reason for the high speed rail line in California is so that workers in Silicon Valley can own homes in the San Joaquin Valley. The route they have chosen lends credence to this idea.
Ah the Democratic party. Learning no lessons. The optics of this are terrible.
Crowley received the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a group of labor unions and activists that has also backed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon. But after Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win, Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, reached out to Crowley’s team and asked that he vacate the line. Crowley, however, declined. This means he’ll remain on the ballot, which is certainly a curious decision to make!
Campaign finance law tomfoolery that will allow him to drain his accounts?
Otherwise, it makes no sense except as a way to stick his thumb in her eye and I did not get the impression from the goings-on that he was that kind of guy.
I think he thinks he can keep his job with a combination of more conservative voters and just name recognition in the district. It does seem like a dick move.
If that’s the case then he’s just very, very wrong about his chances. :)
I can’t even imagine what would happen if he won, or did something to cause the Republican candidate to win somehow. If the DNC thought the drama over superdelegates was bad…