3457

I think it’s early to say Harris, or anyone, has it in the bag. Harris has a puncher’s chance, but it’s early.

I could see a Harris/Buttigieg ticket being interesting though. I’d like to see Pete take on Pence in a VP debate. And given his youth, having Pete wait a term before being President is something we’ve got plenty of time for.

3458

Yes, that could be well worth the price of admission.

3459

I think Pence’s wife would have to be on stage with him for that debate to be morally decent in his mind.

3460

Kamala Harris has been my prediction from day one. As FinnegansFather says, she checks a lot of boxes and I think she’ll be seen as the perfect foil for Trump. Her problem when it comes to the election is being a Californian democrat. That is going to be a tough sell in some parts of the country.

And I’m not sure Pete vs Pence is the match up we’d hope it would be. Buttigieg is an excellent talker, it remains to be seen what his debate skills are like. And we know from the last election, Pence is basically world class at deflecting and changing the subject. The role of the VP in elections is basically to defend your candidate, I don’t know if that is really going to be a strength of Pete. I think he’d do much better in a debate with Trump. I’m reasonably certain Trump will have no idea how to handle him…

3461

I mean… we saw him in action once now. Not quite a one on one debate, but we saw that he has a strong ability to provide extremely thoughtful, understandable answers to any question you ask him.

Pete was able to defend himself, while in the midst of a mess in South Bend… and his answer was very strong.

I think that Pete will do very well in any debate he’s in, because he’s simply smarter than most of the other candidates. But against Pence, I think he’s got an added advantage in that he speaks well in the language of Christian faith. While his status as a gay man will undoubtedly turn off a lot of evangelicals, I think he makes a stronger argument than most to those guys when pointing out the overt hypocrisy of the GOP today. And he’s got that mild midwestern charm that goes a long way with a lot of rural America. He just seems like a nice guy.

3462

The problem with debating Trump is something Rick Wilson outlined in one of Ana Marie Cox’s With Friends Like These podcasts:

You know the Democrat will get up on stage during the debates and say well my 16 point plan on climate change and Donald Trump will make a fart joke and the game will be over.

3463

It is an interesting map.

3464

I’d like to harbor the fantasy that if they tried and had the right candidate, they can get States like Missouri and Texas, maybe others that are classified as Red States there.

3465

I agree with all of this, and he is currently my personal preference, although only by a whisker over Warren.

And I would give a lot to hear the Democratic presidential candidate speak in the language of Christian faith. Dems have allowed the Republic Party to become the party of the flag and Christianity, and I find both absurd. Republican policy has little in common with Jesus, and much of Republican rhetoric amounts to “it’s okay to tear apart America because my resentments are more important than my country.”

But one of the things I was listening most for during the debate was how the candidate sounds when attacked. Because however that sounds, that is what is going to be in play the entire campaign against Dump.

Buttigieg and Biden and Sanders were the ones the most directly tested in that area, and Biden came off far the worst, at least to my ear. Sanders avoids most of the bait (the 70% marginal tax bit, but also an attack from Harris), and he is stingy and brief with denials. But the roaring, well, I would have wanted him at my side during our old contract negotiations talks, but those were never re-played for the public. I’m just not sure how the middle of the country would respond. Would the public still be clear that Dump was the craziest person in the room?

Buttiegieg, to my eye, seemed shaken. His acceptance of responsibility was superb, but that is the part that he could rehearse. Beyond that, he seemed muffled. It seemed that his home problems threw him off his game a bit. And if attacks like those are going to throw him off his game, imagine how Dump and company will impact him. He is very intelligent, and he is not going to pull a Rubio and respond with idiocy. But I wonder if he is really tough enough for what is required here.

3466

@Timex Yes, that is an interesting map. But it is misleading in one way. The impact of the presidential race on Senate and House races is enormous, and there are a lot of competitive elections in those red and blue states.

The odds of getting rid of Dump are much, much greater than the odds of providing that new president with a Congress that would even consider the things that these candidates are pledging to do.

3467
  1. Every Democratic presidential nominee ever has been Christian and used the language of Christian faith.
  2. American Christianity is mostly evangelicals, who are batshit crazy, gross hypocrites, and mostly use their “Christianity” as a signifier of tribe and a cudgel with which to beat infidels.
  3. Therefore, it does zero good for Democratic candidates to use the language of faith. They are never ever ever going to wrest evangelicals from the grips of the GOP. Evangelicals all voted for the transparently idiotic, laughably corrupt, pussy grabber whose primary rallying cry was hatred of the poor and downtrodden. Trump’s biggest demographic voting bloc was evangelicals.

I, for one, would like Democratic presidential candidates to speak in the language of compassion and empathy–values which are transparently orthogonal to most of American Christianity.

3468

This is actually not remotely true. Only around 25% of Christians in the US are Evangelical Protestants.

3469

It’s time for 2Q fundraising numbers here as July begins, and Mayor Pete out of the gate strong:

400k total donors and $25m in the second quarter alone is very impressive.

3470

Yep, nearly a quarter of US Christians are Roman Catholic.

3471

Hey, I heard that Catholics seem to be good at picking winners in presidential elections (they usually slightly lean the direction of the winner). Is that the case?

3472

Huh. Interesting. That’s going to send me down a rabbit hole to look at in the coming days now. :)

3473

Is that map up to date? I thought Virginia was mostly blue now (maybe Colorado too), and Indiana mostly red; and that Georgia is more likely to vote dem than Ohio.

3474

That was my reaction too. The legend for the map is that it is states that have voted consistently for one party or another since the 2000 election.

Obviously, massive changes since then. Virginia is reliably blue now. Ohio pretty reliably red among the biggest impacts.

3475

I only found this, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the original place I picked up this notion.

3476

Okay, that makes sense. Though, using election results from 2000 (and earlier!) to predict 2020 battlegrounds seems misguided. Certainly, there’s a better map they could use.

It seems like what a middle-schooler would do for a statistics project.