The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
So this was a debate for the books.
And what did we learn? Maybe that debates, entertaining as they may be, matter less than we would like to believe.
CNN:
Monster ratings for Las Vegas debate break record for Democratic Party
Nearly 20 million viewers tuned into Wednesday night's Democratic primary debate hosted by NBC in Las Vegas, making it the most-watched Democratic primary debate of all time, according to preliminary numbers.
The early figures from Nielsen Media Research, a firm that measures the size of television audiences, indicated that approximately 19.7 million people watched the debate on NBC and MSNBC combined.
Until Wednesday night, the most-watched Democratic primary debate ever had been one that occurred in June 2019, when
approximately 18.1 million combined viewers watched the second night of a two-part debate series on NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo.
Sure, Mike Bloomberg got clobbered. But he’s a got a ton of money to spend, enough to alter the debate results with selectively edited commercials making him look better. That’s what money can buy.
Hey, want to make sense of the current Democratic primary mess? Seth Masket has you in mind, in a brilliant analysis:
Fine, Dems are in Disarray. Here's Why.
But why? What makes this cycle so unusual? This is a lot of what my book is about, so I wanted to explain this a bit here. I claim that the processes for deciding the two things a party needs to figure out before making a nomination -- what it wants and who is most likely to get it for them -- have been messed up. The culprit is negative partisanship generally, and Donald Trump more specifically. Allow me to explain.
As laid out in the "Theory of Parties" article a few years ago, the ideal party nominee is a combination of two main factors. First, that person should be broadly acceptable to major factions in the party and able to deliver on things that people in the party care about. Second, that person should be electable. A party doesn't want to nominate just anyone who can win an election, because they actually want some things out of that person when they're in office. But they don't want to ignore electability completely, since there's no point in picking a person who's good on the issues but can't win.
So we get that the “broadly acceptable” part is important. But if you have a factional candidate that says “my person or never this other” (and not just Bernie people, Biden people) you got a problem. But the elephant in the room compounding that problem is 2016. If you can’t agree on why Hillary lost, you’ll never agree on the solution to correct the problem. And we don’t agree on that. And here we are.
A bit of conventional wisdom:
But that CW might be wrong. Kirsten Powers/USA Today:
Face facts, Bernie Sanders is electable
It’s well past time to bury the 'Bernie is unelectable' trope. He has a better shot than moderate Bloomberg.
It’s true that at one point calling yourself a “Democratic socialist” would be a bridge too far for many voters, including Democrats. But that was before people began to realize how unmoored the American capitalist system is from any sense of ethics or morality. The level of economic inequality and suffering from lack of affordable health care, crushing debt, and a discriminatory and racist for-profit incarceration system in one of the world’s wealthiest countries is astonishing. People are exhausted from working non-stop trying to just survive financially in a system that dangles the carrot of financial stability or wealth always slightly out of reach except for a favored few. Nothing about this is normal and that is fundamentally Bernie Sanders’ so-called “radical” argument.
Realism is jarring but yesterday’s polls (see Kornacki tweet, above) were pretty bad for Democrats. And yet, they too, may not mean what they seem.
That’s because the phone polls and the online panel polls are diverging. The online polls like Ipsos (43) , Morning Consult( 42), Civiqs (43) SUSA (44) and MSN ( 41) don’t show the bump Trump is getting in Gallup (49), ABC/WaPo (46) and NBC/WSJ (47). And job approval ≠ vote for. This is all stuff to continue to monitor for trends but I continue to see November as competitive and winnable.
2020 as referendum, not choice? NBC:
Large majority of nonvoters plan to cast ballots in November, new report finds
Both pro- and anti-Trump attitudes were motivating factors to vote in 2020, with 19 percent supporting the president and 22 percent against.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they weren't registered to vote because of a basic lack of interest in politics, and 13 percent said they felt their votes didn't matter. Even so, 71 percent of habitual nonvoters plan to cast ballots in November, according to the study. Both pro- and anti-Trump attitudes were motivating factors to vote, with 19 percent supporting the president and 22 percent against. Thirty-one percent said civic responsibility was a factor for voting this year.
These nonvoters also tend not to participate in the political process because they are less likely to actively seek out news and don't feel they have enough information about candidates and issues to make a decision on Election Day, the study found. Survey respondents also cited feeling "depressed, discouraged or distracted" when consuming news and "intentionally" avoiding the news.
I’m sure Susan Collins is troubled.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Why Trump is letting a corrupt Democrat out of prison
But there’s a strategy at work too, one that relates directly to this fall’s election.
Given everything we’ve seen from the president, it’s almost certain that Trump sincerely believed Blagojevich’s sentence was unfair. So he tried to shake down a children’s hospital, using state funding as a way to extort campaign contributions. What’s the big deal? That’s just shrewd deal-making. Would we really want to live in a world where public officials can’t wet their beaks?
But more than that, what Trump is really after is the normalization of corruption. The fact that Blagojevich was a Democrat makes it all the better. Trump would never argue that Republicans are clean and Democrats are dirty; he wants to convince you that everyone is dirty. In fact, it’s a key part of his reelection strategy.
Dave A Hopkins/Honest Graph:
Democratic Debate Review: A Telling Final Question
In fact, the final question of the night revealed the strength of Sanders's position: he was the only candidate to agree that if no single candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates, the candidate with the most delegates should receive the nomination.
This is, of course, partially the Sanders campaign's recognition that he is unlikely to be a compromise choice or the preferred nominee of Democratic superdelegates in the event of a contested convention. But it's also a signal to the party made from a position of strength. The Sanders camp is betting that there's a good chance that they will have at least a delegate plurality, and they want to warn Democratic leaders at this early stage that they will denounce any attempt to deny him the nomination under such circumstances as an illegitimate usurpation of the process.
The fact that the rest of the Democratic field responded to the question by defending the right of the party to select a different nominee reflects the extent to which contestation rather than an outright delegate majority is, in their minds, a live possibility even with 48 states and 7 territories still to vote in this race. Of course, we can expect any of them to make the same argument that Sanders is currently making if they wind up with a delegate plurality instead. But more than a third of the total national delegate count will be selected within the next two weeks, and it's quite possible that we're not very far away from a situation where a contested convention is the only numerically plausible alternative to a first-ballot Sanders nomination. With such a front-loaded nomination calendar, it gets late early out there.
Michael A Cohen/Boston Globe:
A republic — if you can keep it
There is nothing that can stop Trump’s assault on democracy.
This is what makes Trump’s post-impeachment, anti-democratic rampages so particularly terrifying —the only constraints on his actions are the long-standing political norms that he neither understands nor appreciates. This means Trump can engage in all sorts of authoritarian behavior while technically operating within the law.
And don’t miss:
NY Times:
U.S. Watchdog to Investigate Trump’s Farm Bailout Program
The Government Accountability Office will review how the $28 billion farm bailout aimed at cushioning trade-related losses was spent.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, joined with Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, in asking Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, to investigate JBS, a Brazilian-owned meat-processing company that received $67 million in bailout funds. Lawmakers raised concerns about the payments given the company’s past legal problems: In 2017, two of JBS’s former top executives, brothers Wesley Batista and Joesley Batista, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in Brazil. The brothers remain majority shareholders with control over the company.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Menendez also asked the Treasury Department to investigate possible ties that JBS has with the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, whom the United States does not recognize as the legitimate president.