Nine months from today, November 3, is the most urgent election in American history, as America will never be the same if Donald Trump is reelected to a second term in the White House!
Yes, there have been other crucial elections, including 1860 (Abraham Lincoln); 1932 (Franklin D. Roosevelt); and 1940 (FDR).
These elections centered around the upcoming Civil War; the tragedy of the Great Depression at its lowest moment; and the upcoming US involvement in World War II.
But while the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II were all massive crises for America, we now face a true demagogue out of control after an impeachment trial in which much of the evidence and essential witnesses to the wrongdoing of Donald Trump were not permitted to be included, due to the corruption and abandonment of the oaths taken by Republican Senators to uphold the Constitution and rule of law.
The Republican Party has besmirched the historic reputation of the US Senate for all time, and have lost all credibility as a viable political party.
It is essential for the party to be soundly defeated in as many House and Senate races as possible, and for the total repudiation of Donald Trump, who will go down in history as the worst and most dangerous President we have ever had, having abandoned all common decency and respect for the law!
Donald Trump needs to be held accountable for his transgressions, and for accountability under the law when he leaves the White House, having worsened the lives of tens of millions of Americans with his vindictive, lawless, and uncaring agenda!
February 3, 2020 is the first day in the nominating process with the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses.
Here is a list of the scheduled 2020 Democratic presidential primaries (source is “Wikipediaâ€; [ ] are for those contests which are not part of the general-election electoral map; * are for Top 10 populous states):
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• FEBRUARY •
Monday, February 3
Iowa (caucus)
Tuesday, February 11
New Hampshire (primary)
Saturday, February 22
Nevada (caucus)
Saturday, February 29
South Carolina (primary)
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• MARCH •
Tuesday, March 3 (Super Tuesday)
Alabama (primary)
[American Samoa (caucus)]
Arkansas (primary)
* California (primary)
Colorado (primary)
Maine (primary)
Massachusetts (primary)
Minnesota (primary)
* North Carolina (primary)
Oklahoma (primary)
Tennessee (primary)
* Texas (primary)
Utah (primary)
Vermont (primary)
Virginia (primary)
Tuesday, March 10
[Democrats Abroad (partly-run primary)]
Idaho (primary)
* Michigan (primary)
Mississippi (primary)
Missouri (primary)
North Dakota (firehouse caucus; partly-run primary)
Washington (primary)
Saturday, March 14
[Northern Mariana Islands (caucus)]
Tuesday, March 17
Arizona (primary)
* Florida (primary)
* Illinois (primary)
* Ohio (primary)
Tuesday, March 24
* Georgia (primary)
Sunday, March 29
[Puerto Rico (primary)]
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• APRIL •
Saturday, April 4
Alaska (partly-run primary)
Hawaii (partly-run primary)
Louisiana (primary)
Wyoming (caucus)
Tuesday, April 7
Wisconsin (primary)
Tuesday, April 28
Connecticut (primary)
Delaware (primary)
Maryland (primary)
* New York (primary)
* Pennsylvania (primary)
Rhode Island (primary)
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• MAY •
Saturday, May 2
[Guam (caucus)]
Kansas (partly-run primary)
Tuesday, May 5
Indiana (primary)
Tuesday, May 12
Nebraska (primary)
West Virginia (primary)
Tuesday, May 19
Kentucky (primary)
Oregon (primary)
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
• JUNE •
Tuesday, June 2
District of Columbia (primary)
Montana (primary)
New Jersey (primary)
New Mexico (primary)
South Dakota (primary)
Saturday, June 6
[United States Virgin Islands (primary)]
Thanks, D, for conveniently providing the list of the primaries and caucuses from Wikipedia.
You and i are on opposite sides on who we endorse, but we are friends, and I have great respect for you and your thoughts and ideas.
The important thing is that we stand united to back whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party in November, so as to remove Donald Trump from the White House!
Ronald writes, “Thanks, D, for conveniently providing the list of the primaries and caucuses from Wikipedia.â€
You’re welcome!
Same with everyone here at “The Progressive Professor.â€
The presidential primaries are a lengthy process covering up to five consecutive months (February, March, April, May, and June). People cannot be expected to commit to memory when one’s home state (or District of Columbia or in another contest) is on the schedule.
The schedule—to go along with the blog topic “Nine Months to the Most Urgent Election in American History!â€; and timed with the date of the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses—should be of help to a person who will vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
Why Iowa Matters and Why It Doesn’t
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/03/why-iowa-matters-and-why-it-doesnt/
I’ve written repeatedly over the years about my contempt for the Iowa caucuses, less because the state is demographically unrepresentative of the nation or because caucuses are inherently undemocratic than because the whole process is basically a sham. The main problem is that it’s more of a beauty contest than an actual result; the delegates that are “won†on caucus night are not really committed to any particular candidate. But even if the caucus results were iron-clad and binding, the secondary problem is that the media treats the caucuses as much more important than they are. The truth is that relatively few delegates are at stake, and a minuscule number of voters will actually participate.
Yet, a typical pre-take on the results looks like this:
[“No one has more at stake tonight than Joe Biden. A first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses here could put him the driver’s seat to win the Democratic nomination; a fourth-place finish could end his political career.â€
“No other Top 4 Democrat has that wide range of possibilities.â€
Two more questions: “Are there really only two tickets out of Iowa — with Michael Bloomberg purchasing the third? Think about it: The only realistic third-place finish that would be a positive story for that candidate is Amy Klobuchar’s.â€
“And if Sanders really does win Iowa, does he start acting like a front-runner? How he declares victory, if he wins, will matter.â€]
You can read a more sober take from the folks at Daily Kos Elections who also explain how the caucuses actually work. The reason Iowa is important has less to do with who comes in first or fourth than in how those results track with expectations. A better-than-expected result is a victory, while a disappointingly narrow win can effectively be a momentum-killing loss. This is superficial because of how the media chooses to report things, but the actual mechanism is that campaigns need a big new influx of cash after Iowa if they’re going to be able to maintain and grow their organizations for the many contests to come. If they get negative news coverage out of Iowa, the money won’t be forthcoming and they’ll have to drop out for lack of funds rather than for any mathematical reason. Their staffers will either latch on to other, better-paying campaigns or they’ll go home to work on state and local races.
Even this logic doesn’t work all the time anymore. Newt Gingrich, for example, sustained a long campaign in 2012 simply because he had one incredibly generous oligarch funding his Super PAC. Actual billionaires, like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, can stay in the race as long as they’re willing to spend their own money.
So, Iowa actually is very important, but this derives from the media overhyping the results and the public then swallowing their analysis whole.
In the above example, we are told that only two candidates will remain viable after Monday’s caucuses, in addition to Michael Bloomberg (who isn’t even competing there). We’re also told that only Amy Klobuchar can exceed expectations by coming in third place and thereby claim some positive news coverage. Conversely, we’re told that Biden could see his entire political career destroyed if he doesn’t wind up in the top three. And as a cherry on top, we’re informed that Bernie Sanders could blow the positive coverage he ought to get from winning if he “doesn’t act like a front-runner†in his victory speech.
This is not nonsense exactly, but it’s also not good or helpful analysis. For starters, it’s short on details. It doesn’t explain why some candidates are in one position and other candidates are in another. But it also seems illogical on its face. Elizabeth Warren is polling in fourth place in Iowa. Is she really doomed if she finishes third? Will she fold up her campaign before New Hampshire? What would a fourth-place finish mean for Sanders, the consensus frontrunner to win the caucuses? Yes, this would not be “a positive story†for him, but would it necessarily knock him out of the top two going forward?
This analysis doesn’t make an effort to look forward other than to anticipate Bloomberg’s entry in the race. Biden is still looking like a likely winner in South Carolina, even if his once commanding lead is dwindling. Wouldn’t a win there rekindle his hopes? It appears that Tom Steyer is putting his hope in South Carolina, too, so should we say he doesn’t have a ticket to stay in the contest if he doesn’t finish in the top two in Iowa? Meanwhile, the demographics of Pete Buttigieg’s support suggest that he’ll do better in Iowa than he does in more diverse states on Super Tuesday. Doesn’t he have more at stake on Monday than Biden?
Instead of any effort to understand what the race will look like after the results are in from Iowa, we are told that it will involve two unidentified candidates, plus Bloomberg.
Even if this were a likely outcome, the media should be doing more to prevent it from happening than to bring it about through the force of their coverage. The Iowa caucuses should not have this kind of winnowing influence for a whole host of reasons that vary from the small number of voters and unrepresentative makeup compared to the rest of the country, to the oversized influence of money and oligarchs, to the mathematical insignificance of the results, to the fact that the actual winner may not actually be awarded their fair share of delegates at Iowa’s state party conventions.
In some sense, it’s fair that candidates need to win in order to maintain their candidacies, but this analysis is ready to deny Sanders even this kind of coverage if they don’t like his demeanor at his victory speech.
The truth is that some candidates need a good result on Monday more than others because they are low on money or because they don’t have funds to pour into their own campaign. The frontrunners Biden and Sanders have more to lose in the expectations game, but they’re also more viable for the long haul. It’s actually quite likely that more than 70 percent of the caucus participants will be voting against the eventual declared winner, especially on the first ballot, and the small number of delegates will be split three or four ways, making the result basically a wash as far as who will have the lead.
But most of the stories you read about Iowa will tell a much more dramatic story. That’s why every four years I am newly infuriated by this process.
How the Republican Party Became a Threat to Democracy
They abandoned policy in favor of identity politics and ethno-nationalism.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/03/how-the-republican-party-became-a-threat-to-democracy/
For years now we’ve known that Donald Trump lied and cheated in his business dealings. We know that—at minimum—he welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election and that he obstructed justice to thwart the investigation of those efforts. We know that he extorted the Ukrainian president to get dirt on his political opponent and then covered it up by obstructing investigations in congress.
What wasn’t clear until last week is how far the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, would go to enable the president’s abuse of power. It has now become clear that not only will they exonerate Trump, but they also refused to call witnesses who would document his guilt. That is why so many people are beginning to contemplate the demise of our democracy—and rightly so. Facing that possibility raises the question of how Republicans got to the point that they are willing to risk our democracy for the sake of Donald Trump.
Any attempt to explore the historical roots of current events is an endless process. That’s because there are no periods (as in punctuation) in history. Focusing on one point in history as the cause inevitably leads to an exploration of what led up to that moment, sending us back even further to find its antecedents.
But I believe there are two significant inflection points when Republicans made choices that led them to be willing to exonerate the most corrupt president in our country’s history. One of those moments came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater 486 to 52 in the electoral college. That led Republicans to complete the process of abandoning their support for civil rights and launch an effort to regain the party’s competitiveness by appealing to white grievance. Here is how Nixon’s strategist, Kevin Phillips, described the so-called “Southern Strategy.â€
[From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.]
In other words, for Republicans, the votes were with white people whose racism could be triggered by dog whistles, such as an appeal to “state’s rights†and “law and order.†That strategy worked. Richard Nixon won handily in 1968 and in a landslide in 1972.
The second infection point came with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Just as significant as the emergence of this country’s first African American president was the fact that he was elected after the entire Republican policy agenda was in shatters. The Bush-Cheney administration had demonstrated the folly of the party’s policies in both the foreign and domestic arena with the invasion of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, and the emergence of the Great Recession.
At that point, Republicans decided to completely abandon the idea of having a policy agenda (other than tax cuts for the wealthy) and go all-in on obstructing anything the Democrats attempted to do. In order to justify that decision, they cast aside the dog whistles and openly inflamed the xenophobic fears of their white base with attempts to paint the first African American president as a dangerous extremist who didn’t love America.
That decision became even more pronounced in the reaction to Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. Recognizing demographic trends, the Republican National Committee issued an autopsy that called on the GOP to do more to win over “Hispanic[s], Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, women, and youth[s].†On the other hand, Michael Anton warned that 2016 was “the flight 93 election.â€
[“If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988,†he wrote, averring that “the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us.†He blamed “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,†which had placed Democrats “on the cusp of a permanent victory.â€â€¦The GOP’s efforts to broaden its coalition, he thundered, were an abject surrender.]
The election of Trump was a definitive rejection of the RNC autopsy recommendations and an embrace of Anton’s suggestion that it was time to “storm the cockpit or die.â€
Those decisions left the GOP without a coherent agenda other than a common heritage. As Yoni Appelbaum writes:
[A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up.]
Whether consciously or subconsciously, Republicans know that the United States is on a path to the inevitable day when their “numbers no longer add up.†As Zachary Roth wrote, the response to those facts led them to decide that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.†The calculation was that they could maintain their power at the expense of our democratic norms and institutions.
But as Appelbaum notes, something more fundamental to our democracy broke.
[Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed…
[Conservatives] are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilities…When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.]
In his book Trumpocracy, David Frum identified the cost Republicans are willing to pay when he wrote that, “if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.â€
That is the challenge we face today. After casting aside policy and ideas in favor of ethnonationalism, the Republican Party is now in the process of rejecting democracy as their only alternative for survival. What that portends, as Appelbaum suggested, are some dark possibilities that will remain, even if Trump is defeated in November.
I had mentioned in an earlier thread that the Democratic Party is split by age. You can see this in the coverage of the caucuses tonight. The older voters are for Biden, Klobuchar, Buttigieg. The younger voters are for Sanders and Warren.
The age split is like that by race as well. Older blacks and older Latinos are not into Bernie.
It’s 10 pm EST and no results from Iowa so far. They’re saying the closeness of the race could be a factor for the delay.
Trump has been acquitted by the Republicans in the Senate. Romney was the only Republican who voted with the Democrats.