Some interesting Presidential Statistics on Presidents:
Specifically, the four times we have had six Presidents alive at the same time and also six times with no President alive other than that one serving? So here goes:
Six Presidents alive:
March 1861 to January 1862—Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln —320 days until death of Tyler.
January 1993 to April 1994—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton—1 year 92 days until death of Nixon.
January 2001 to June 2004—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush—3 years 137 days until death of Reagan.
January 2017 to November 2018—Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump—1 year 314 days until death of H. W. Bush.
Six living Presidents, no living predecessors:
April 1789 to March 1797—George Washington, no earlier President
December 1799 to March 1801—John Adams after death of Washington
July 1875 to March 1877—Ulysses S. Grant after death of Andrew Johnson
June 1908 to March 1909—Theodore Roosevelt after death of Grover Cleveland
January 1933 to March 1933—Herbert Hoover after death of Calvin Coolidge
January 1973 to August 1974—Richard Nixon after death of Lyndon B. Johnson
‘AOC Is Right: She and Joe Biden Should Not Be in the Same Party’
By Neil Meyer
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/aoc-joe-biden-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-same-party?utm_source=Jacobin&utm_campaign=11b3d97993-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_01_07_50_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_be8b1b2846-11b3d97993-85492921&mc_cid=11b3d97993&mc_eid=15d0c14ad6
In a story released yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she and Joe Biden “would not be in the same party†in a different country. Centrists went to war. But she’s right — fighters for the working class like AOC and Bernie Sanders aren’t on the same team as defenders of Wall Street and war like Biden.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. She, Bernie Sanders, and the millions of working-class people ready to fight for a “political revolution†don’t belong in the same political party as Joe Biden. The fact that they nevertheless are all “Democrats†is one of the most frustrating facts of American politics.
In a recent interview with New York magazine, AOC seemed to indicate that the thought of a Joe Biden presidency does not inspire her — to put it politely. AOC groaned, according to the article, and then confessed: “Oh God. In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.â€
Unsurprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez’s comments are making the rounds. Ben McAdams, the Democratic representative for Utah’s 4th congressional district, pounced on AOC for supposedly forgetting that as Democrats “we’re all on the same team.†Fred Guttenberg, a prominent gun safety advocate, called her points “disturbing and wrong.†And many random liberal Twitter users expressed some version of “Why don’t you join another party then?â€
But are we really on the same team?
The political distance between AOC and Bernie Sanders on the one hand, and Joe Biden on the other, is stunning. They’re not on the same team when it comes to their vision for America — and thank God for that.
On Medicare for All? AOC and Sanders believe that health care is a right, and that it should be guaranteed to everyone from birth to death via a single-payer plan. Biden disagrees, and he supports preserving the for-profit health insurance system that bankrupts millions but lines the pockets of billionaires.
On the environment? AOC and Sanders back a multitrillion-dollar Green New Deal that will transform our economy, pushing us rapidly toward one-hundred-percent renewable energy to avert the worst effects of climate change. On the other hand, as the Sunrise Movement details extensively in their candidate scorecard, Biden’s plan fails in almost every regard to measure up to the moment. The kind of tepid transition to renewable energy — the kind that Biden argues for — is so insufficient that it is, in AOC’s words, “a form of denialism.â€
On mass incarceration? AOC and Sanders want to end it. Biden built his early career pushing Ronald Reagan from the right to create it.
On Social Security? AOC and Sanders want to dramatically expand it. Biden has a history — first in the 1990s and then again in the early 2010s — of trying to slash it.
On abortion rights? AOC and Sanders are categorically in favor. Biden has consistently equivocated.
On war? AOC and Sanders vigorously oppose US military action abroad. Biden voted for the Iraq War and has been a reliable hawk in Washington, DC, for decades.
These are not candidates running on the same agenda or cut from the same cloth. AOC, Sanders, and other democratic socialists run their campaigns exclusively through the support of working-class volunteers and contributors. Meanwhile, Biden (and Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and almost every other Democrat) run campaigns bankrolled by Wall Street and other big-money donors and managed by mercenary consultants.
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Our Dysfunctional Party Coalitions ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
In any reasonable political system, voters would be presented with a choice between the vision advanced by democratic socialists like AOC and Sanders and the vision — if it can be called that — of career politicians like Joe Biden.
Such a system does not exist in the United States. At least not yet.
That’s in large part due to the unique institutional setup of American politics. Winner-take-all elections are a big part of the problem (a system of proportional representation would be infinitely preferable). But so is the outsize influence of the US presidency, which leads to exceedingly long national campaigns in which third-party candidates always threaten to act as “spoilers†— as well as highly restrictive ballot access laws in most states.
Absent a competitive multiparty system, dissident candidates have in recent years made the most progress by running on the ballot lines of the major parties. The “tents†covering acceptable political ideas in both parties have expanded dramatically as a result.
Few in Congress seem to be very happy with this new arrangement. As AOC notes, “Democrats can be too big of a tent.†From a very different perspective, former Republican speaker of the House Paul Ryan made a similar point to Politico — and got closer to the nub of the problem — in 2018: “Ryan [said] last fall that the fractures in the Republican Party threatened to make governing impossible. ‘We basically run a coalition government,’ he complained, ‘without the efficiency of a parliamentary system.’â€
Paul Ryan’s politics may be despicable, but his point here is a good one. In any other country, the diehard far-right Trump team, the self-proclaimed “respectable†but austerity-crazed Republicans like Paul Ryan, the Biden-Buttigieg-Clinton-Obama sphere of big-business-friendly social liberals, and democratic socialists like AOC and Sanders would sort themselves into four different parties.
These four parties would then run competitively in general elections, presenting four different visions for the country’s future to voters. In the seventy or so congressional races on average, for example, that are won by less than a ten-percentage-point margin, the main fight might come down to a race between Ryans and Bidens. In the remaining 365 seats, elections in today’s solidly red districts might come down to fights between the Ryans and Trumps, while in today’s solidly blue districts, Bidens would face off against AOCs.
The end result might be similar to the makeup of Congress today, with no party having a clear majority. Coalitions could then be entertained, via formal negotiations with clear pacts arranged between parties.
But the critical advantage in this arrangement would be that general elections would test the popularity of four very different political programs before a critical mass of voters.
Instead, in the United States today these vital battles between very different visions happen in low-turnout primaries in which few voters weigh in. Worse still, the political loyalties of candidates are usually unclear, and kept purposefully so by many candidates afraid of alienating voters. As a result, most people in the ballot booth have an understandably difficult time sussing out which political faction within the existing parties a candidate might belong to.
This is precisely the problem that formal parties were designed to resolve. It’s no surprise that parties have therefore emerged in almost every functioning democracy. Identifying the tens of thousands of candidates that run every election cycle with a political party is a means to make complicated decisions more transparent. It ought to allow a voter to easily choose the candidates most closely aligned with that voter’s politics.
The broken party system in the United States frustrates that basic but essential function. US parties today subsist as chaotic and only barely logical coalitions of many different political tendencies. A voter who always votes Democrat may be supporting a pro-war, abortion-equivocating, anti-Medicare-for-All, climate-change-ignoring candidate — or a democratic socialist.
Fundamental change is needed. How we get out of this nightmare for democratic decision-making is the big question for the 2020s, though there are no easy solutions. But regardless of where change comes from, AOC is undeniably correct that the current party system in the United States is absurd and a travesty for democracy. She and Biden don’t belong in the same party. No party is big enough for the both of them.
The goal is to save our democracy from the POS in the White House. Right now, all signs are pointing to Joe Biden being the best candidate to do so.
I second that Biden will be the winner. Here’s why…
Iowa and New Hampshire Are Skewing Coverage of the Democratic Primary
If not for the polling results in those two states, no one would be talking about Sanders.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/01/02/iowa-and-new-hampshire-are-skewing-coverage-of-the-democratic-primary/
On Thursday, Julián Castro became the latest Democratic candidate to drop out of the presidential race. Back in August, I wrote about why his candidacy mattered. One of the reasons was that many of his proposals on things like immigration reform, universal pre-K, lead abatement, criminal justice reform, police reform, and housing became the templates that other candidates incorporated into their plans.
Over the last couple of months, however, Castro has taken on an issue that all of the other candidates avoid like the plague.
[This week Castro is doing what few candidates laser-focused on winning would dare to do: question the fairness of the presidential primary system itself. Specifically, he is noting that Iowa and New Hampshire, the two big, bellwether states whose voters largely determine who has the White House goods, are lacking in racial and ethnic diversity. Iowa, which famously holds the first caucus of the primary season, is about 91% white while New Hampshire is 94% white.
“I actually do believe that we do need to change the order of the states,†Castro said in an interview with MSNBC on Sunday from, yes, Iowa. “Demographically, it’s not reflective of the U.S. as a whole, certainly not reflective of the Democratic Party, and I believe other states should have their chance.â€]
We can all agree that politically, a statement like that isn’t a huge risk for a candidate who had no chance of winning either Iowa or New Hampshire. But Castro gave voice to an issue that is becoming increasingly important for Democrats to confront.
If the 2020 Democratic primary plays out as the polls indicate right now, the predominantly white voters of Iowa and New Hampshire will produce results very different from the two more diverse states that follow: Nevada and South Carolina. Given that white Democrats are actually a minority of primary voters (approximately 40-45 percent), the first-in-the-nation states fail to capture the kind of coalition that is required to win the nomination. But as Castro points out, their status also skews the issues that are highlighted.
[There’s a difference between states that are diverse and those that are not. If people are living and working around people that are different from themselves, they’re more likely as people and as voters to understand a range of different issues in more depth.]
Contrary to what a lot of people believe, putting Iowa and New Hampshire first was not intentional and isn’t the way things have always been. Before 1968, most states didn’t even hold presidential primaries. As Leonard Stark has documented, Iowa solidified its role as the first caucus state in 1972. New Hampshire did the same as the first primary state in 1980. It wasn’t until 2008 that the Democratic National Committee chose Nevada and South Carolina to go next to provide African Americans and Hispanics a greater voice in the nomination.
According to the polling aggregates at FiveThirtyEight, the voters in Nevada and South Carolina do a better job of capturing the national sentiment about the 2020 race. If, as Martin Longman has suggested, it is coming down to a contest between Biden and Sanders, the two are basically tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. But in Nevada, Biden holds a seven point advantage. In South Carolina, his lead jumps to 24 percent. Nationally, Biden leads by ten. In other words, if it weren’t for the polling results in the first two states, no one would be talking about Sanders’s chances.
For those who are interested in the wonkiness of delegate selection, Walter Shapiro provides an interesting tidbit about another advantage that Biden holds with his strong support among African Americans.
[Even though statewide results are what the TV networks emphasize on primary nights, most Democratic convention delegates will be chosen by congressional districts. Elaine Kamarck, a longtime member of the DNC’s rules committee and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out that each congressional district is awarded a certain number of convention delegates (usually four or five) based on its prior Democratic vote. Because congressional districts with a heavy concentration of African American voters deliver such lopsided Democratic margins, they often have eight or nine delegates.
As Biden himself might say, this calculus of primary support is getting a little wonky—but the math is important for understanding the contours of the coming nomination fight.
A candidate needs to collect at least 15 percent of the vote in a congressional district to win a delegate. An affluent suburban district might split its five votes: Warren two, Buttigieg two, and Biden one. But in a majority-minority district, Biden might be the only candidate hitting the 15 percent threshold. So, in such a scenario, he could walk off with all nine delegates.]
To get an idea of where those majority-minority districts are located, here is a map of majority-black cities and towns in the U.S.
(see map in article)
Because African Americans have traditionally been the most loyal voting block for the Democratic Party, many of those cities and towns get a disproportionate number of delegates, making those Southern states crucial for gaining the nomination. Clinton lost them to Obama in 2008, and Sanders lost them to Clinton in 2016. Nuff said.
It is still possible that the early states will surprise us with their results. That has certainly happened before. But at this point in the campaign, the advantage belongs to Biden. Unless the predominantly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire change that calculus, he will be the Democratic nominee.
Exactly, Leia! That’s been my thinking as well.
CNN says South Carolina is the key as to whether Bernie or Joe wins. Right now, Bernie is trailing there by over 20 points. His current deficit, however, is much smaller than it was at this point in 2016. He trails Biden by a lot less among black voters (a majority of the South Carolina Democratic primary electorate) than he did Hillary Clinton.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/12/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-election-poll-of-the-week/index.html