Charlie Cook, an avatar of centrism, asked yesterday if Democrats can grab the center now that Trump alienated it from the Republicans. As he says, the electorate is made up of two sides and a big mushy middle. Sometimes it's a third, a third and a third. Going all the way back to the American Revolution, we found about a third of the country siding with the Patriots, a third, the conservatives, siding with the British and about a third who didn't want to be bothered. I recall that when I was in college politics, about 30% of the students wanted to see the War against Vietnam ended, about 30% supported it and about 40% were studying for the Physics exam and didn't want to be bothered by that kind of stuff. If we motivated out 30% and nibbled away at some of the engineering and pre-med students, we won. There ws at at-large student senate seat I won with the highest number of votes. We used that strategy I described but I know I really won for other reasons too. I was a senior and had been around forever and had immense name recognition. I had brought the Doors, the Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Temptations, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Big Brother, Tim Buckley, Otis Redding, etc to the school gym for free concerts. What Cook wrote was that "The side passionately supporting Trump is about 35 percent of voters; the side adamantly opposed to him represents about 45 percent; and the middle is somewhere between 15 and 20 percent... A national poll released by Monmouth University this week showed many voters in the middle moving away from Trump. Thirty-seven percent of registered voters surveyed thought that 'President Trump should be re-elected,' while 60 percent felt it was 'time to have someone else in office.'"
Trump is not ahead or tied in any of the 20 states (plus D.C.) carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Worse yet, he trails in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the states that effectively determined the outcome of the 2016 election. In fact, Trump apparently lags in polls conducted for his reelection campaign in 17 swing or potentially swing states.
Cook points to national polls showing Biden Bernie and Elizabeth Warren all beating him in head-to-head match-ups. "But," he asked, "what will that 15 to 20 percent in the middle be thinking about when they actually begin to focus on the race? This is hardly a monolithic group that will simultaneously pick up and move in the same direction, but what will the preponderance of voters do, keeping in mind that Trump needs to win between two-thirds and three-quarters of them? Republicans should hope they don't look at Trump and his administration and focus on the three C’s: chaos, conflict, and competence. Do they see the president and his team on top of the job, knowledgeable, possessing the right skill set and addressing problems in an organized and disciplined way-- or, not so much? The old line about 'no drama Obama' was more right than not. These days, the atmosphere of the White House is more like that of a soap opera, or even the WWE.
Notice the absence of scandal in this narrative. Those voters obsessed about Russia, emolument clauses, obstruction of justice, collusion, or any other allegations-- those who see a “moral imperative” to impeach the president-- are fully baked into the 45-47 percent who adamantly oppose him. The group of voters in the middle don’t love or hate Trump; they just want things to function....The age-old debate over whether it is better to nominate a candidate who can motivate the party base or one who reaches into the middle, appealing to independent and other swing voters, is presenting a choice of walking or chewing gum-- you have to do both. Where these things come into conflict is that the issues that most motivate the base, whether within the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, are often ones that grate on the nonideological, or at least less ideology-driven, voters in the middle.Trump has clearly picked the base-motivation model, effectively conceding the middle ground to Democrats-- if they choose to take it.
Persuading that 20% of voters that Medicare-For-All, the Green New Deal, a fairer shake for the 99% is a great way to win over the middle. Its exactly what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie are out on the hustings doing. As author and former Hillary advisor Peter Daou tweeted today, "Mealy-mouthed, milquetoast 'centrism' and 'bipartisanship' isn't going to cut it. At this rate, if we don't stand up with courage and conviction, fascists are going to run right over us."Today, Status Quo Joe was too frightened of Democrats to show up at the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco today. All the other candidates did. So... a Biden flyer showed up in his place. It was a really well put together piece with all the quotes Democrats need to help assess a man who more and more realize is just, basically, Obama's rib. The first quote was from a Brookings Institure speech one year ago. Biden is always more comfortable speaking at gatherings of wealthy conservatives than at rallies with real people. He said "I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble... The folks at the top aren’t bad guys." He always thought the guys at the top weren't the bad guys. That's why he spent his entire career blowing them. And they guys at the bottom? They are the bad guys and Biden spent that same despicable career making their lives worse, by showing them in prison, helping the credit card companies charge them more, sending their children to die in senseless wars, etc. No wonder he was too scared to show up in San Francisco at an event filled with party activists!Second quote was made in a state he feels more comfortable speaking in, Alabama, where he told a roomful of rich donors "Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are." Wouldn't you love to hear him say that at a Democratic Party convention in San Francisco? He'd be booed back to Delaware. Or maybe to Omaha, where in February, 2018 he stated publicly that Pence "is a decent guy." Sure, especially decent to the LGBTQ community and to women, a group Biden has never taken seriously anyway. In fact, speaking a few years earlier-- in 2015-- before Biden followed him as vice president, he was at George Washington University where he said-- and this wasn't part of a joke-- that "I really like Dick Cheney for real. I get on with him, I think he’s a decent man." So you think Dick Cheney, is a decent man?There were some great quotes by some respected journalists on Page one as well:
"Biden voted for repeated rounds of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy-- often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy." – Journalist Ryan Cooper, The Week (3-20-19)"In more than four decades of public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now animate his party... Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during the Clinton years.... Biden’s regular Joe credibility is based entirely on his personal background, as someone who grew up working class and speaks with the rough masculinity that Washington interprets as authenticity. But his politics have always relied on elite assumptions about the economy."– HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter (5-5-19)"Biden’s team apparently is fixated on the relatively small number of workers in the building trades unions who want to keep on constructing natural gas pipelines (and perhaps, since he hasn’t signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, on big donors from the hydrocarbon sector). This is old-school thinking at its best: throw young voters, overwhelmingly fixated on climate change, under the dirty diesel bus in an effort to win a narrowing pool of union leaders, who gathered in the Oval Office with Trump to celebrate in the early days of his presidency."– Bill McKibben, The Guardian (5-11-19)"Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights." – Rebecca Traister, feminist author, writing for TheCut.com (3-29-19)"It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible... In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show [in summer 2002] designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.”– Middle East Studies professor Stephen Zunes, University of San Francisco, Foreign Policy in Focus (8-24-08)"It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about.... As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden didn’t just craft the 1994 crime bill – he also ushered a variety of other draconian measures into law.... During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people)."– New York magazine journalist Eric Levitz (3-12-19)“[Biden] earned sharp criticism from both the NAACP and ACLU in the 1970s for his aggressive opposition to school busing as a tool for achieving school desegregation.” In 1984, Biden “joined with South Carolina’s arch-racist Strom Thurmond to sponsor the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. He and Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration.”– Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Cornel West, The Guardian (5-1-19)"Turnout from the Democratic Party’s base will be crucial to whether Trump can be defeated in November 2020. Biden’s record of dog-whistling is made to order for depressing enthusiasm and turnout from that base, especially among African Americans. Apt to be a big political liability among voters who normally vote Democratic in large numbers, Joe Biden’s historic dog-whistling for racism is an incontrovertible reality. Denial of that reality could help him win the party’s nomination-- and then help Donald Trump get re-elected.”"– California Democratic Party Central Committee member Norman Solomon, CommonDreams.org (5-23-19)
In 1975 Biden was interviewed by The People Paper in Delaware, and he said, on the record, "I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, 'We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.' I don’t buy that." More Biden quotes:"One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail."– Joe Biden, 1990The 1994 crime bill "did not generate mass incarceration."– Joe Biden, campaigning in New Hampshire (5-14-19)"My greatest accomplishment is the 1994 crime bill." – Joe Biden, speaking to the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2007"I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don't care why someone is antisocial. I don't care why they've become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society." – Joe Biden, speaking on the Senate floor for what became the landmark 1994 crime law (11-18-93)"We must take back the streets. It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons."– Joe Biden, speaking on the Senate floor (11-18-93)