Running List of Declared 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Kjbartolotta · Jun 28, 2019

frimble3 said:
I may be an outlier and a foreigner, but when you say 'Southie', I think of gangs. And the IRA.

My mom's a Southie. Admittedly, they got outta there when she was four, so YMMV if she typifies the experience.

ElaineA · Jun 29, 2019

KBooks said:
but I'm not sure deciding not to vote for Beto (a moderate) necessarily translates into Team Castro. I would suspect they'd be more likely to go for Buttigieg or Biden instead.

There's something probably-accurate about that suspicion, but I can't qwhite put my finger on it.

MaeZe · Jun 29, 2019

Biden is toast. He shouldn't have said it wasn't so.

Democracy Now Interview: Jonathan Kozol: Joe Biden Didn’t Just Praise Segregationists. He Also Spent Years Fighting Busing

AMY GOODMAN: ...

While Biden’s recent comments made the news, far less attention has been paid to the former vice president’s actual record. In the 1970s, then-Senator Biden was a fierce critic of Delaware’s attempts to bus students in an effort to integrate its schools. In a recently unearthed interview from 1975, Biden said, quote, “We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown v. School Board desegregation case. … To 'desegregate' is different than to 'integrate.'” He went on to say, quote, “The real problem with busing is that you take [white] people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school,” unquote. CNN recently revealed that in 1977 Biden wrote a letter to the segregationist Senator James Eastland thanking him for supporting his anti-busing legislation ....

JONATHAN KOZOL [National Book Award-winning author]**: Joe Biden didn’t simply reach out, in consensus, some kind of civility, to these Southern racist senators. It wasn’t hard for him to reach out, because he shared their views in the first place. He didn’t just support legislation introduced by James Eastland, Jesse Helms. He thanked them for supporting his legislation and his own anti-busing legislation. He called busing “asinine.” And worse than that, at one point he even came to the point of saying—I want to get his words exact—of saying, “I’ve gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing is a constitutional amendment.” Just stunning words.

OMG! An anti-busing crusader, wrote legislation against busing, suggested a Constitutional Amendment because he believed that strongly against busing... And he now describes that as never being against busing, just being against a federal mandate?

Here's the article from The Nation: When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists - The candidate’s years as an anti-busing crusader cannot be forgotten—or readily forgiven.

In the interview, which captured an early unfiltered Biden, today’s Democratic front-runner picked through a grab bag of anti-integration canards to make his case against busing—among them, the idea that a school where children of different races or multiple ethnicities sit in class together is doomed to be inferior. ...

WA Post reporters unearthed the interview. It's behind a paywall for me but there's a link to it in The Nation article.

Nor did Biden stop there. With bald disregard for centuries of American history, he said, “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and…in order to even the score, we must now give the black man”—no reference to black women—“a head start or even hold the white man back.… I don’t buy that.”

He concluded, “I oppose busing. It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. I’ve gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.”

But oh no, he wasn't racist.

Apparently Biden's anti-bussing legislation was mentioned in the CNN letters but it seems the collaboration with the segregationists got the most attention.

In a stunning piece of reportage in Politico in 2015, historian Jason Sokol surfaced Biden’s argument that busing children for the sake of integration was an insult to black people because it implies that they “have no reason to be proud of…their own culture” and cannot learn unless they’re sitting next to a white child. By dragging out this chestnut, Biden sought to turn the tables on Senate integrationists.

I think Biden had a prepared answer to the collaborating with segregationists accusation but was caught off-guard by the bussing questions.

**

Jonathan Kozol is the National Book Award-winning author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities and other books on children in inner-city schools. He taught fifth grade for two years in Boston's suburban interdistrict program, the longest-lasting voluntary integration effort in the nation. Kozol is the winner of the 2005 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.

Introversion · Jun 29, 2019

If Biden truly had a change of heart from his past, and wasn't a bull-headed fool, he could've tried being humble and admitting that he'd had some wrong ideas in the past, and was ashamed of that past. But no, he's a bull-headed fool, and deserves to be nowhere near the White House.

That said, dog help me, if he's the Dem nominee, I'll vote for him. Not because I'll only ever vote for Dems, but because the GOP offers me nothing.

cbenoi1 · Jun 29, 2019

Auteur said:
Democrats should call Trump: Treasonous Trump, because he has committed treason several times.

I prefer Orange Suit Trump.

-cb

MaeZe · Jun 29, 2019

Introversion said:
If Biden truly had a change of heart from his past, and wasn't a bull-headed fool, he could've tried being humble and admitting that he'd had some wrong ideas in the past, and was ashamed of that past. But no, he's a bull-headed fool, and deserves to be nowhere near the White House.

That said, dog help me, if he's the Dem nominee, I'll vote for him. Not because I'll only ever vote for Dems, but because the GOP offers me nothing.

My speculation: he doesn't believe those were racist attitudes. But over the years he's done one of two things, or both. He recognizes that it sounds racist so he alters the retelling into what we heard at the debates, he wasn't really against bussing, just the mandate. Or, he has false memories of the events.

It's going to be a rude awakening when he reads his own words. Unless your brain works like Trump's does, it's pretty hard to read those words and claim it really just meant he was against federal control that SCOTUS ordered. Expect him to revise his rationalization to 'it was his opinion but he had nothing against a local administration holding a different opinion.

He'll first try not to talk about it. Reporters will ask questions about the evidence and he'll dismiss the questions. Eventually he'll come up with some less than credible rationalization.

I'll be shocked if he actually says he didn't remember that was his position and he now admits he's very sorry for that.

nighttimer · Jun 29, 2019

Auteur said:
I wonder what nickname Trump will give Kamala.

I'm sure The Orange Cheeto has a few already picked out. The thing is, even Trump has to have some degree of caution in whatever nickname he hangs on Harris. She is not Hillary Clinton and when Trump tees off on a Black woman he has to strike a balance between demeaning humiliation and overt bigotry.

For now, the immediate threat Harris has to deal with are the Russian bots and trolls coming for her, as well as the right-wing sleeper agents who are remixing Birtherism to a 2019 beat.

Not long after Sen. Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden’s record on race during part two of the first Democratic debate last night, a barrage of tweets questioned her race and US citizenship. While these claims erupted into national prominence last night, in part due to a quote-tweet from Donald Trump Jr., falsehoods about her have long been simmering in fringe conspiracy and neo-Nazi circles.

Just as Barack Obama’s US citizenship and background became a full-fledged conspiracy theory — promoted at the time by Donald Trump — Harris has also been targeted with disinformation questioning her race and legitimacy as a US citizen. Obama birther conspiracy theorists and prominent neo-Nazis, including Andrew Anglin, have questioned her eligibility to run for president, and she’s been labeled an “anchor baby.”

In fact, Harris was born in Oakland to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, and is eligible to run for president.

“Seeing the tweets declaring that Kamala isn’t black enough because her parents are from Jamaica and India, I had an immediate flashback to the 2008 campaign,” Shauna Daly, who led the fight against online smears on the Obama campaign, told BuzzFeed News. That campaign faced an early wave of rumors about Obama’s race and religion, which later coalesced into false claims about the president’s birthplace, whose most famous champion was Donald Trump.

The senator’s campaign didn’t comment on the claims after being contacted by BuzzFeed News. However, Harris herself is alert to the pattern and made a connection between claims made about her and Obama birtherism in a February radio interview later broadcast on CNN.

“This is the same thing they did to Barack, this is not new to us,” she said. Harris said “powerful voices trying to sow hate and division among us. And so we need to recognize when we’re being played.”
Last night’s tweets, some of which were amplified by bots and in one case by Trump Jr., gave a new level of exposure to earlier claims propagated by fringe websites and discredited figures such as Jacob Wohl and the virulent neo-Nazi Anglin.

As documented by social media researcher Caroline Orr, Harris’s presence in the debate led to an onslaught of tweets that claimed she isn’t black, was not born in the United States, and was raised in Canada. (Harris went to high school in Canada, but otherwise lived in the US.)

This is how it starts. The weaponization of social media by foreign powers, extremists, fake-ass "hoteps" and other freaks who want to throw the 2020 election into total chaos. Don't believe the hype.

MaeZe · Jun 29, 2019

nighttimer said:
I'm sure The Orange Cheeto has a few already picked out. The thing is, even Trump has to have some degree of caution in whatever nickname he hangs on Harris. She is not Hillary Clinton and when Trump tees off on a Black woman he has to strike a balance between demeaning humiliation and overt bigotry.

For now, the immediate threat Harris has to deal with are the Russian bots and trolls coming for her, as well as the right-wing sleeper agents who are remixing Birtherism to a 2019 beat.

This is how it starts. The weaponization of social media by foreign powers, extremists, fake-ass "hoteps" and other freaks who want to throw the 2020 election into total chaos. Don't believe the hype.

This is how it starts indeed. The book I'm reading, Cyberwar - How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect A President : What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, covers the 'priming of the propaganda pump' which sounds like this very thing. Throw a bunch of stuff out there ahead of time and when the trolls and bots are ready, they turn the pump on.

It's a very worthwhile book to read, a little tedious in parts, but that's because she describes in detail what was done to change the election outcome in 2016.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?455539-1/cyber-war
https://www.c-span.org/video/?459639-1/depth-kathleen-hall-jamieson

ElaineA · Jun 29, 2019

The bots and trolls will be coming for Harris from every side. The "she's not black enough" side and the "she's a traitor to black people" side, based on her work as a prosecutor (multi-tracked with the "birtherism-2019" and Candace Owens's #BLEXIT movement). I understand people from CA have been skeptical about her background as a prosecutor for a long time, and I'm sure a legitimate conversation will take place during the primary process. I'm only talking narrowly here, about the deluge of coordinated social media attacks.

I strongly recommend people follow Caroline Orr on Twitter @RVAwonk for the campaign season, or at least bookmark her profile for fact-checking backup. She's really on top of this stuff when it's happening, and in real time. Her posting of the copy/paste tweets during the debate was amazing.

Also be aware that a Trump reelection operative is in on the disinformation act (with Team Trump's explicit thumbs-up) by running a fake Biden website (link goes to a Daily Beast quick-headline page that points to a NYT article). The phony site is near the top of Joe Biden search results online. The operative has them for Bernie & Harris, as well, they're just not as high in the search results. Yet.

Everyone needs to squint hard at what they see and read this election cycle, even if it seems like it's saying something we like. 493 days until election day. It's going to be a brutal slog.

MaeZe · Jun 29, 2019

ElaineA said:
The bots and trolls will be coming for Harris from every side. The "she's not black enough" side and the "she's a traitor to black people" side, based on her work as a prosecutor (multi-tracked with the "birtherism-2019" and Candace Owens's #BLEXIT movement). I understand people from CA have been skeptical about her background as a prosecutor for a long time, and I'm sure a legitimate conversation will take place during the primary process. I'm only talking narrowly here, about the deluge of coordinated social media attacks.

I strongly recommend people follow Caroline Orr on Twitter @RVAwonk for the campaign season, or at least bookmark her profile for fact-checking backup. She's really on top of this stuff when it's happening, and in real time. Her posting of the copy/paste tweets during the debate was amazing.

Also be aware that a Trump reelection operative is in on the disinformation act (with Team Trump's explicit thumbs-up) by running a fake Biden website (link goes to a Daily Beast quick-headline page that points to a NYT article). The phony site is near the top of Joe Biden search results online. The operative has them for Bernie & Harris, as well, they're just not as high in the search results. Yet.

Everyone needs to squint hard at what they see and read this election cycle, even if it seems like it's saying something we like. 493 days until election day. It's going to be a brutal slog.

This is an important post, should be bumped now and again or stickied.

Kjbartolotta · Jun 30, 2019

A solid Medium.com article examining Kamala's record as a prosecutor, certainly favorable but covers most of the criticisms against her and why they tend to get overblown. Hits most of the commonly pointed out complaints; the truancy program, her unwillingness to prosecute Mnuchin, and the vague assertion she has a vested interest in 'locking up black men'. Definitely syncs up with what I've seen of her as a Californian and former SF resident.

Roxxsmom · Jun 30, 2019

ElaineA said:
Also be aware that a Trump reelection operative is in on the disinformation act (with Team Trump's explicit thumbs-up) by running a fake Biden website (link goes to a Daily Beast quick-headline page that points to a NYT article). The phony site is near the top of Joe Biden search results online. The operative has them for Bernie & Harris, as well, they're just not as high in the search results. Yet.

I think I ran across it when I was googling Joe Biden (trying fruitlessly to find an official site to comment or show responses on a couple of things he said in the debate). They show him touching women and kissing crying babies and so on and it seems pretty clear they're set up by Trump people. Rather rich that they're tossing stones from within their glass house.

I suppose someone could set up a similar site for Trump, except he does it for himself already. Not that his base cares.

Auteur · Jun 30, 2019

Harris got a bump in the polls from the last debate. She's now tied with Warren for third.

Biden is down five points from the last Politico/Morning Consult poll, which was on Tuesday.

https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/

MacAllister · Jun 30, 2019

MaeZe said:
This is an important post, should be bumped now and again or stickied.

Excellent idea.

Done!

MaeZe · Jun 30, 2019

Priming the social media pump against Harris has begun.

"Birther" tweet targets Kamala Harris. 2020 Democrats rushed to her defense.

Kamala Harris was the target of a birtherism-like attack — retweeted and then deleted by President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. — targeting her identity as "not an American Black." ...

President Trump was one of the leading voices, along with a group of conspiracy theorists, who questioned whether former President Obama was really born in the U.S. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, would not directly answer whether the president's birther conspiracy against Mr. Obama was racist.

CNN: 'It won't work:' Kamala Harris' campaign slams online attacks on her race

President Trump was one of the leading voices, along with a group of conspiracy theorists, who questioned whether former President Obama was really born in the U.S. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, would not directly answer whether the president's birther conspiracy against Mr. Obama was racist.

Keep in mind, these obviously false assertions are meant to 'prime the pump' for later attacks. When the second barrage comes out some people will say, 'I think I did hear something about that before.'

BenPanced · Jul 1, 2019

But apparently her record on transgender issues is rather unpleasant and questionable, so I'm raising my doubts based on that.

MaeZe · Jul 1, 2019

BenPanced said:
But apparently her record on transgender issues is rather unpleasant and questionable, so I'm raising my doubts based on that.

Huh?

From your link:

On transgender issues in particular, Zbur noted Harris as attorney general appointed last year a transgender woman of color, Mariana Marroquin, to the California Racial & Identity Profiling Advisory Board.

Her record is 99% very positive.

She balked at the state paying for reassignment surgery for two inmates. That's a tricky issue. Given all of the pro-LGBT work Harris has done (cited in that article), I don't think this disqualifies Harris.

But one part of her record she might avoid is her role as California attorney general in 2015 in arguing on behalf of the state to withhold gender reassignment surgery from two transgender inmates who were prescribed the procedure while serving out their sentences. Advocates have made the case that transgender inmates are entitled to receive the taxpayer-funded procedure because denying them medical treatment amounts to cruel and unusual punishment — a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

People should read your link and decide for themselves.

Auteur · Jul 1, 2019

Harris is now in second place!

Biden: 22 percent (-10 from last poll)
Harris: 17 (+9)
Warren: 15 (+8)
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/07/01/rel8a.-.democrats.and.healthcare.pdf

BenPanced · Jul 1, 2019

MaeZe said:
She balked at the state paying for reassignment surgery for two inmates. That's a tricky issue. Given all of the pro-LGBT work Harris has done (cited in that article), I don't think this disqualifies Harris.

But that's just it: "for all the pro-LGBT" work people have done has generally given short shrift to the T in the equation. The Human Rights Campaign has also regularly dragged their feet on transgender people; hell, look up shaky their record on ENDA.

But, hey, never mind there were also some recent questions about her misgendering people. Yay, rah, stellar record, otherwise. :sarcasm

MaeZe · Jul 1, 2019

BenPanced said:
But that's just it: "for all the pro-LGBT" work people have done has generally given short shrift to the T in the equation. The Human Rights Campaign has also regularly dragged their feet on transgender people; hell, look up shaky their record on ENDA.

But, hey, never mind there were also some recent questions about her misgendering people. Yay, rah, stellar record, otherwise.

I'm not following you, Ben.

I'll keep my evaluation of Harris open and try to gather more information.

BenPanced · Jul 1, 2019

Point blank: everybody's praising her for her QUILTBAG record. Which isn't as stellar or shiny as everybody expects/wants/claims. I'm questioning it because of these fouls/gaffes/little slip-ups/whatever you want to call them. I'm questioning it because, once again, trans people tend to get overlooked or misrepresented in the greater scheme of QUILTBAG rights (ETA: guilty of said infraction on many occasions in the past but trying to overcome my own personal ignorance/biases and hopefully becoming a better person).

Maybe I shouldn't have thrown in the mention of the HRC but I felt it was a necessary parallel. Maybe I'll just sit the rest of this one out. I don't know. I'm trying to figure out where I wasn't so clear and I thought by sharing these links, my position would be a little more clear. I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I feel like I'm being brushed aside because my enthusiasm is a bit more bridled than the rest of the room and that I should leave the talking to the big kids.

*exeunt*

MaeZe · Jul 1, 2019

Well don't sit this one out. Your voice is important.

If Harris were out, who's in?

I like Pete, but he's young and I think Harris has more experience. I've heard negative things about her years as a prosecutor, but now I'm beginning to think some of that was faux negative campaigning. That article noting her LBGQ record was encouraging. I don't know that not going all-in supporting state funding of transgender prisoner medical needs is a deal breaker. Some of those issues are evolving.

I have some insight on expensive health care for incarcerated persons. It's taken a while to get HIV treatment for inmates. Progress has been made. Now there is an issue, we know sex occurs in prisons. It's not supposed to. So how do you justify prophylaxis HIV care for prisoners? They should have a right to those meds.

Progress has been made in Hep C treatment in prisons, also a very expensive commitment. So now if you are incarcerated in WA State, you will receive Hep C treatment. But if you are not incarcerated and too poor to afford health care while not poor enough for Medicaid, you cannot get treatment for Hep C.

I bring this up to point out how complicated the cost of certain new medical procedures and medications are in this current era. We've made great strides. The fact that Harris is not leading the charge for transgender gender reassignment surgery, well, it's a cause to keep working on.

But if she will make a great POTUS with some flaws, I'm still leaning her way at the moment.

People that are pro-Sanders and/or pro-Warren have legit reasons to support those candidates and that's fine. But Sanders has some skeletons in his closet in this area and I don't know Warren's history yet. I don't see how they rate higher than Harris, but if other people think they do, great.

Right now, let's see who's in the cream settling on the top. But please don't not put your voice in. We need everyone's voices.

Lyv · Aug 23, 2019

Seth Moulton follows Jay Inslee out of the race. Moulton will run for the House again. I am not going to find out when he's in his Massachusetts office and go razz him, though I do love Salem in the fall. Just glad he's out. I don't want a Republican in his House seat, but I'd love a better Democrat.

Also glad the herd is being thinned, but of all the interchangeable white guys, Inslee was one I didn't mind staying in because of his focus on the environment, but he's going to keep up his good work, just not as a presidential candidate. He's going to run for a third term as governor.

Kjbartolotta · Aug 23, 2019

Lyv said:
Seth Moulton follows Jay Inslee out of the race. Moulton will run for the House again. I am not going to find out when he's in his Massachusetts office and go razz him, though I do love Salem in the fall. Just glad he's out. I don't want a Republican in his House seat, but I'd love a better Democrat.

Also glad the herd is being thinned, but of all the interchangeable white guys, Inslee was one I didn't mind staying in because of his focus on the environment, but he's going to keep up his good work, just not as a presidential candidate. He's going to run for a third term as governor.

Honestly, I'm spending every spare moment obsessing over every detail of the race, and I can't recall anything about Moulton.

ElaineA · Aug 23, 2019

Inslee put out a Tweet yesterday that said, "I think you'll like my new stump speech," along with a link to an Onion piece about his withdrawal. The graphic showed his face superimposed onto the trunk of a tree.

Not sure I liked being reminded that Presidents have actually been capable of being good people, funny people, caring and not-narcissistic people, quite so forcefully.

As for his future, he'll run for Gov, but if a Dem gets elected, they aren't going to let him sit out here running a state. I still say this country needs a Green New Deal Czar to marshal all of the various governmental resources to attack the energy needs of the future--especially with the horror of seeing the Amazonian forests in a fully-involved fire that covers half a country--and he's the guy for the job. So while I'm happy to keep him, I'm not counting on him actually sitting a 3rd term if a Dem wins the race (and Trump gives up the throne, both of which are suspect at the moment).

Running List of Declared 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Potentially has/is dog

All about that action, boss.

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!

No Gods No Masters

All about that action, boss.

Potentially has/is dog

Beastly Fido

Redacted

'Twas but a dream of thee

THE BLUEBERRY QUEEN OF HADES (he/him)

Redacted

THE BLUEBERRY QUEEN OF HADES (he/him)

THE BLUEBERRY QUEEN OF HADES (he/him)

I meant to do that.

Potentially has/is dog

All about that action, boss.