Harris on Wikiales

15 days away, the top 4 scrambles for an Iowa victory.

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 19:04:27 +0000

It has now been close to a year since I last wrote anything for this blog, and while I know no one has been waiting for me to do so I felt the need to continue. The main reason? The Iowa caucuses are now exactly 15 days away and we are headed for a photo finish.

As of today, the candidates with a reasonabe chance at an Iowa victory are former Vice-President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg has lapped other minor candidates in the moderate lane, even those that looked great on paper (Steve Bullock comes to mind), while Senators Sanders and Warren compete for dominance within the progressive electorate. All the while, the Vice-President continues to cruise ahead in national polls, strong and stable and running a wave of perceived electability.

Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard and the rest.

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 22:50:42 +0000

On December 31st, 2018, Elizabeth Warren announced that she was forming an exploratory committee to consider a run for president. This is the first step many candidates take in their journey for the presidency, and Warren is already touring through early states like Iowa and New Hampshire. It would be, to put it mildly, pretty damn unprecedented for her to not run for president after announcing an exploratory committee.

I have been pretty bullish on Elizabeth Warren in the past, but she's had some rough patches since I published my last entry on this blog: bad net favorability ratings, dwindling enthusiasm, poll numbers falling, etc. And let's not forget the whole DNA test debacle. All in All, the senator from Massachussets has seen her stock in the upcoming primary decline in the last month.

2020 candidates ranked.

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 23:50:17 +0000

It's been a week since I started my “The case for” series, and I've writen about all the major candidates and three minor ones since. On Sunday, I promised that today I would bring you my power ranking of 2020 democratic presidential contenders, a mere 15 months away from the Iowa caucuses. I'm not going to beat around the bush now, but I'm going to do a whole lot of that after the ranking itself, so there's no shortage of information. Without further ado, here they are:

The case for Richard Ojeda, Andrew Yang and John Delaney for president.

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 23:14:26 +0000

During the 2018 election, there was a lot of buzz around the race for West Virginia's third congressional U.S. House district. The incumbent at the time, Evan Jenkins, was retiring to run for senate, so he left an open seat that West Virginia state senator Richard Ojeda thought he could take. It was, by any standard, a tall order; WV-03 was 37% more republican leaning than the nation as a whole, the 43rd most republican district out of 435. His rival, Carol Miller, was ostensibly just a party-line republican, so it's not like she was Roy Moore bad. However, not everything was uphill for Ojeda. West Virginia is ancestrally democratic, and he was on the ticket with Joe Manchin, a democrat who was running for reelection statewide (and won). In the end though, it wasn't enough for Ojeda to eke out a win. He lost by 13%, which is still a really good result for D's. In fact, the WV-02 race -a VERY deep sleeper- ended up being closer than WV-03, democrat Talley Sergent lost by about 11% there.

The case for Harris for president.

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 21:24:31 +0000

In 2016, then attorney general Kamala Harris defeated longtime US House representative Loretta Sanchez in an election to Barbara Boxer´s senate seat. Shortly thereafter, rumors spread that the democratic establishment had chosen her as the DNC pick for president in 2020. They thought Harris could appeal to minorities enough to secure a path to 270 electoral votes, and they also thought that she could have enough appeal to both wings of the democratic party to win a primary.