I have no idea how much it will matter this year, however. For example, it's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the former mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg, wins the caucus and then quickly fades into obscurity in subsequent primaries. Or, one candidate wins in Iowa and then a different candidate wins in New Hampshire a week later, resulting in no one consolidating enough support to challenge former Vice President Joe Biden's polling edges in Nevada and South Carolina. Indeed, it's entirely possible that a single candidate (the most likely to pull this off, I suppose, is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont) wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada but then still loses to Biden in South Carolina, and the majority of states on Super Tuesday. Perhaps building momentum from winning early states just isn't A Thing anymore in our modern media landscape. I really don't know.
I do know who I plan on voting for in the Michigan primary, though: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. That is, if she hasn't dropped out of the race by then. I harbor no illusions about her chances of winning the nomination; as I type this, polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight gives her 1 in 7 odds, or a 13% chance of taking more than half the pledged delegates up for grabs:
As the image illustrates, Joe Biden has the best chance of winning at this point in time, with 2 in 5 odds. This is because Biden has held an edge in national polls for the past year now, while also maintaining a large lead in South Carolina, which has the largest number of pledged delegates to allocate out of the 4 early states. On top of that, he's very competitive in Iowa and New Hampshire.
There's no real secret to Biden's apparent lead, despite a record 29 (!) major Democratic candidates having launched presidential campaigns at some point in time in the past 3 years (as I type this, 19 have dropped out of the race, while 11 remain). He was the vice president to the most revered politician within the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, for 8 years. And he enjoys popular support from older voters and African Americans, an absolutely vital demographic in South Carolina and other states in the South.
It's a pity to see Elizabeth Warren's current standing in the race. She's the only candidate to have briefly surpassed Biden in an aggregate of the national polls out of the crowded field, and she did so as recently as October, per Real Clear Politics:
Alas, Warren's support has collapsed between then and now. I don't believe in voting strategically in presidential primaries. That is to say, I don't believe in voting based on who has the best chance of winning the general election, since no one really has any idea who is more electable. After all, our country went from electing a mild-mannered black constitutional law teacher named Barack Hussein Obama to electing a bombastic game show host and serial sexual predator with dementia named Donald Trump. We can make reasonable guesses, but anyone who says they know with 100% certainty who is going to win this November is lying. My general philosophy is to vote for my preferred candidate in the primary, and then to vote for the Democratic nominee in the general, no matter who she or he may be.
I prefer Warren for a number of reasons. I think this In These Times article by Kathleen Geier articulates my thoughts on the matter pretty well. In the article, Geier writes that "if [Warren] defeats President Donald Trump, it would mean an economic populist defeated a corrupt plutocrat, that the most leftwing Democratic presidential nominee in history defeated a racist reactionary, that a woman defeated America’s most famous misogynist. It would be an extraordinarily powerful moment." The bulk of the piece is spent detailing Warren's progressive policies. Of note is her proposed wealth tax - "a two-cents-on-the-dollar tax on assets over $50 million," which would be be used to fund much of her domestic agenda, and a "more far-reaching measure that would let workers control 40% of corporate board seats."
Beyond policy, the best reason I can think of to vote for Warren is her experience in essentially creating and briefly running a new government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), from scratch. The CFPB exists to enforce consumer financial laws and protect people from predatory companies, which has resulted in more than $13 billion being returned to aggrieved consumers thus far. And the article that perhaps sold me most on Warren's candidacy is this Politico piece, which tells the story of her fights with the Obama Administration (and then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in particular) over how the CFPB should be run and who would be its first director amidst the backdrop of the Great Recession. It's worth reading from beginning to end.
The most important lesson I took from that piece is precisely what Ezra Klein of Vox emphasizes in his own case for Warren, which I'll quote at length:
I'll take some time to write about the other candidates who could feasibly win the nomination, and why I don't think they're as good of a match. Pete Buttigieg, if elected, would be the youngest president in history, as well as the first openly gay president. That would be an undeniable progressive victory, especially given the fact that Karl Rove, the mastermind behind the George W. Bush campaign, was cynically pushing state proposals to ban same-sex marriage in an effort to bring conservatives to the polls as recently as 2004.
But Buttigieg is comically out of his depth. His political experience consists of being the mayor of the 4th largest city in Indiana, South Bend, with a population of just over 100,000 residents. To put that in perspective, my own city of Grand Rapids has just shy of 200,000, but I don't see anyone suggesting that Mayor Rosalynn Bliss should run for president. Buttigieg has proven himself to be an intelligent man throughout this campaign, but he's since turned his back on or downplayed some of the positions that initially made him an intriguing candidate, such as adding additional justices to the Supreme Court. This suggests that he doesn't exactly have ironclad principles, and is simply choosing to occupy a center left lane in the race because he thinks that's his best bet at getting nominated.
Joe Biden certainly has the experience needed to be president. Not only was he the vice president for 8 years, but he was a senator for an astonishing 36 years before that. He was sworn in to the U.S. Senate in 1973 in a hospital room because his young son, Beau, was bed ridden after a car accident, which took the lives of his wife and daughter:
Beau Biden would later die of brain cancer in 2015, at the age of 46. That is, the former vice president has witnessed the deaths of his wife, and 2 kids. Biden has certainly experienced pain in his life, and his ability to recognize and emphasize with the pain of others on a personal level is very real.
Having written that, his political record over the years clashes with my ideological preferences, and I cannot support him in the primaries as a result. Biden was a major proponent of a shitty bankruptcy reform bill in 2005 that, among other things, favored creditors at the expense of debtors, and made it virtually impossible to discharge student loan debt. Warren, who was a Harvard Law School bankruptcy professor at the time, personally debated Biden over the merits of the bill in a Senate hearing:
Furthermore, Biden has a long history of backing punitive criminal justice policies (so called "tough on crime" laws), which includes his support for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill, and many others that he voted in favor of resulted in an escalation of the War on Drugs, which has been detrimental for lower income people of color in particular. To this day, Biden is one of the only Democratic presidential candidates still opposed to the federal legalization of marijuana.
He failed in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to properly vet allegations of sexual harassment against now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas back in 1991. Biden could have called multiple witnesses who had worked with and were aware of Thomas' behavior to testify. But instead, only Anita Hill was called before the committee, thereby making her the lone voice against a powerful judge who would be confirmed to the Supreme Court shortly after the hearings. Perhaps things could have turned out differently if Biden had allowed them to testify before the public. Finally, he also voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy decision in my life time.
That brings me to Bernie Sanders.
I admire Sanders. I voted for him here in Michigan in the 2016 primary. But I was never a particularly enthusiastic supporter, and I genuinely can't relate to the Bernie Sanders worship that's easy to find on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit amidst his most ardent online supporters. I guess this is because I've watched Sanders give interviews on MSNBC and other cable networks years before many others my age have ever heard of him, and he never really struck me as distinguishable from any other liberal Democrat. He seems to have traveled the same path blazed by other progressive senators such as Tom Harkin and Paul Wellstone, though I doubt many Sanders supporters have any idea who they are.
Certainly I was aware that Sanders refers to himself as a socialist, or a democratic socialist, but that's one hell of stretch. He gave a speech this past June in which he attempted to clarify his brand of democratic socialism, but all he really ended up doing was giving a vigorous defense of New Deal liberalism as practiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. His thinking wasn't always so conventional, as the Wall Street Journal notes:
“My view was you had hundreds and hundreds of jobs that were decent-paying union jobs. You shut them down here, they’re just going to move someplace else,” Sanders told the WSJ when confronted with this. His views on this matter haven't evolved. Today, there are F-35 fighter jets based in Burlington, and numerous plants building its parts are operating in Vermont thanks to Sander's aggressive lobbying efforts. "Given the reality of the damn plane, I’d rather it come to Vermont than to South Carolina. And that’s what the Vermont National Guard wants, and that means hundreds of jobs in my city," Sanders said at a town hall in 2014.
The problem with this isn't just that the F-35 is built to drop bombs on foreigners overseas - it's that the F-35 is a piece of shit. It apparently can't "shoot straight," and has "more than 800 software flaws." And yet, the U.S. government is spending $428 billion on these goddamn things. Sanders is hardly the first senator to back questionable federal programs in an effort to bring some of that sweet, sweet money back to his home state. In fact, I raise this point to highlight the fact that he isn't a unique and beautiful snowflake - he does the same shit every other senator does! And despite the fact that he voted against going to war with Iraq in 2003, his broader military and foreign policy record is hardly perfect, as Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept points out:
Again, I'm writing all of this to point out that Sanders isn't a saint; he's a career politician who's said and done a handful of shitty things, but is otherwise pretty banal. Despite being a career politician for the past 38 years, his legislative accomplishments are thin. Perhaps his most notable achievement is a bipartisan bill he worked on with John McCain that allows veterans to access health care services from private providers outside the Veterans Affairs system. Beyond his political record, he also apparently has a habit of being an asshole to his staffers.
Sander's theory of change is that he commands an army of dedicated citizens who are mobilized and ready to take to the streets to fight for his agenda. And yet, that army and other Sander's aligned groups have a pretty poor record of getting his preferred candidates elected to higher office so that they can enact said agenda. As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine writes, "Our Revolution went 0–22, Justice Democrats went 0–16, and Brand New Congress went 0–6" in the 2018 midterm elections. It seems unlikely that he (or anyone else, for that matter) will be able to accomplish many of the big ticket items, such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a $15 an hour minimum wage if elected president. After all, the office of the presidency is only 1/3 of our government, and the U.S. Senate and its ability to filibuster legislation aren't going anywhere.
I do think that he'd be a force for good if he were to become president. I just don't believe he'd be the best at it. To be sure, Warren's accomplishments with the CFPB are quite modest in scope but, well, at least they're tangible accomplishments. Sanders wants me to believe in his ability to enact far reaching progressive changes, but he hasn't given me a compelling reason to do so.
Warren has.
There's no real secret to Biden's apparent lead, despite a record 29 (!) major Democratic candidates having launched presidential campaigns at some point in time in the past 3 years (as I type this, 19 have dropped out of the race, while 11 remain). He was the vice president to the most revered politician within the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, for 8 years. And he enjoys popular support from older voters and African Americans, an absolutely vital demographic in South Carolina and other states in the South.
It's a pity to see Elizabeth Warren's current standing in the race. She's the only candidate to have briefly surpassed Biden in an aggregate of the national polls out of the crowded field, and she did so as recently as October, per Real Clear Politics:
Alas, Warren's support has collapsed between then and now. I don't believe in voting strategically in presidential primaries. That is to say, I don't believe in voting based on who has the best chance of winning the general election, since no one really has any idea who is more electable. After all, our country went from electing a mild-mannered black constitutional law teacher named Barack Hussein Obama to electing a bombastic game show host and serial sexual predator with dementia named Donald Trump. We can make reasonable guesses, but anyone who says they know with 100% certainty who is going to win this November is lying. My general philosophy is to vote for my preferred candidate in the primary, and then to vote for the Democratic nominee in the general, no matter who she or he may be.
I prefer Warren for a number of reasons. I think this In These Times article by Kathleen Geier articulates my thoughts on the matter pretty well. In the article, Geier writes that "if [Warren] defeats President Donald Trump, it would mean an economic populist defeated a corrupt plutocrat, that the most leftwing Democratic presidential nominee in history defeated a racist reactionary, that a woman defeated America’s most famous misogynist. It would be an extraordinarily powerful moment." The bulk of the piece is spent detailing Warren's progressive policies. Of note is her proposed wealth tax - "a two-cents-on-the-dollar tax on assets over $50 million," which would be be used to fund much of her domestic agenda, and a "more far-reaching measure that would let workers control 40% of corporate board seats."
Beyond policy, the best reason I can think of to vote for Warren is her experience in essentially creating and briefly running a new government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), from scratch. The CFPB exists to enforce consumer financial laws and protect people from predatory companies, which has resulted in more than $13 billion being returned to aggrieved consumers thus far. And the article that perhaps sold me most on Warren's candidacy is this Politico piece, which tells the story of her fights with the Obama Administration (and then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in particular) over how the CFPB should be run and who would be its first director amidst the backdrop of the Great Recession. It's worth reading from beginning to end.
The most important lesson I took from that piece is precisely what Ezra Klein of Vox emphasizes in his own case for Warren, which I'll quote at length:
"I reported on Warren’s construction of the bureau, and what impressed me most in those years was something that is rarely discussed in politics but is of deep importance to the presidency: her skills as an organizational leader.
I have never covered an agency where the morale was as high, the sense of mission as clear, and the collection of talent as impressive, as the CFPB under Warren. During those years, I spoke with CFPB employees ranging from senior leadership to midlevel lawyers to junior communications staffers, and you couldn’t make it three minutes into those conversations without getting some aphorism from Warren, or anecdote about Warren, quoted back to you. Her ability to inspire not just loyalty but a sense of mission in her staff was unique.
***
The president has far more direct control of regulation than redistribution, and as such, much of what Warren wants to do — from using antitrust enforcement to break up monopolistic firms to simplifying consumer financial products to cancelling student loan debt to cracking down on the risks too-big-to-fail banks can run — can be done through powers the executive branch already holds.
The next Democratic president is likely to face a Senate where Mitch McConnell remains majority leader, and even if Democrats manage to take back the gavel, the most optimistic outcome is a slim majority with the hinge vote being West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Alabama’s Doug Jones — and that’s before taking the filibuster into account. It is possible, perhaps probable, that the president’s primary power will come through their control of the executive branch. Warren is the candidate who would be most interested in, knowledgeable about, and effective at wielding it."It's easy to forget in an era in which a former reality TV star is president, but here's the reality: we're electing a bureaucrat. The office of the presidency is a bureaucracy. And electing someone who is really fucking good at this bureaucracy thing strikes me as a wise decision! Geier sums it up perfectly in her article towards the end when she writes that "Warren combines a strong strategic sense with an unparalleled understanding of the possibilities of the executive branch. Her skill set is a better match for the job."
I'll take some time to write about the other candidates who could feasibly win the nomination, and why I don't think they're as good of a match. Pete Buttigieg, if elected, would be the youngest president in history, as well as the first openly gay president. That would be an undeniable progressive victory, especially given the fact that Karl Rove, the mastermind behind the George W. Bush campaign, was cynically pushing state proposals to ban same-sex marriage in an effort to bring conservatives to the polls as recently as 2004.
But Buttigieg is comically out of his depth. His political experience consists of being the mayor of the 4th largest city in Indiana, South Bend, with a population of just over 100,000 residents. To put that in perspective, my own city of Grand Rapids has just shy of 200,000, but I don't see anyone suggesting that Mayor Rosalynn Bliss should run for president. Buttigieg has proven himself to be an intelligent man throughout this campaign, but he's since turned his back on or downplayed some of the positions that initially made him an intriguing candidate, such as adding additional justices to the Supreme Court. This suggests that he doesn't exactly have ironclad principles, and is simply choosing to occupy a center left lane in the race because he thinks that's his best bet at getting nominated.
Joe Biden certainly has the experience needed to be president. Not only was he the vice president for 8 years, but he was a senator for an astonishing 36 years before that. He was sworn in to the U.S. Senate in 1973 in a hospital room because his young son, Beau, was bed ridden after a car accident, which took the lives of his wife and daughter:
Beau Biden would later die of brain cancer in 2015, at the age of 46. That is, the former vice president has witnessed the deaths of his wife, and 2 kids. Biden has certainly experienced pain in his life, and his ability to recognize and emphasize with the pain of others on a personal level is very real.
Having written that, his political record over the years clashes with my ideological preferences, and I cannot support him in the primaries as a result. Biden was a major proponent of a shitty bankruptcy reform bill in 2005 that, among other things, favored creditors at the expense of debtors, and made it virtually impossible to discharge student loan debt. Warren, who was a Harvard Law School bankruptcy professor at the time, personally debated Biden over the merits of the bill in a Senate hearing:
Furthermore, Biden has a long history of backing punitive criminal justice policies (so called "tough on crime" laws), which includes his support for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill, and many others that he voted in favor of resulted in an escalation of the War on Drugs, which has been detrimental for lower income people of color in particular. To this day, Biden is one of the only Democratic presidential candidates still opposed to the federal legalization of marijuana.
He failed in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to properly vet allegations of sexual harassment against now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas back in 1991. Biden could have called multiple witnesses who had worked with and were aware of Thomas' behavior to testify. But instead, only Anita Hill was called before the committee, thereby making her the lone voice against a powerful judge who would be confirmed to the Supreme Court shortly after the hearings. Perhaps things could have turned out differently if Biden had allowed them to testify before the public. Finally, he also voted for the war in Iraq, the most disastrous foreign policy decision in my life time.
That brings me to Bernie Sanders.
I admire Sanders. I voted for him here in Michigan in the 2016 primary. But I was never a particularly enthusiastic supporter, and I genuinely can't relate to the Bernie Sanders worship that's easy to find on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit amidst his most ardent online supporters. I guess this is because I've watched Sanders give interviews on MSNBC and other cable networks years before many others my age have ever heard of him, and he never really struck me as distinguishable from any other liberal Democrat. He seems to have traveled the same path blazed by other progressive senators such as Tom Harkin and Paul Wellstone, though I doubt many Sanders supporters have any idea who they are.
Certainly I was aware that Sanders refers to himself as a socialist, or a democratic socialist, but that's one hell of stretch. He gave a speech this past June in which he attempted to clarify his brand of democratic socialism, but all he really ended up doing was giving a vigorous defense of New Deal liberalism as practiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. His thinking wasn't always so conventional, as the Wall Street Journal notes:
"He had a different vision in the 1970s, when he sought statewide office four times as the nominee of the Liberty Union Party of Vermont. Campaigning for U.S. Senate in 1971, he demanded the nationalization of utilities. In 1973 he proposed a federal takeover of “the entire energy industry,” and in 1974 he wanted a 100% tax on all income above $1 million. In 1976 he asserted that workers needed to “take immediate control of the economy if we are to survive” and called for “public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries.” He had a plan for “public control over capital.” As late as 1987 he asserted that “democracy means public ownership of the major means of production.”"But he seems to have lost interest in all that shit once he got elected. "I'm not going to war with the city's financial and business community," he reportedly said after becoming mayor of Burlington, Vermont, per the WSJ article. And indeed he didn't. His initial moves included conducting an audit of the city's finances in the name of fiscal restraint, and picking a fight with progressive groups over his decision to back a commercial development plan along the waterfront. He informed a group of anti-war protesters that they would be arrested if they carried through with their plan to demonstrate in front of General Electric in 1983 for assembling military equipment at a plant in Burlington. And they were.
“My view was you had hundreds and hundreds of jobs that were decent-paying union jobs. You shut them down here, they’re just going to move someplace else,” Sanders told the WSJ when confronted with this. His views on this matter haven't evolved. Today, there are F-35 fighter jets based in Burlington, and numerous plants building its parts are operating in Vermont thanks to Sander's aggressive lobbying efforts. "Given the reality of the damn plane, I’d rather it come to Vermont than to South Carolina. And that’s what the Vermont National Guard wants, and that means hundreds of jobs in my city," Sanders said at a town hall in 2014.
The problem with this isn't just that the F-35 is built to drop bombs on foreigners overseas - it's that the F-35 is a piece of shit. It apparently can't "shoot straight," and has "more than 800 software flaws." And yet, the U.S. government is spending $428 billion on these goddamn things. Sanders is hardly the first senator to back questionable federal programs in an effort to bring some of that sweet, sweet money back to his home state. In fact, I raise this point to highlight the fact that he isn't a unique and beautiful snowflake - he does the same shit every other senator does! And despite the fact that he voted against going to war with Iraq in 2003, his broader military and foreign policy record is hardly perfect, as Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept points out:
His criminal justice record isn't perfect either. Sanders voted for the same 1994 crime bill backed by Joe Biden, and remarked that the country "needed more jails" and should be "tougher in certain instances" on crime around the time the bill was passed. In fact, he voted in favor of a specific amendment in the bill that allocated increased funding for prisons (other prominent Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler, voted against this provision). Sander's opinions on guest workers from other countries were also notably less accommodating than they are today.
Sen. @BernieSanders rightly called his 2001 vote for the AUMF & blank check for global war a “mistake.” He should also acknowledge the same for his 1998 vote for Iraq regime change, his support for deadly economic sanctions and bombing of Iraq. https://t.co/L4dJ76SB9k— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 22, 2020
Again, I'm writing all of this to point out that Sanders isn't a saint; he's a career politician who's said and done a handful of shitty things, but is otherwise pretty banal. Despite being a career politician for the past 38 years, his legislative accomplishments are thin. Perhaps his most notable achievement is a bipartisan bill he worked on with John McCain that allows veterans to access health care services from private providers outside the Veterans Affairs system. Beyond his political record, he also apparently has a habit of being an asshole to his staffers.
Sander's theory of change is that he commands an army of dedicated citizens who are mobilized and ready to take to the streets to fight for his agenda. And yet, that army and other Sander's aligned groups have a pretty poor record of getting his preferred candidates elected to higher office so that they can enact said agenda. As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine writes, "Our Revolution went 0–22, Justice Democrats went 0–16, and Brand New Congress went 0–6" in the 2018 midterm elections. It seems unlikely that he (or anyone else, for that matter) will be able to accomplish many of the big ticket items, such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a $15 an hour minimum wage if elected president. After all, the office of the presidency is only 1/3 of our government, and the U.S. Senate and its ability to filibuster legislation aren't going anywhere.
I do think that he'd be a force for good if he were to become president. I just don't believe he'd be the best at it. To be sure, Warren's accomplishments with the CFPB are quite modest in scope but, well, at least they're tangible accomplishments. Sanders wants me to believe in his ability to enact far reaching progressive changes, but he hasn't given me a compelling reason to do so.
Warren has.
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