judeling
judeling's JournalKlobuchar compressing the time frame, emphasizing quickly achievable.
An AlterNet article on high speed broadband access, reminded me of the basic Klobuchar strategy throughout the campaign.
The press release accompanying the bill was pure Amy, highlighting bipartisan support and listing highlights of past actions. This is how she always runs.
Remember back in the first debate when M4A first started to be a dividing line, and how her objection was framed? She didn't challenge the policy, she challenged an aspect of it in terms of time. Moving 150m off in four years. She then pivoted to near term.
It is a subtle difference, but an important one. It is a strategy of self-interest. That goes to Bipartisanship also. It is not a vision of a radical change in the partisan divide, rather it is pointing out on issues there is a self-interested base path to some. While not really an appeal to what we see as the base, it is an appeal to a large part of the voters who long for some end to the madness. She gives them enough entry points on actions to hook them, but by going short term not much that will scare them away. You may think that would be more effective in a general election, However it works in an election where defeating Trump is so important. By emphasizing near term progress towards long term goals, she is allowing the more progressive wing of the party a way to support her and also holding out the hope of a more unified party without the internal fights that could block progress even before we confront the Republicans.
Amy K complets the Full Grassley
Klobuchar just visited her 99th Iowa county.
For Klobuchar it is not anything out of the ordinary, she makes a point of visiting all of the counties in Minnesota every year.
It was the first stop of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s four-day, 27-county barnstorm and the 71st Iowa county she’d visited since announcing her candidacy. The Minnesota Democrat told the crowd she slept for just three-and-a-half hours before catching a flight, on which she said she opted to write thank-you notes rather than sleep.
It is also reflective of a broader campaign strategy where she is really emphasizing rural areas much more so then most of the others.
I'm Staring to really feel this. Amy is actually on the way.
I have felt a growing optimism since the September debate. Since the last one the that sense has exploded.
I can now see Amy finishing in Iowa anywhere from first to 3rd and that changes the race.
It is of course not only of her doing, except that she has run her whole campaign to be in this place. But the tiff between Warren and Buttigieg seems to have had a real effect on both.
She is moving up at exactly the correct moment to take the lions share of their support come caucus night.
Will Gender Reemerge?
Watching the endo of the year wrap ups and projections of the future race, I cannot help remembering how this cycle started. There was at the start after the Women's March and the number of strong women elected in 2018 the thought that of course the nominee would be a woman.
As the summer went on you could feel that dynamic still there, but it is greatly diminished as the fall went on and the hopes invested in two candidates faded out to a large extent. But I would argue it is still there and may yet reshape the race.
But, we are now down to it and it is likely that only one of our female candidates will survive Iowa. It is of course possible that neither will but if one does that really could reshape the race. A Warren rebound or a Klobuchar surge reflected in the Iowa outcome could have a bigger impact then is currently expected.
The main connective tissue of the democratic coalition is female. And that can still come into play in ways that right now are hard to see.
No votes have been counted yet, and while the race looks static it is not and wont be until that event happens.
Who wll win the January Debate
I don't care if you thought she won or not almost everyone will acknowledge Klobuchar did well.
As a supporter I wondered why my opinion of her performance in a debate finally seemed to get the credit it deserved. So as I had time with the holiday slow down I went back and watched the last three debates again.
She is the only aggressor left. Everyone else is essentially a counter-puncher. Sort of why Warren looked so awkward doing it.
Without Booker, Harris and Gabbard it just was not lost.
So we will have to see how the polls workout and where everyone is sitting in January, but if I was going to place a wager it would be on Amy. Which will be good for Bernie and Joe.
Who had the most effective contrast
I'm not going to say attacks because really they were not. Warren and Buttigieg attempted to contrast not attack so much and you have to contrast.
It was Klobuchar on Buttigieg in my opinion. She drew long term blood against her major immediate rival. First she chose the moment and framed it. While the "Gay Dude" come back worked in the moment, from then on the issue bled out and will continue to do so.
The 20% loss tag sealed it. In the spin room Mayor Pete was forced to explain that it was in Indiana and a Red year, oops. When you are explaining you are losing.
Just to much chum for the sharks now. Already it has been pointed out that Hillary crushed Trump in South Bend. That he won with 8500 votes in a college town. That it was 25% not 20%.
The thing people forget about Klobuchar is she is a shark.
Amy's Path
The thing most people miss about Senator Klobuchar is that she never lets tactics overcome strategy and that she thinks things through all the time. While her path to the nomination is difficult it is no longer impossible and a lot better then people think. A lot of it has to do with how well she has run her campaign in a strategic sense.
So lets look at the state of the race today and just how Amy could win this thing.
From the start she always knew her path to the nomination runs through Iowa. Now that she has clearly moved within striking distance there possibilities open up and her strategic choices can have a big effect. First in Iowa she has emphasized lower level endorsements. What that has done is allowed her to have a much more local face to her campaign and to have a pool of experienced operatives/endorsers much closer to the regional and district caucuses. That is a huge advantage in the 15% math.
But more then that with the media forcing the Warren/Buttigieg tiff, she is now in a position to pick up a bunch of support. But so is Sanders. This actually makes sense because Warren and Buttigieg are fighting for the same voters right now.
An entirely plausible outcome right now is for Sanders to win by consolidating in the caucus Warren's more ideological support and for Klobuchar to pick up much of Warren's other support and much of the support Buttigieg has acquired from Warren. That could easily vault Amy into 2nd or 3rd. It would also be a huge shock to the perceptions of the national voting public. At this point Amy is in the best position to have a shockingly better outcome then any other candidate simply because she is not in the national conversation as much.
So on to NH with Amy surging and Warren/Buttigieg fighting for survival. Warren cannot attack it is simply not to her benefit at that point as she needs ideological crossover to beat Sanders, Buttigieg can do so but that hurts his all together now image and Amy has sowed the seeds very well of gender and experience. She has also been laying the groundwork in NH from the beginning. A Sanders win in Iowa will also hurt Biden if not as much. A nick in the inevitability will bring the lingering doubts back to the fore. Klobuchar has always looked to a direct comparison to Biden and she will get it. Again it is quite easy to see that after Iowa a Sanders win with a Biden/Klobuchar following is even more likely. That would be enough for the race to be really down to 3.
Nevada would then be a a test. But now gender politics would be clearly in play. An experienced woman against two older males. That is a hugely interesting dynamic that as the daughter of a union household could really play. I would expect Bernie and Joe to win thare but Amy right there in a 3 way race.
But now SC at this point Sanders is likely to come in with three wins and Biden would be in a must win. If he is in a must win he has already lost.
Which means that going into Super Tuesday we will have Sanders pounding on Bloomberg who is his perfect foil and Klobuchar consolidating the rest of the moderate wing and the electability "win track". At which point it is 2016 with Amy as Hillary without the EMails.
RCV experiment interesting Watch out for Klobuchar
The Concord Monitor used the Primary to do a Ranked Choice Voting Experiment.
.[link:https://www.concordmonitor.com/alternative-voting-ballots-ranked-choice-30987954| (my last free access)
The reason I'm posting this here is in a fluid race peoples deeper choices may become very important. It also reflects how voters are bunching the candidates.
Our experiment showed at least one thing: Some people love ranked-choice voting
By DAVID BROOKS
Monitor staff
Published: 12/9/2019 4:49:58 PM
When the Monitor decided to run a mock Democratic primary using ranked-choice voting, there were two numbers I was particularly interested in seeing.
Here is one of them: 385.
That’s how many usable ballots were mailed in, and it’s a lot. It’s about three times as many as I expected and one of the biggest mail-in responses the Monitor has seen in ages. We even beat Letters to Santa!
To me, this answered the biggest concern about ranked-choice voting: That the complexity will turn off voters. It seems the opposite happened.
I have heard just one negative reader comment about the enormous 16x16 grid, but more than a dozen readers included notes with their ballots expressing enthusiasm, including one who scribbled, “Thanks – this is great!” at the bottom.
Here’s the other number I was interested in: 14.
That’s the number of rounds it took to reduce our original 16 candidates to the point where one of them had a majority of the ballots.
Yes, it’s a lot. In fact, it’s the maximum number possible with 16 candidates, reflecting how divided our readers were about the huge Democratic field.
(snip …)
There were also 19 ballots that didn’t get counted at all later in the process because they left some candidates un-ranked and all their choices were eliminated.
That brings to mind a third interesting number: 156. This is how many ballots ranked all 16 candidates, not skipping anybody.
In other words, more than half of our readers did not have an opinion about everybody on the ballot. Usually, such voters marked the top four or five and left the rest empty – although a few jumped just over the middle rankings and marked one or two candidates at the very bottom, to indicate their displeasure.
And the winner is …
Eventually, we got down to just three candidates who had 152, 126 and 104 votes respectively. We parceled out the 104 votes to the other two. It turned out voters who liked this candidate – Amy Klobuchar, if you must know – had a very strong preference, so almost all of them went to the eventual winner.
The final tally was 224 votes for Pete Buttigieg and 142 for Elizabeth Warren.
Here’s the twist: It was Buttigieg who got the 102 No. 1 votes, meaning he also would have won the election with traditional enumeration. To an extent, the hours that Sarah and I spent moving ballots around and counting and re-counting didn’t change a thing.
It did make one change: Warren was originally in fourth place but was boosted to second because virtually all of Bernie Sanders’ voters chose her as No. 2. This affection didn’t go the other way, however: Warren voters split their No. 2 among a whole host of alternatives.
This is totally unscientific and nothing should be read into it. Except for someone polling at 6% (on a good day) to show up in third indicates there is a lot more underlying support then you may expect.
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