Lookout Joe

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Well then! I had no idea how powerful a Riot Trail endorsement was! With great power comes great responsibility 🤔.

But seriously, although many people I know seem to be freaking out about yesterday, I for one am relieved. It looks like it's gonna be Bernie vs. Biden from here on out, which mean one of them (probably Joe, but who knows) will likely be able to win outright on first ballot. Although I was kind of fascinated by how a contested convention (during a pandemic!) would play out, it's undoubtedly better not to go through that. And I agree with my friend JH who said, "I feel much, much better that the narrative turns out to be something like 'black voters gave Joe the momentum to win' instead of the much nastier alternatives about superdelegates or the party establishment or billionaires or Super PACs."

Ezra Klein has an excellent article about Bernie's flawed strategy of attacking people he needs to join his coalition. In short:

If you treat voters and officials in the party you want to lead as the enemy, a lot of people in that party aren’t going to trust you to lead them.

Indeed. Eric Levitz, a Bernie supporter, makes many of the same points and more here.

Now if Bernie somehow does manage to right the ship, build a coalition and win the nomination against a single rival, he will have surely proved his mettle and deserve to be the nominee. I don't see that happening, but if it does, fine. 

But I'm glad we seem to have avoided the two worst outcomes: Bernie winning by default because everyone else splits their votes between them, or (less bad but still pretty bad) the superdelegates choosing someone else at a contested convention. 

It's also worth noting that the huge surge in turnout of young people that Bernie has been banking his candidacy on did not materialize yesterday. Good to figure this out now rather than later. Promising to get non-voters (like young people) to turn up has been the fool's gold of many a campaign over the years. It never happens. 

And as a commenter on this blog pointed out, the old crusty moderate voters who might defect if they're worried the Dem is going to screw up the economy will vote either way, possibly for Trump, not just stay home... so that is in effect a double vote loss, rather than the single votes lost from disaffected Bernie supporters sitting the election out.

There are a lot of concerns out there about Biden as a candidate, and I share those. He is far from ideal. He's not running a campaign of ideas. He naively suggests Republicans will work with him. He has trouble forming complete sentences.

But, overall, I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief today.

One person who isn't breathing a sigh of relief: Donald Trump.