Elizabeth Warren 2020

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It was a startling spectacle in the heart of Trump country: At least a dozen supporters of the president — some wearing MAGA stickers — nodding their heads, at times even clapping, for liberal firebrand Elizabeth Warren. The sighting alone of a Democratic presidential candidate in this town of fewer than 400 people — in a county where more than four in five voters cast their ballot for Trump in 2016 — was unusual. Warren’s team was apprehensive about how she’d be received.

About 150 people gathered at the Kermit Fire & Rescue Headquarters Station to hear the Massachusetts senator and former Harvard professor talk about what she wants to do to fight the opioid epidemic. Trump-supporting college students in baggy t-shirts, housewives in pearls, and the fire chief dressed in uniform joined liberal retirees wearing rainbow “Persist” shirts and teachers with six-figure student loan debt. Kermit is one of the epicenters of the opioid addiction epidemic. The toll is visible. The community center is shuttered. Fire trucks are decades old. When Warren asked people at the beginning of the event to raise their hands if they knew somebody who’s been “caught in the grips of addiction,” most hands went up. “That’s why I’m here today,” she said.

Warren entered the room from behind a large American flag draped in the station. Roving around a circle of people seated in fold-out chairs, she tried to strike a tone equal parts empathy and fury, while avoiding pity. She went full prarie populist, telling people their pain and suffering was caused by predatory pharmaceutical barons. The 63-year-old fire chief, Wilburn “Tommy” Preece, warned Warren and her team beforehand that the area was “Trump country” and to not necessarily expect a friendly reception. But he also told her that the town would welcome anyone, of any party, who wanted to address the opioid crisis. Preece was the first responder to a reported overdose two years ago only to discover that the victim was his younger brother Timmy, who died. Preece said after the event that he voted for Trump and that the president has revitalized the area economically. But he gave Warren props for showing up. “She done good,” he said. Others agreed.

LeeAnn Blankenship, a 38-year-old coach and supervisor at a home visitation company who grew up in Kermit and wore a sharp pink suit, said she may now support Warren in 2020 after voting for Trump in 2016. “She’s a good ol’ country girl like anyone else,” she said of Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma. “She’s earned where she is, it wasn’t given to her. I respect that.” But Warren didn’t come to rural West Virginia primarily in search of votes. The tiny state likely won’t decide the nomination, and is all but certain to back Trump in the general election. Instead, Warren was here to try to send a message that she’s serious about tackling the problems of remote communities like this one.

The “opioid war” is a medical problem rather than a behavioral or law enforcement one, Warren argued. Her plan is modeled on the government’s response in 1990 to the HIV/AIDS crisis, as she explained in a Medium post earlier this week. “But we got a second problem in this country and it’s greed,” she said. “People didn’t get addicted all on their own, they got a lot of corporate help. They got a lot of help from corporations that made big money off getting people addicted and keeping them addicted.” Kermit was a subject of a Pulitzer Prize winning series in 2016 that found drug wholesalers provided a single pharmacy in the 392-person town with 9 million hydrocodone pills over just two years. Warren's plan would dole out $100 billion over the next decade to states, cities, and nonprofits, with extra money going to cities and counties with the highest levels of overdoses.

“Right here in Mingo County, people are on the front lines of this opioid epidemic and this is a way to draw attention to the urgency of the moment,” she told reporters after the town hall. Warren’s four-stop tour Friday and Saturday took her from the small towns of Kermit and Chillicothe, Ohio to Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati. The latter's narcotics problem is so bad that the local paper assigned a reporter to the heroin beat. Warren’s approach to the opioid crisis — which calls for treating victims and punishing perpetrators — largely mirrors her response to the financial crisis, when she called for jailing bankers and providing mass assistance for homeowners. Her trip is the latest iteration of her campaign strategy to distinguish as the most substantive and well-prepared candidate in the sprawling Democratic field. Each time Warren rolls out a policy proposal — almost invariably with the theme of curbing corporate power and Washington corruption — her team schedules on-the-ground events to draw further attention.

When she announced her plan to break up big technology companies, Warren went to the South by Southwest tech conference and then to Long Island City, New York where Amazon had planned to build a headquarters. She whistle-stopped through Tennessee, Alabama, and the Mississippi delta after she unveiled a housing proposal aimed at closing the racial wealth gap.A Republican protest — or “Trump support rally” — was organized a few hundred yards away from Warren's event in Kermit. But inside the fire station was remarkably devoid of partisanship, even if the topic was political.

Asked late Friday what stuck with her from the visit, Warren said it was the moment when she asked who had been personally affected by the opioid crisis and almost everyone’s hands went up. “I was in the town where the pain of that decision by the government to not interfere was felt hard,” she said. As Warren posed for selfies after the town hall, several people pressed notes into her hand that she read later in the car. "Help our town of Kermit, West Virginia any way you can to help us be able to reduce the drug abuse," read one letter. “A lot of people told me,‘You’re in the reddest of the red here,'” Warren said. But "I like being here."
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/ ... 20-1317611
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I was happy that she is taking the southern route. As long as she keeps the conversation going, it is good. Her Mississippi town hall was useful.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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This was a strong move by her. We have to break into the right bubble while energizing the left base, and Warren seems best equipped to do that right now. It's important for Trump voters, especially those who previously voted for Obama, to see people in MAGA hats clapping and cheering for a progressive candidate and progressive policy ideas. We'll never reach all of them, or even most of them, but if we can show even 2-3% of them that their anger is misplaced, that's enough to swing places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and maybe even Florida. Look at how tight some of those states were in 2016, and look at how tight the governor and senate races were in Florida in 2018. We have to show people that Muslims didn't get your community addicted to opioids, Mexicans didn't skyrocket your student loan debts, and impoverished black people didn't cause the price of your prescription drugs to go through the roof. It was greedy assholes who did that, enabled by a bunch of greedy assholes in DC who threw your communities under the bus for some campaign contributions and the promise of a cushy private sector job.

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I agree it was a strong move. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning OH, Warren understands it and chose issues that were local. People assume since she was a Harvard Law professor that she had a privileged upbringing, not so she was born in Oklahoma. She's said that when she taught at Harvard Law that she was the only faculty member who hadn't graduated from an Ivy League law school, she is an alumna of Rugers Law (undergrad - UT, Austin).
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Elizabeth Warren is out with a proposal to protect abortion rights.
But Warren’s proposal is notable for its exclusive focus on the expansion of abortion rights. In it, the senator urges Congress to create “federal, statutory rights” to abortion that block states from “interfering” with either a doctor’s provision of abortion care or a patient’s ability to access that care. Warren further urged passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which has already been introduced in Congress. The act would overturn state-level obstacles to abortion, like Alabama’s law forcing women to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds before they can receive abortions. She called for the repeal of the global gag rule, which blocks non-governmental organizations that receive U.S. funding from providing or even referring women to abortion care, and the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits publicly funded health care coverage like Medicaid from covering abortion. She closed by endorsing the EACH Woman Act, which would prohibit private insurance companies from refusing to cover abortion services. The overarching goal is to protect the right to abortion from erosion at both the legislative and judicial levels.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/ ... ights.html

Roe vs Wade was 1973 and it should have been put into federal statute, some states like CA have made it part of state law. Even with all three branches of government in Reep hands it would have been harder to overturn.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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President Donald Trump’s reelection machine is setting its sights on a new target, one it had left for dead just a few months ago: Elizabeth Warren.

With the Massachusetts senator rising in polls and driving a populist message that threatens to cut into the president’s blue-collar base, the Trump campaign is training its firepower on Warren with an eye toward blunting her momentum.

Trump aides and their allies at the Republican National Committee, who initially believed their money and manpower were better focused elsewhere, are digging up opposition research, deploying camera-wielding trackers, and preparing to brand Warren as a liberal extremist. The reassessment of Warren, confirmed in conversations with more than a half-dozen Trump advisers, reflects the volatility of the massive Democratic primary and how the reelection campaign is reacting to it.

The Trump team — including the president himself — had been focused almost exclusively on Joe Biden to this point. But Warren’s rise now has them thinking she could pose a serious threat in a general election. Warren’s disciplined style, populist-infused speeches, and perceived ability to win over suburban female voters, Trump advisers concede, has raised concerns.

Campaign pollster John McLaughlin has sounded the alarm internally, stressing that Warren’s attacks on Trump threaten to undercut his support from the working-class voters who propelled him to the presidency.

“Although our own early published polls and internal polls discounted Elizabeth Warren, her recent momentum in May and June in national and early caucus and primary states into a strong second place to a flat Joe Biden is a cause for our campaign’s attention,” McLaughlin wrote in a text message to POLITICO.
Warren is enjoying a renaissance after a painful campaign rollout. Trump attacked her mercilessly after she released a DNA test that attempted to put the controversy over her blood lines to rest only to reveal she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.

During an appearance at his Mar-a-Lago resort in March, the president lamented to donors that he knocked Warren out of the race too early and that he should have saved his jabs for later. During a late April rally in Wisconsin, the president said Warren was “finished.”

In the weeks that followed, though, the anti-Wall Street crusader engineered a turnaround with a litany of policy plans, a nonstop campaign schedule and a hard-charging populist message.

In the most recent national poll, from Quinnipiac University, Warren was at 15 percent, only slightly behind Sanders for second place. And in polls released this week of California and Nevada — two key states that vote in late February and early March, respectively — Warren leapfrogged Sanders, running behind only Biden. The latest view inside the Trump campaign is that Warren has a more coherent message and a more passionate liberal following than Biden, whose support they see as soft. “Her politics are where the Democratic party has moved,” said Trump campaign adviser Raj Shah. “She’s primed to pick up more support as Bernie fades and Biden erodes.”

Biden and his supporters, however, are confident the Democratic electorate is more centrist than prognosticators think. Not everyone agrees that going after Warren is the right move. Some Trump aides contend that her liberal positions would make her an easier general election opponent and that they should hold off on attacking her. Others, however, argue that guessing a particular candidate's level of electability is impossible and that the Democratic nominee — no matter who it is — needs to be defined well before next year’s convention.

Trump himself appears to recognize Warren’s newfound strength. “Now I see that Pocahontas is doing better,” the president said during a Friday morning appearance on Fox News, using his favorite nickname for the Massachusetts senator. “I would love to run against her frankly.”
[https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/ ... on-1365816][/url]

Latest poll of CA voters from LA Times/UC Berkeley has Biden at 22%; Warren at 18%; Sanders 17%; Harris 13% and Buttigieg 10%.
https://igs.berkeley.edu/igs-poll/berkeley-igs-poll
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na- ... story.html

Meanwhile Donnie is supposed to announce for reelection on Tuesday.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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There was a time not so long ago when leading Democrats warned that Elizabeth Warren’s “fantasy-based blue-state populism” risked leading the party to ruin. But in a revealing tell of how far her campaign has come since its early February launch, some unlikely voices in the center of the party are growing more comfortable with the idea of Warren as the nominee.

It’s a sign of how the ideological lanes of the 2020 primary have blurred and overlapped and of the steady progress Warren is making as a candidate. But it’s also a statement on Bernie Sanders, Warren’s top rival for progressive votes. Sanders continues to face significant resistance from within the party — and nowhere more so than among the moderates and establishment players who blanch at his talk of democratic socialism.

Warren, on the other hand, is gaining traction among those who once rejected her muscular vision of liberalism. She’s drawn notice for her wide-ranging “I have a plan for that” policy playbook, which has just enough growth-and-opportunity, center-left measures to earn her a serious look from former detractors. The Massachusetts senator may be out of sync with party centrists, but she’s drawn at least one sharp line with Sanders that is resonating with prominent moderate voices as she surges into the top tier in national and early state polls.

“One is a Democratic capitalist narrative,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank that convened a conference of party insiders in South Carolina this week designed to warn about the risks of a nominee whose views are out of the political mainstream. “The other is a socialist narrative.” Third Way, which isn’t backing a candidate, famously torpedoed Warren in a widely read 2013 op-ed that exposed the party’s ideological fissures on entitlements. “Nothing would be more disastrous for Democrats” than to adhere to Warren’s brand of economic populism, wrote two of the think tank’s leaders in a piece that drew condemnation from progressives.

Today, however, Third Way is learning to live with Warren even as it embarks on a mission to ensure the Democratic nominee doesn’t stray too far to the left.

Jim Kessler, one of the authors of the 2013 piece warning that Warren would lead the party off the populist cliff, raved about the senator’s performance last weekend at the Black Economic Alliance candidate forum in South Carolina.

“Elizabeth Warren kills it at @BlkEconAlliance candidate forum. Love her entrepreneurship fund,” the Third Way co-founder tweeted Saturday.

“I don’t agree with 'Medicare for All.' I don’t agree with free college, … [But] her consumer protection policies are great. I think she has a good infrastructure plan,” said self-described moderate Democrat Reagan Gray, a health care policy and political consultant attending the Third Way conference. “I absolutely know and believe people are taking a second look at her. She now seems to be getting herself away from the Bernie Sanders grouping. People are taking a second look at her and saying, ‘Hmm. Some of her policies are good. Maybe she isn’t like Bernie.’”

Establishment and moderate Democrats haven’t necessarily been won over to Warren’s camp yet — many still point to former Vice President Joe Biden as their preferred candidate. But the tensions that once marked Warren’s relationship with moderate Democrats have begun to dissipate as she methodically lays out her agenda and shows a folksier, more accessible side that wasn’t always apparent in her role as a blue-state senator and progressive icon.

With 99 town halls and 30,000 selfies under her belt, Warren has offered a level of access that has disarmed some critics. She’s also made a point of traveling to some of the reddest of red-state locales — Mississippi, Utah and West Virginia, among them.
That might explain why Donald Trump’s reelection campaign now views Warren as a threat after the president had dismissed her campaign just a few months ago as “finished.”

Polling suggests that at least one of Warren’s lightning-rod proposals — taxing the net worth of the wealthiest Americans — has support that extends beyond progressive circles. According to a recent Morning Consult survey, 61 percent of all voters favored her 2 percent wealth tax on households worth at least $50 million. Among Democrats, 74 percent favored the plan.

“What Warren has tapped into is that to most Democrats, it’s not about ideology [or] liberalism, it's about the economy’s out of balance. Nibbling around the edges and offering stale, old Democratic ideas of raising the minimum wage and shoring up Medicare and Social Security are just insufficient to dealing with the scale and scope of the problems we're facing in our economy,” said Dan Gerstein, who worked as a speech writer on the presidential and vice presidential campaigns of former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. “But she's doing it in a way that doesn't necessarily demonize business, but talks about the bad actors in capitalism. And again, very much differentiating [herself] from Bernie.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/ ... en-1369874

A plurality of Democrats identify as liberal, but a majority of Democrats are moderate and conservative, according to Gallup polling.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/246806/und ... ology.aspx

Even within those broad categories, not all liberal, moderate or conservative Democrats or Indep leaners agree on all issues.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Cross posted from another thread:

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https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/TY_14819.html
People who give money to presidential candidates typically spend more time following campaigns than average voters do. Many campaign donors — including those who give small amounts — read policy proposals, watch debates and listen to candidate interviews. Along the way, the donors develop well-informed views about the candidates.

As a result, the donors’ opinions end up mattering for both obvious and less obvious reasons. In the obvious category: Donors determine which candidates have well-funded campaigns and, in the 2020 race, will help decide who’ll qualify for the early debates. In the less obvious category: Donor’s opinions are an indicator of which candidates deserve to be faring well. Donors are akin to a huge panel of interested experts.

For these reasons, two research firms — Gradient Metrics and Survey 160 — recently asked Democratic donors from the 2016 campaign, many of whom are giving money again in this cycle, what they thought of the 2020 candidates. The results, which haven’t been publicly released until now, are fascinating.

Above all, they underscore the vulnerabilities of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, the two candidates atop most polls of Democratic voters.

Sanders has an inherent advantage with donors, because he is the only 2020 candidate who also ran in 2016. So I wasn’t surprised that he was the first choice of 34 percent of donors, more than any other candidate. Elizabeth Warren was second (23 percent), and no one else topped 10 percent. Biden was at 9 percent, along with Pete Buttigieg.

But Sanders’s support seems soft. Because the race is in its early stages, the pollsters also asked people a broader question: Which candidates would you consider supporting?

On this measure, Sanders fell to second. Warren was first, at 68 percent, followed by Sanders (57 percent), Kamala Harris (40 percent) and Buttigieg (38 percent). The survey was conducted before last week’s debates, so it’s reasonable to think the numbers for Harris and Buttigieg may have risen.

What about Biden?

Only 26 percent of donors said they were considering him. Even among Hillary Clinton’s 2016 donors — presumably a more moderate group of Democrats — Biden came in fourth. Harris drew the broadest potential support among Clinton donors, followed by Warren and Buttigieg.

Nathaniel Lubin, the chief executive of Survey 160, which helped conduct the poll, told me that Biden’s relative lack of a policy agenda so far may be hurting him. When asked whether they wanted a candidate to focus on a policy agenda or on standing up to President Trump, almost 80 percent of donors chose policy.

Obviously, Biden can still win the nomination. He still has time to release a detailed agenda, and he remains popular among rank-and-file Democrats. But he is struggling to generate excitement among the most engaged Democratic voters, including many moderates. Democrats who follow politics closely don’t seem energized by Biden’s candidacy.

Sanders, meanwhile, has failed to lock down many of his 2016 supporters. In 2016, they preferred him in a head-to-head matchup with Clinton, but they don’t necessarily like him best among this year’s larger field.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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max129 wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:17 pm That is a great chart. I am in the Warren "first choice" camp myself.

I think she would make a damn fine POTUS.
I wax and wane between Warren and Sanders. Warren is more anti-gun. That is my only worry about her.

Dems need a strong, sustained effort to counter the misogynist and racist attacks from the Trump mafia to win. No more ignoring the Pocahontas comments and anti-women comments. The candidates need to fight and scrap to win this one.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I think a woman leading the ticket is the ticket.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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CDFingers said:

I think a woman leading the ticket is the ticket.
I am "pro" a woman leading the ticket also, but to me Warren slightly transcends that bias with a kick ass point of view and policy chops.

I think she is the best man/woman for the job currently in the race.
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Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Warren seems to have the most developed policies which leads me to believe she would like to follow through with what she says rather than say shit to get elected. She also seems to have the best environmental policies, so hopefully resonates with the younger crowd that gives a shit about their future. She's my top pick and likely to stay there.

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Warren/Sanders

He gets health care and wages/working conditions.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I was a Sanders guy in 2016, but I don't think he's there for me now. In one respect, he isn't strictly "necessary," as his views have all gone mainstream, and you can get them from other candidates. I'm sending Warren my money this year.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Jaywalker wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 8:53 am I was a Sanders guy in 2016, but I don't think he's there for me now. In one respect, he isn't strictly "necessary," as his views have all gone mainstream, and you can get them from other candidates. I'm sending Warren my money this year.
I'll take either one. I trust Bernie more, but Warren seems to have been on the right side of history, too.

I haven't seen anything persuade me that I shouldn't trust Warren - except that she makes a lot of money. Even that isn't a real problem.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Bumping this up a bit. I like to make a small donation every quarter to my preferred winners - even early in the race.

I just put in my Q3 donation to Elizabeth Warren for (drum roll) $25. Once they get more steam, I tend to go in for the legal limit.
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Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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max129 wrote: Fri Jul 12, 2019 12:15 pm Bumping this up a bit. I like to make a small donation every quarter to my preferred winners - even early in the race.

I just put in my Q3 donation to Elizabeth Warren for (drum roll) $25. Once they get more steam, I tend to go in for the legal limit.
In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll Warren overtook Bernie Sanders and is seven points below Biden. In the RCP average, she's neck and neck with Bernie, with Harris close. Second debates are at the end of the month and the candidates will be mixed again over the two nights. She presents her case well as befits a former Harvard Law professor.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epoll ... -6730.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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max129 wrote: Fri Jul 12, 2019 12:15 pm Bumping this up a bit. I like to make a small donation every quarter to my preferred winners - even early in the race.

I just put in my Q3 donation to Elizabeth Warren for (drum roll) $25. Once they get more steam, I tend to go in for the legal limit.
Same. I wanted to make sure she made the debates, so I started early and monthly with Warren and Castro to help.

I am not going all-in for anyone until things are clear. I am not a billionaire.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I'm not supporting any one candidate. I'm actually enjoying getting to know them all better and not feel like one particular one has been chosen and thrust upon us whether we like it or not, this time.
But it doesn't hurt to say something nice about someone. Warren is a scrapper. I like her quite a bit. she reminds me of the old New Deal style leaders.

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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Yes, I see her as the most likely to win the primaries. Strange things happen in a long primary season, though.

My vote is just a drop in a small bucket. I am more interested to see the number of primary voters in my state and other states.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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I’m torn between Warren and Sanders. The best I would love to see is a Sanders Warren ticket. The real dream would be Sanders does one term then we have a Warren /Occasio-Cortez for two terms.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Elizabeth Warren 2020

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TrueTexan wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 5:38 pm I’m torn between Warren and Sanders. The best I would love to see is a Sanders Warren ticket. The real dream would be Sanders does one term then we have a Warren /Occasio-Cortez for two terms.
I'm tellin' ya, man. A Warren/Sanders ticket would rock.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

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