On Super Tuesday eve, Joe Biden gets boost from former rivals
Biden received the support of former rivals, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Iowans head to caucuses, may clarify Democratic field
Candidates gave last-minute pep talks and pitches, while hundreds of volunteers activated statewide to win the famed Iowa caucuses.
Elusive Quest for Momentum is On as Democrats Dash to Iowa
No candidate is a clear leader as the Iowa caucuses draw near.
Out of power, state Dems frustrated with national committee
Democrats around the country are demanding change from a national committee they say has focused too heavily on the White House at the expense of governorships, legislatures and state party operations. “It’s got to be helping us organize in our states to be able to build that power at the state legislative level,” Michigan Democratic Party Chair Brandon Dillon said of the Democratic National Committee, currently searching for a new leader. “We’ve lost governorships and state legislatures at a rate that is pretty astounding.” DNC members gather in February to elect a new chairman, with five candidates running so far, each pledging to rebuild from the ground up. Money from the DNC to state parties has been inconsistent during President Barack Obama’s tenure and, in most states, less than it was under former chairman Howard Dean. Party chairs say that’s resulted in fewer staff members and training programs, a change felt particularly in Republican-leaning states. State leaders also say Obama’s grassroots group Organizing for Action has functioned more like competition than a partner. Beginning in 2017, Republicans will hold 33 governorships and fully control legislatures in 25 states, as well as the Congress and presidency. During Obama’s two terms in office, the party lost more than 1,000 seats at the state and national level. “I love President Obama, but he and his administration allowed for the deterioration, the terrible deterioration, of the state parties over the last eight years,” said Mark Brewer, who led the Michigan Democratic Party for 18 years. Obama has announced plans, though, to improve Democrats’ down-ballot fortunes once he leaves office. He is launching an initiative with former Attorney General Eric Holder aimed at making Democratic gains when states redraw legislative district lines following the 2020 census. Democrats have blamed Republican gerrymandering for some of their losses in Congress and state legislatures. State officials say it’s been hard to plan long term and recruit and train candidates in off-election years due to inconsistent funding from the DNC. Under Dean, the national party installed and paid several staff members in each state. But that program ended after Obama’s election. State parties began to receive monthly payments of anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000, an amount that varies depending on the year. At some point, the parties have received no money at all. The DNC does provide some money to state parties for elections based on the state’s competitive races and other factors. The change has left some states scrambling. The Nebraska Democratic Party, for example, paid five full-time staff members during Dean’s tenure. But when Dean’s “50-state strategy” ended, it was hard to keep one and pay the rent, said Maureen Monahan, a vice president of the Association for State Democratic Chairs from Nebraska. Some states, such Mississippi, do not pay their party chairs. Even in Michigan, a staff that once stood at more than a dozen now is between five and seven employees, party chairs said. “The past eight years we have not had any focus on the state parties,” Monahan said. “There’s been a sense that the DNC is a building in Washington.” The push-and-pull between state parties and the DNC is nothing new. State parties, congressional Democratic groups and the president’s allies often spar over how best to spend party resources. The DNC defended its involvement with states. “State parties are the lifeblood of the DNC, and we make investing in all of them a priority because they are an integral part of winning up and down the ballot. State parties were critical to picking up Senate seats, House seats, legislative chambers and governorships in 2016, and their importance will be a key focus for the party as we elect new officers in February,” DNC spokesman Adam Hodge said. Marcel Groen, Pennsylvania Democrats’ chair, said it’s unfair to blame Democrats’ troubles completely on the national party. But he said a focus on recruiting and running Democrats even in low level races in Republicans areas can help the top of the ticket in the long term. “We can’t expect people in rural areas, in red areas, to vote for our presidential candidates or our gubernatorial or Senate candidates if they’ve never seen a Democrat running for school board or county office,” he said. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Joe Henderson: Tim Kaine, Mike Pence clash in downcard, ‘diluted’ debate
About halfway through the vice presidential debate Tuesday, I wonder how many Republicans were secretly (or maybe not so secretly) wishing Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was at the top of their presidential ticket. On my scorecard, Pence was the clear winner over Democrat Tim Kaine – not on policy so much, as I doubt the debate changed many minds on the major issues that divide us all. But Pence was polished, poised and focused most of the time and, dare I say it, looked presidential. Kaine? Not so much. He was so loud, rude and frenetic that I almost wondered he hadn’t looked at Howard Dean’s epic meltdown after he was routed in the 2004 Iowa caucuses and thought, “Hey, that looks like a good plan.” Yo Tim? One word: decaf. But let’s be honest: I doubt any of this will really matter much for this election. I can’t imagine any undecided voter looked at Pence or Kaine and made up their mind based on that 90-minute exchange. Let’s put it another way: Last week’s Clinton-Trump debate drew comparisons to the Super Bowl. By that reckoning, Pence-Kaine would be along the lines of a late-season Bucs and Cleveland Browns game. I doubt it had any impact in Florida, especially since I wouldn’t be surprised if folks all along the east coast of the state were more focused on hurricane preparations than a faceoff between the No. 2 people on the presidential ticket. It’s likely the audience was further diluted by the baseball playoff game between Baltimore and Toronto. Full disclosure: During one of the many times Kaine was going full-Dean and interrupting Pence (who didn’t get flustered; respect for that), I switched over briefly to catch a score on the game. Being dutiful, though, I quickly switched back. Kaine was still yelling. The person I felt sorriest for, besides the viewers, of course, was moderator Elaine Quijano, a CBS News correspondent. She lost control of the debate shortly after the introductions and never got it back. The candidates ignored her most of the night and just kept on talking over each other. One of the more humorous twists came when the Republican National Committee released a prepared statement declaring Pence the clear winner. What’s the big deal? Someone took “rapid response” to warp speed by sending the statement out 90 minutes before the debate started, even declaring Pence’s top moments included comments about the economy and Hillary Clinton’s scandals. Oh well. The night needed a little levity anyway as we wait for Sunday and Round II of Clinton-Trump. ___ Joe Henderson has had a 45-year career in newspapers, including the last nearly 42 years at The Tampa Tribune. He covered a large variety of things, primarily in sports but also including hard news. The two intertwined in the decade-long search to bring Major League Baseball to the area. Henderson was also City Hall reporter for two years and covered all sides of the sales tax issue that ultimately led to the construction of Raymond James Stadium. He served as a full-time sports columnist for about 10 years before moving to the metro news columnist for the last 4 ½ years. Henderson has numerous local, state and national writing awards. He has been married to his wife, Elaine, for nearly 35 years and has two grown sons – Ben and Patrick.
Darryl Paulson: Why Donald Trump won’t win the GOP nomination
As we rapidly approach the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, speculation increases that Donald Trump will likely be the Republican presidential nominee. I believe Trump has no better than a 20 percent chance of winning the nomination. We all know the common criticisms of Trump. He has made outrageous statements about Mexicans as “rapists,” John McCain as not a military hero, and his rants against Carly Fiorina‘s ugly face and Megan Kelly bleeding from “wherever.” We know Trump has flip-flopped on almost every major issue including abortion, national health care and his attitude toward Hillary and Bill Clinton. We know that Trump has spent far more time as a Democrat or independent than as a Republican and he has given most of his $1.5 million in political donations to Democrats, including large contributions to Nancy Pelosi and the Clinton Foundation. We know that Trump has never been a conservative. Besides calling himself a liberal on health care, Trump quit the Republican Party in 1999 saying, “Republicans are just too crazy right.” We know that PolitiFact awarded Trump the “lie of the year” for his numerous misstatements during the campaign. Of the 77 statements PolitiFact investigated, they rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire. Among the lies cited by PolitiFact was Trump’s comment that he watched “thousands of Muslims” cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11. You think at least one person would have a photo or video of that incident. None of it has damaged the Trump campaign yet. In fact, the more outrageous his statements, the more his numbers rise. So, why will Trump not win the Republican nomination? Because he will either suffer a Howard Dean-like fall, or because his support is concentrated among people who are not Republicans and people who are less likely to vote. Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times that Trump’s support will vanish as Election Day approaches. As Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager wrote, “People get more pragmatic the closer they get to an actual vote.” According to Trippi, this is what happened to Dean. Why waste a vote on someone unlikely to win? Second, Trump will lose because much of his support comes from people who are not Republican and who don’t vote. Trump’s strongest support comes from what The New York Times called “a certain kind of Democrat.” It is hard for anyone to win the nomination of a political party when much of their support comes from people in the other party. As we get past the early caucuses and primaries, the candidates will face several closed primaries, where only members of a party can vote. If his support comes from Democrats, they will not be able to vote for him in states such as Florida and New York where Trump is doing well in the polls. A final problem for Trump is that much of his support comes from individuals who are least likely to vote, especially in caucuses and primaries. Civis Analytics, in a study of 11,000 Republican-leaning supporters, found that Trump would get 40 percent of the vote of those who have less than a 20 percent chance of voting. Unless Trump has a plan to compensate for these problems, he may quickly find himself, much like Dean, going from first place to out of the race in a period of weeks. If Trump loses the Iowa caucus, where Cruz is now leading, the bottom could fall out of his campaign very quickly. For a “winner” like Trump to lose the first major race of the campaign season would reduce the sense of inevitability that Trump will win the nomination. As other Republicans fall by the wayside, it is unlikely that Trump will win their support. Conservative and evangelical voters are unlikely to align with Trump, who is only a Republican of convenience. • • • Darryl Paulson is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and resides in Palm Harbor, Florida. For more state and national commentary visit Context Florida.
A year from Election Day, GOP faces chaos it hoped to avoid
After a devastating loss in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican Party entered a period of intense self-reflection and emerged with a firm promise to learn from its mistakes. The GOP vowed to avoid a prolonged and vicious 2016 primary. It concluded it must embrace an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws and adopt a more welcoming tone to win over women and minorities. Yet a year from Election Day 2016, the GOP primary is a rough and bumpy competition. More than a dozen candidates are fighting for the support of voters — and skirmishing among themselves over the process of picking the nominee. There are few signs the candidates are committed to expanding the party’s appeal beyond its conservative base. “For Republicans, a free-for-all is good — I guess,” said Steve Duprey, a Republican National committeeman from New Hampshire. “We always anticipated a vigorous contest, but I never anticipated 16 candidates.” Meanwhile, there’s no such drama among Democrats. The party appears to be coalescing behind front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is building a campaign operation aimed at turning out the general election voters who catapulted Barack Obama to the White House. The GOP’s challenges were on display Monday, as bickering continued among campaigns about upcoming debates. That’s an issue the GOP thought it had resolved, having spent years retooling its primary process after officials said it left 2012 nominee Mitt Romney bloodied heading into the general election. Members of both parties say the GOP’s White House hopefuls have also ignored the recommendation from the RNC’s self-study that insisted Republicans must improve the party’s appeal among women and minorities. “Devastatingly, we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue,” the report found. In addition to an improved tone, the RNC outlined a single policy imperative: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” After a bipartisan group of senators failed to turn immigration legislation into law, Republicans on the campaign trail — including those involved with that effort — have moved sharply in the other direction. Almost the entire GOP field now calls first and foremost for increased security along the Mexican border. Some, including front-runner Donald Trump, want to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the country illegally — a policy prescription experts suggest would be difficult if not impossible to achieve. Incoming House Speaker Paul Ryan said during the weekend there would be no immigration bill until 2017, at the earliest. But Trump, who has infuriated Latinos by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, keeps the topic front-and-center in the race. “There have been moments that have been a little painful,” says Henry Barbour, an author of the RNC’s post-election report and a Republican National committeeman from Mississippi. “We have to nominate a candidate who can win, someone who can grow our party instead of making it smaller.” Absent a clear front-runner of their own, Republicans are trying to rally around their opposition to Clinton — amid signs that she’s getting stronger. Commanding performances in the first primary debate and during 11 hours of testimony before a Republican-led congressional committee reassured many Democrats who’d feared the controversy over her use of a private email server as secretary of state could harm her campaign. Her poll numbers have rebounded from a summer slump, and she now holds a wide lead nationally over Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. The relatively clear Democratic field has allowed her team to focus a full year before Election Day on building the kind of operation that can carry her beyond the primary contests. She employs 511 staff members across the country — close to the number of staff on all the Republican campaigns combined. Fundraising reports show an energized Democratic Party, with Clinton and Sanders together raising only slightly less than 15 candidates on the Republican side combined. The two top Democrats had about the same amount in the bank at the beginning of October as all the Republicans. Clinton aides say that they budgeted for a high level of spending early in the campaign, and that the team is making important investments in data analysis, digital infrastructure and organizing that will help both in the primaries and the general election. Few, if any, Republican campaigns have made such investments, although the Republican National Committee has expanded its digital operation. Still, with two Senate committees and the FBI investigating Clinton’s email arrangement, that issue could re-emerge. And an unpredictable Democratic primary electorate, which has moved to the left during President Obama’s administration, leaves Clinton and her team cautious about their prospects. “I once made the mistake of thinking we could talk about these kinds of things before a single vote was cast,” said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Clinton supporter. “Anything could happen still. This is a presidential campaign. You have no idea what may be waiting in the wings.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Bernie Sanders has had consistent message for 4 decades
Once a democratic socialist, always a democratic socialist. Once a scold of big money in politics, still a scold. No one can accuse Bernie Sanders of flip-flopping during his four decades in public life. Rock steady, he’s inhabited the same ideological corner from where he now challenges Hillary Rodham Clinton in an improbable quest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Here he is in 1974, as the 32-year-old candidate for U.S. Senate of a fledgling leftist party in Vermont called Liberty Union: “A handful of banks and billionaires control the economic and political life of America. … America is becoming less and less of a democracy and more and more of an oligarchy.” And now, in an Associated Press interview: “This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans. … You know this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires.” Some see him as a broken record, others as a person who has been telling the truth all along and just waiting for enough people to listen. “The fascinating thing about Bernie right now is that the agenda has caught up with Bernie,” said Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor and longtime Sanders watcher. During Sanders’ near decade as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, during his eight terms holding Vermont’s lone House seat and during his near decade in the Senate, the message has stayed the same: The rich are absconding with an immorally large part of the country’s wealth, and ordinary people have been getting the short end of the stick. Clinton has gone from opposing same-sex marriage rights to supporting them. Howard Dean, the last Vermont presidential candidate, was a centrist governor who became a liberal representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” when he saw the left flank open in the 2004 primary campaign. Sanders, now 73, favored gay marriage rights before it became fashionable in Democratic circles. He voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in the mid-1990s signed by Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton. Early in her primary campaign, Clinton has spoken about the gap between the rich and the middle class, in an appeal to the party’s liberal wing. The Republican contenders, too, are taking up the problem of income inequality, although with much different solutions in mind than the Democrats. Steady-as-he-goes Sanders has been at it for decades. He’s admired Canada’s single-payer health care system since way back, talking up “nationalized health care” during his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1988. When Republicans charge that Democrats would bring European-style socialism to the U.S., Sanders says bring it on. “I can hear the Republican attack ad right now: ‘He wants America to look more like Scandinavia,’” George Stephanopoulos said while interviewing Sanders on ABC’s This Week. Sanders replied, “That’s right. That’s right. And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a stronger middle class in many ways than we do, a higher minimum wage than we do, and they’re stronger on the environment?” If he’s undergone any transformation, it’s in his political affiliations. He long ago dropped the Liberty Union banner and has run as an Independent in his successful elections in Vermont. He says he remains one “in my heart,” but has caucused with Democrats in Congress. He chose to go for the Democratic nomination and, if he loses the party primaries, says he won’t run for president as an Independent. In an unsuccessful 1986 race for governor as an Independent, Sanders said, “It is time to stop the tweedledee, tweedledum politics of the Republican and Democratic parties.” This time, he’s trying to shake one of the tweedles up from the inside. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
