Beto's $6.1 million raised in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign was eye-popping. It seems to me, much like Kamala Harris' campaign kickoff attended by 20,000 supporters, too good to be true.
The mainstream media does love Beto, slathering him with attention and amplifying his completely spent and discredited call "to reach across the aisle and act together as one nation." The mainstream media loves to peddle a wholly fictitious bipartisan centrism because it acts as a smokescreen to allow the corporate oligarchy that runs the planet to continue to rape and pillage freely.
One particularly interesting aspect of Edsall's piece is the assessment that Beto bites more out of Bernie's hide than Biden's. I would have thought it the other way around since Biden peddles the same centrist snake oil. But that's not what the early polling reveals:
While head-to-head polls are still in a larval stage, they do signal the demographic sources of support for the candidates.
The most recent CNN poll, released on Tuesday, shows, for example, that the leader, Joe Biden, at 28 percent overall, gets more support from moderates than from liberals, more from older voters than young voters, more from men than women and more from whites than from minorities. Bernie Sanders, at 20 percent, is just the opposite, stronger among liberals, young voters, minorities and women.
O’Rourke, at 11 percent, has a long way to go to catch up with either Biden or Sanders. But the CNN poll shows that O’Rourke’s supporters tend to be slightly more liberal than moderate, young rather than old, female rather than male, and O’Rourke gets more support from African-Americans and Hispanics than from whites.
In other words, O’Rourke’s backing is tilted to constituencies that are not normally associated with a moderate white Democratic politician whose voting record, by party standards, is on the center-right.
If these demographic patterns hold, O’Rourke is competing more directly with Sanders (and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren) than with Biden.
The Sanders-O’Rourke battle has already begun. Bernie Sanders loyalists have been challenging O’Rourke’s credentials for the past three months as both men seek support from younger voters.
“Forces loyal to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are waging an increasingly public war against Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the new darling of Democratic activists,” Jonathan Allen and Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News wrote in December. “O’Rourke’s ability to connect with younger and progressive white voters,” they continued, “puts him in direct competition with the Vermont senator.”
On Tuesday, Sanders announced that he has hired David Sirota, one of O’Rourke’s harshest critics, as a senior adviser and speechwriter. On Dec. 22, Sirota published a 1,700 word denunciation of O’Rourke in The Guardian that concluded,
"Another blank-slate Democrat who pretends there is a unifying third way between the 99 percent and the 1 percent and who refuses to take sides in big fights against corporate power — that may excite Betomaniacs, establishment Democrats and those with stakes in the status quo, but it won’t rescue our country and it won’t save the planet."If you're scratching for every single vote, yes, having Beto in the race is an impediment for Bernie. But general demographic overlap shouldn't be a real cause for a concern. O'Rourke will not eat Sanders' lunch.
Participation in presidential primaries is for the committed. Beto attracts the non-engaged voter, someone who views politics as a Hollywood drama. Push comes to shove the Beto voter is not going to give up his/her Saturday morning to pack into some hall for hours to attend a caucus.
Bernie will keep his true believers. Biden will have the party machinery, the union officials who double as PCOs, et al., just as Hillary did. Basically, once the crowed primary field is culled, it is going to be 2016 all over again.
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