Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc!

Bernie’s big gamble: Sanders hopes new voters surprise at Iowa caucuses: ANALYSIS

It’s a cliché in political reporting: turnout decides elections. The candidate who gets more people to the polls wins.

Campaigns love to talk about turnout in the finals days of a campaign, when there is little else to say.

Democrats, in particular, pitch over and over that when people turnout, they win. Statistically, more people identify as Democrats nationwide, but that does not always correlate to the number of people who take time to get to the polls, who have the means, interest and will to vote.

In the days before the Democratic primary kicked off with the Iowa caucuses, it was Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders who was talking a lot about turnout.

“On Monday night, we will know very, very early, who wins the Democratic Caucus. If the voter turnout is low. We’re going to lose. Simple as all that,” he told a crowd in Indianola, Iowa on Saturday.

Since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015 and continuing through this second bid all last year, his team has focused extensive time and resources to get new potential voters into the political process.

It’s a different kind of conversation about turnout for Sanders.

His philosophy is that boosting turnout in a significant and meaningful way comes not only by exciting existing Democrats, but organizing and rallying nonvoters into Democrats.

His mission and ability to do that has been central to his argument about why he is the best candidate for Democrats in a general election.

“I think we are the strongest campaign to defeat Trump, because we are developing the strongest grassroots movement in this campaign,” Sanders continued in Indianola. His team has expressed confidence in his ability to win her and polls have showed him surging.

Of course Bernie Sanders can win

As Iowans prepare to head to the caucuses Monday night, Democrats, pundits and academics are already fretting about Sen. Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. He is too risky. He can’t beat President Trump. A booming stock market and record unemployment means his ideas are “stillborn.”

As a conservative, I believe that his policies would be disastrous, and I agree that Sanders (I-Vt.) has major liabilities. In a moment where young, dynamic female and minority candidates are finally getting an opportunity to seize the political limelight, Sanders’s status is a political albatross. He doesn’t even identify as a Democrat, and, while support for socialism may be growing in the Democratic Party, it’s unclear that Americans across key swing states will pull the lever for a man who has championed it since before most of them were born. Beyond that, the media and conservatives have begun to hit Sanders, and his more than three decades in public life have given them ample material, regardless of how fair it is.

But all of these criticisms ignore Sanders’s considerable strengths. He commands a passionate, dedicated and active army of volunteers and small-dollar donors. He either leads or is right behind former vice president Joe Biden in Iowa, depending on the poll. He also leads in New Hampshire. And Sanders slightly leads Trump in head-to-head polling, including in Texas, underscoring that he would be running against a deeply unpopular president who has already been impeached.

Sanders’s message, whether you agree with it or not, is consistent and resonates deeply with millions of Americans. It is unclear whether Sanders is the strongest candidate in the Democratic field, particularly in the purple states that Democrats will need to beat Trump. But he should not be dismissed before a single primary vote is cast.

Beyond Sanders’s candidacy itself, if there has been any lesson worth learning from the 2016 election, it’s that candidates can be deeply flawed — in ways once considered fatal — and still win. But the political expert class seems to have completely forgotten this.

Bernie Sanders Leads Iowa by 7 Points in Poll Released on Eve of Caucus Night

Senator Bernie Sanders continued his lead as the frontrunner for Iowa Democrats by seven points in a new poll released on the eve of the state’s caucuses.

The latest Emerson College poll, released on Sunday evening, shows Sanders leading the narrowing 2020 Democratic primary field with 28 percent of support from respondents in Iowa. Former Vice President Joe Biden followed behind in second place with support from 21 percent of likely caucusgoers, while former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elizabeth Warren trailed behind in third and fourth, with 15 and 14 percent respectively.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was the only other candidate in double digits, came in fifth with 11 percent. The survey, conducted between January 30 and February 2, polled 853 Iowans who were likely to participate in the state’s Democratic caucuses. The margin of error is roughly 3.3 percentage points.

Newsweek reached out to Sanders’ campaign for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Although the results showed Sanders dip slightly by two points from last week’s figures, other recent polls have similarly predicted that the senator is likely to take out Iowa. A CBS News poll, released earlier today, had Sanders and Biden tied at 25 percent for first choice among likely caucusgoers.

A new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald/NBC10 Boston poll released hours before the Iowa caucuses showed the 2020 candidate also leading his Democratic rivals in New Hampshire by seven points, with 31 percent of support among likely Democratic voters. Biden and Warren came in second and third in New Hampshire, garnering 25 and 17 percent respectively.

How Medicare for All Could Improve—and Save—the Lives of Transgender People

Arya Serenity started using GoFundMe in 2018, just before being released from prison. With the help of people on the outside, she ran two campaigns to raise a few thousand dollars to defray the cost of housing, re-entry, and buying women’s clothing and cosmetics for the first time. A year later, she returned to the platform again to pay for facial hair removal.

Arya is a transgender woman, someone who was assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman. She’s also part of a growing cohort of gender diverse individuals who are turning to online platforms like GoFundMe to ask their communities for direct assistance in covering the costs of their transitions. A quick search for “top surgery” on the website will turn up over 27,000 results, and “bottom surgery” yields some 16,000 more. There are also thousands more campaigns from people asking for aid to cover the cost of hormones, gender confirmation surgeries, laser hair removal, and other expenses related to medical transition.

These services can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Arya scoffs at the thought of being able to afford the full scope of gender affirming care that she would like: “Hell no. I can barely pay my rent.”

But with Medicare for All maintaining broad popular support and its chief political proponent—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—surging to the lead in the Democratic primary, that calculation may soon change.

The proposed policy would be a major intervention in a system where over 1.3 million Americans who identify as transgender or gender diverse are systematically shut out of health care coverage. Currently, only 19 states and the District of Columbia require government insurance to cover gender affirming care, and nine states explicitly exclude it. The gender diverse community is uninsured at more than double the percentage of the general population. And in a system where health insurance is tied to employment, gender diverse people are three times more likely to be unemployed than cisgender people, whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. According to the National Center for Trangender Equality, “More than one in four transgender people have lost a job due to bias, and more than three-fourths have experienced workplace discrimination.” This reality is even worse for transgender people of color, with nearly half of Black transgender Americans reporting harassment at work.

With Medicare for All, these coverage disparities could instantly disappear.

Barbara Ehrenreich on Her Endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Why Socialism Should Be Fun

Barbara Ehrenreich is an activist, journalist and author of over 20 books, including her classic 2001 title Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Ehrenreich is a contributing editor to In These Times where her work first appeared in 1977.

She, along with John Ehrenreich, coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) in a famous 1977 essay to describe a class of “salaried mental workers” separate from the working class, whose main function is to reproduce capitalist culture and class relations.

Ehrenreich recently endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic race. She spoke with In These Times about the upcoming elections, socialism and the climate crisis.

Arizona Attorney General wants election access decision placed on hold

Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich has asked the Supreme Court to keep in place an Arizona law that prohibits voters from delivering other people’s mail ballots to the polls.

Political organizations and Native American tribes would previously collect mail-in ballots and drop them off at precincts before or on election day, but state lawmakers banned the practice in 2016, groups said.

The practice was particularly useful for elderly living in rural areas.

Brnovich’s request comes less than a week after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the policy is illegal and violates the Voting Rights Act, officials said.

Some Democrats have argued the policy disproportionately affected Native American, Hispanic, African American and other voters in Arizona who have poor mail service.

Some Republican legislators have argued that the practice of ballot harvesting leaves elections vulnerable to fraud.

“The Ninth Circuit took the unusual step of overruling multiple previous rulings in the State’s favor,” Brnovich said. “Thereby rejecting Arizona’s authority to secure its elections and discourage potential voter fraud.”

The ruling also deemed a separate policy illegal that called for discarding the entire ballot of residents who vote in the wrong precinct, rather than counting votes for races in which the voter was eligible to participate, court officials said. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 5.

Iowa caucus, Native style

There are 1,678 caucus rooms in the state of Iowa. Only one is located in Indian Country. Since 1999, the Meskwaki Settlement, home to the Sac & Fox of the Mississippi in Iowa, has been designated as its own caucus precinct. Located about an hour northeast of Des Moines, the Meskwaki are the only federally recognized tribe in Iowa.

On Monday evening, February 3, the Meskwaki Tribe will join their fellow Iowans as the first voters in the nation to kick off the 2020 presidential election season. State of Iowa voters participate in a quintessentially grassroots democratic process called caucuses.

“We may be Meskwaki Indians but we are also Iowans; we take our little caucus very seriously,” said Johnathon Buffalo, Meskwaki tribal historic preservation officer.

Residents of the Meskwaki Settlement located in Tama County, however, have often felt overlooked in both Iowa and U.S. elections.

“Our people have only recently begun to show more interest in participating in caucuses,” said Donnielle Wanatee of the Meskwaki Tribe. Wanatee is 2020 precinct Democratic chairperson for the Meskwaki Settlement.

“Traditionally, we haven’t been that engaged in the political process. People don’t believe that their voice matters to the state of Iowa or the country at large,” she said.

Brother Ali is right up there with Lowkey and Bernie Sanders when it comes to my favorite people list:

I love this video so much. pic.twitter.com/hqH31rI9cs

— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) February 3, 2020