I don’t think it’s all that surprising that progressive groups are now concentrating on down ballot candidates. Plus it’s not as if the Biden campaign will be putting a lot of effort in these primaries either.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/17/bernie-sanders-delegate-count/

The party platform will be decided at the Democratic National Convention, which was postponed from July to August due to the coronavirus pandemic. To have more influence over shaping it, Sanders will need at least 1,200 elected delegates, which will require winning at least 15 percent of the vote in the remaining primaries. Some delegate-rich states are still up for grabs, like Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. (Many of the votes in Ohio have already been cast by mail; GOP Gov. Mike DeWine postponed the in-person election that had been scheduled for March 17.)

But it’s unclear how hard the Sanders campaign — or what’s left of it — will be working to get those delegates. Sanders has already said he would not actively campaign or spend money on advertising in any of the remaining contests, and he has made clear that he will be campaigning for Biden.

The Sanders campaign, which has laid off the vast majority of its organizing staff, told The Intercept that there’s “a team that works on delegates that is working the strategy” but declined to provide further detail, including how many staffers are staying on to do that.

While Our Revolution, the group that formed from the remnants of Sanders’s 2016 campaign, says it’s prioritizing turning out voters to rack up Sanders’s delegate count, most of the other national groups that backed Sanders’s candidacy aren’t planning to direct much, if any, resources to that effort.

Our Revolution will be doing personal outreach to its most active supporters in the remaining states with requests that they volunteer to send get-out-the-vote texts to other voters. The group is not running any independent expenditures for Sanders.

Other Sanders-supporting groups don’t have plans to get involved or are planning to do just minimal outreach over email and social media. Evan Weber, political director for the Sunrise Movement, which endorsed Sanders in January, told The Intercept that the group hasn’t determined whether it will be phone-banking or doing other kinds of GOTV work for the remaining primaries. “It’s not in our organizing plans as they are developed thus far,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Socialists of America said that since Sanders has left the race, the organization has “shifted our work to focus on down ballot races,” naming a handful of local, state, and congressional candidates it is supporting.

Justice Democrats will also be focusing on down-ballot primaries, said spokesperson Waleed Shahid, and the Center for Popular Democracy Action is also not investing more in getting out the vote for Sanders. Jennifer Epps-Addison, co-executive director of CPD Action, said its stance is “folks can choose to vote for Sanders in the remaining primaries, and Biden should see those votes as an endorsement of the progressive agenda he’ll need to make room for to motivate key voting blocs needed to defeat Trump.” The group’s biggest focus now though, she said, is “defeating Trump and advancing bold progressive ideals.”

The Working Families Party, which originally endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren but then endorsed Sanders several days after she dropped out, will be encouraging members to vote for Sanders through email and social media, but is not planning to run a big persuasion effort. “We’re going to urge WFP members in the remaining primary states to cast a vote for Sanders, in order to send as many progressive delegates as possible to the convention,” said WFP’s national campaigns director, Joe Dinkin.

Regardless of whether Sanders is able to reach the delegate threshold he seeks, Biden is facing greater pressure to unify the party and court Sanders supporters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. This week. the two men announced that they will be forming task forces to work on issues like education, immigration, health care, criminal justice, and climate change. On Tuesday night, during an Instagram Live conversation with rapper Cardi B, Sanders said Biden was “moving in the right direction” on immigration and criminal justice reform.

Under pressure to unify the party, it’s unlikely that Biden would come out explicitly against the rules reforms the DNC Unity Commission agreed to in 2017 — especially as Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon co-chaired that commission. The Biden campaign did not return a request for comment.

Cohen, though, has his eye not just on maintaining those reforms, but expanding them and pushing the party to adopt more progressive positions. Examples of platform stances he said Sanders delegates could push for include allowing employers to join Medicare, which is how South Korea eventually got to single payer, and allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs can.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2020/04/16/bernie-sanders-endorses-magic-the-gathering-workers-union/#34a796302c88

Workers trying to organize a union at one of the country’s largest collectible card game storefronts just found an unlikely ally in the form of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

More than 100 warehouse workers at TCGplayer, a major reseller of Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokémon cards are organizing to form a union to address concerns about their working conditions and healthcare.

“We were promised a company that truly cared about its workers, offering great benefits and a supportive, nurturing community,” the union’s organizers said in a letter they released online. “As the company has grown and evolved, workers in the Fulfillment Center have experienced much of this promise erode.”

Shortly after reporter Matthew Gault covered the union efforts in an article on Motherboard, the former Democratic candidate hopeful shared his support on Twitter.

It only took a few hours for TCGplayer union organizers to respond to Sen. Sanders. “Thank you for showing support! We believe like you, all workers deserve a voice on the job and the security of a contract. Solidarity forever!” the union’s Twitter account wrote.

While Sen. Sanders’ endorsement of unions fits his brand perfectly, Twitter users were entertained by the crossover between politics and Magic: The Gathering, speculating on Sen. Sanders’ favorite playstyle and preferred mana color. Two users, @UncleItsEvan and @AltersAlk, collaborated on a parody Magic card inspired by the Senator.

One thing’s for sure: Sen. Sanders’ endorsement will give this union effort far more publicity than it might have gotten otherwise. I have reached out to TCGplayer for a statement on the matter and will update this article if I hear back from them.

I support @seiu200united and TCGPlayer warehouse workers work to organize a union. Now more than ever, workers need a union contract to protect their wages, benefits, and safety on the job. https://t.co/N3FUldba2r

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 16, 2020

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/17/disturbing-new-trump-plan-reopen-economy-contains-no-national-covid-19-testing

President Donald Trump late Thursday released a vague plan to reopen the U.S. economy that—in a retreat from his claim of “total” authority—puts the onus on states to decide when to lift coronavirus prevention measures and contains no national strategy for the kind of massive testing expansion that public health experts say is necessary before any safe return to normalcy.

The new White House guidelines, titled “Opening Up America Again” (pdf), say states should have the “ability to quickly set up safe and efficient screening and testing sites for symptomatic individuals and trace contacts of COVID+ results” before reopening their economies. But governors have repeatedly and directly warned Trump that, without federal assistance, their states do not have the capacity to expand testing on the scale that is needed.

Trump—who on almost a daily basis has pushed the misleading claim that the U.S. is ahead of the rest of the world in testing—is “determined to reopen the country,” one anonymous adviser to the president told the Washington Post.

“Testing is just not his primary thought,” the adviser said.

“The most disturbing story I’ve read in a while, which is saying something given the times,” MSNBC legal analyst Matthew Miller tweeted late Thursday, linking to a Post article on the new White House guidelines. “There is no plan for testing. Nothing, nada, zilch.”

According to the Post, “there is no national testing strategy, but rather a patchwork of programs administered by states with limited federal guidance.”

“Trump’s the-buck-stops-with-the-states posture is largely designed to shield himself from blame should there be new outbreaks after states reopen or for other problems, according to several current and former senior administration officials involved in the response,” the Post reported.

Following the release of the White House’s latest guidelines, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted that “if you are a straight news reporter it doesn’t undermine your neutrality to characterize the failure on testing as a failure.”

“It is an objective fact that [the administration] failed to meet any of the metrics set by public health professionals or even their internal goals,” said Schatz. “It’s a failure.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/opinion/coronavirus-relief-trump.html

But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low. And in the wake of two political campaigns — Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s — that pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics, voters might begin to see this essential truth.

If the electoral danger for the Republican Party is that voters will blame the president for high unemployment and mass death — a reasonable fear, given how Trump loudly denied the threat in the face of warnings from inside and outside his administration — then the ideological danger is that it undermines the ideological project that captured the state with President Ronald Reagan and is on the path to victory under Donald Trump.

Republicans haven’t openly expressed this, but they seem aware of it, to the extent that on the eve of approval of the first coronavirus bill, they tried to kill the most generous provisions of relief — an enormous expansion of unemployment insurance. The reason? “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else,’” Senator Rick Scott of Florida explained on the Senate floor. In other words, we cannot help people so much that they can effectively bargain for better wages; crisis or not, we must discipline the working class.

But in trying to destroy the administrative state — in trying to make government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — conservatives left the country vulnerable to a deadly disease that has undermined that project and galvanized its opponents.

And all of this is happening as one of the most progressive generations in history begins to take its place in our politics, its views informed by two decades of war and economic crisis.

Yes, nothing is set in stone and, yes, events still have to unfold. But at this moment in American life, it feels as if one movement, a reactionary one, is beginning to unravel and another, very different in its outlook, is beginning to take shape.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/836670935/self-employed-and-gig-workers-face-long-waits-for-coronavirus-relief-checks

Crashing servers, outmoded software and overloaded call centers are some of the obstacles standing between millions of unemployed workers and the financial lifeline the government has promised under the $2 trillion relief package approved late last month.

With every passing week the problem is exacerbated by new waves of jobless or laid-off workers whose paychecks have vanished since the coronavirus pandemic crippled the U.S. economy.

But the delays may be even longer for the self-employed, independent contractors and gig-economy workers who are not normally eligible for unemployment benefits, but are covered under two separate provisions in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act.

New figures released by the Department of Labor show 22 million Americans have filed unemployment claims since mid-March. The staggering surge reflects how jobs, created during a decade-long economic expansion, have been wiped out.

Meanwhile, state agencies say a large part of what is causing the technology problems leading to delays is the avalanche of newly eligible applicants that have overwhelmed existing systems. The crush of calls and online applications have proved to be too much for understaffed call centers and outdated benefit programs running on old software.

Battle of the SuperPacs 🥊🥊🥊 💵💵💵. Of course, no mention of grassroots fundraising 😣😣😣

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-campaigns-selection-of-preferred-super-pac-stokes-strife-in-democratic-party/2020/04/16/1379504c-7f8e-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html?utm_source=reddit.com#click=https://t.co/eauTAOnXAa

Joe Biden’s campaign signaled to donors this week that Priorities USA would be its main big-money partner for the general election — a move that has alarmed some of Biden’s ardent backers, who fear the campaign has given outsize influence to a super PAC that many donors associate with the party’s loss in 2016.

Biden’s campaign on Wednesday called Priorities USA, which was founded in 2011 to support President Barack Obama’s reelection, “a leader” among the groups working to defeat President Trump and an “organization of proven effectiveness.” The statement was viewed as a sign to wealthy backers that they should give to Priorities over other groups.

But some prominent Biden supporters said the decision had alienated outside groups that had formed since 2016 and helped turn out voters for Democratic wins in subsequent elections. One of those groups is Unite the Country, which boosted Biden through the primaries.

Among top Democrats pushing the campaign to accept help from a broader constellation of groups is Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), an influential figure whose endorsement was pivotal to Biden’s momentum toward the nomination.

“It’s a horrible mistake to put all the eggs in one basket,” Clyburn said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I believe very strongly that everybody has a role to play. No one person, no one entity can be all things to all people. It just can’t happen. One size does not fit all.”

Clyburn is a prominent advocate of Unite the Country, and his daughter is on the group’s board.

Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 reelection run and an adviser to a different superPAC, American Bridge 21st Century, said the party’s donors need to invest in many independent groups to beat Trump.

At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in independent spending for Biden by super PACs and politically active nonprofits that can raise and spend unlimited sums to try to influence elections.

Democrats are scrambling to build an operation to compete with President Trump, who has been fundraising for his reelection since 2017.

But as they seek to put up a unified front, Democrats have been dogged by internal battles over how to avoid the mistakes of 2016, when they were caught off guard by Trump’s unorthodox campaign and ultimate victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Some of the donors concerned with this week’s announcement said that the party made a mistake in leaning so heavily on Priorities USA in 2016, because it put too much control in the hands of a small group of overly influential players.

He said fellow longtime Biden donors had expressed concern to him about Biden’s top advisers’ judgment in giving their blessing to Priorities, which those donors believe miscalculated its spending strategy in 2016. “They cannot be trusted with our money — again,” Morgan said.

Another longtime Democratic donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions, said there was “an explosion” of “aggressive and tense” reactions among fellow Biden donors, who thought the campaign was repeating a failed strategy.
“
My opinion was always that Biden would be crazy to pick one,” the donor said. “This is not 2016. We lost in 2016 with this command-and-control structure. There are many groups that sprung up since 2016 on our side.”

Clyburn said his daughter’s role with the group did not influence his position. In a statement, Clyburn Reed said she joined the super PAC “because of their inclusive approach . . . early in the primary which helped deliver the nomination to Joe Biden and because I know an amplified approach like that will be critical to winning in November.”

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/16/florida-pays-on-only-5-percent-of-jobless-claims-as-desantis-rejects-calls-for-generosity-1277282

As Gov. Ron DeSantis rejects pleas to increase unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of workers hit by coronavirus closings, the state is sending only a small number of jobless residents any aid at all.

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered a knockout punch to the state’s economy, prompting labor groups and Democratic politicians to call on Florida to raise its $275 cap on weekly unemployment benefits, which is one of the lowest amounts in the country, and extend the number of weeks that people can collect aid.

DeSantis has said he lacks the legal authority to make such moves, standing firm even as he has used his emergency power to shut down non-essential surgeries, push back tax collection deadlines and make other sweeping moves.

“I waived pretty much everything I could waive,” DeSantis said Thursday.

As DeSantis has refused to make the benefit more generous, only about 5 percent of applicants for aid in the past month have actually received payments from the state. Of the 650,000 people who applied for unemployment benefits since March 15, about 33,600 have received payments, the Department of Economic Opportunity said Thursday.

Warren the most popular overall. Abrams does better than Harris with black voters.

https://www.axios.com/vice-president-women-color-warren-poll-biden-c75d2901-aead-424c-a5b1-a987ab312c6c.html

A group commissioned a poll in two Midwestern swing states to test the viability of women of color to be Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick and found Stacey Abrams as the top choice for black voters — but Elizabeth Warren as the overall candidate to beat.

Details: Kamala Harris was the only candidate of color to break the top three for overall support, along with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Warren, in this survey of Michigan and Wisconsin voters conducted for Donors of Color Action and reviewed by Axios.

But Warren reflected the most consistent support among white and black voters in both states.

By the numbers: Black voters in Michigan and Wisconsin picked Abrams as their favorite hypothetical running mate for Biden, at 36% and 38%, respectively.

While Klobuchar is popular among voters overall in these states, she got just 12% support from black voters in Michigan and 20% from black voters in Wisconsin.

Harris underperformed with black voters in Michigan (22%) relative to her overall support in these two states, and she did 10 percentage points better with black voters in Wisconsin.

Warren earned the most consistent support among the group, in the low 30s among black voters in both states.

Abrams’ performance without being a sitting senator or having just run for president, shows potential to build a broad coalition and turn out voters.

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21223994/texas-disenfranchise-millions-ken-paxton-physical-condition-democratic-party-debeauvoir

On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) office released a letter arguing that a Texas law governing who may obtain an absentee ballot must be read very narrowly — so narrowly that it could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters during the coronavirus pandemic.

The letter went even further than that, threatening criminal prosecutions against activists who encourage many younger voters to vote absentee.

The next day, a state trial judge in Austin rejected Paxton’s reading of this absentee ballot law, holding that Texas voters should have broad access to absentee ballots during the pandemic. But it is far from clear that Judge Tim Sulak’s order will survive contact with higher Texas courts.

That case is called Texas Democratic Party v. Debeauvoir.

All nine justices on the Texas Supreme Court are Republicans, so there is a very high likelihood that Paxton’s narrow reading of the law will prevail if Texas Democratic Party reaches the state supreme court. Paxton is widely expected to appeal Judge Sulak’s decision.

Texas is one of a minority of states that does not permit voters to obtain an absentee ballot for any reason they choose. In Texas, voters over the age of 65 may obtain such a ballot merely by requesting one, but younger voters may only obtain an absentee ballot under a limited set of circumstances.

The law does permit voters under the age of 65 to obtain an absentee ballot if they have a “sickness or physical condition,” but Paxton’s office claims that voters under the age of 65 have to actually be ill in order to obtain a ballot. As they read the law, it’s not enough if a voter is stuck at home in order to avoid becoming infected.

Because older voters tend to favor Republican candidates, Texas’s odd legal regime, where older voters may have an easy time voting from home while younger voters could struggle to obtain a ballot, could provide a significant unfair advantage to Republicans if the coronavirus pandemic still requires most Texans to remain at home on Election Day.

Moreover, the Texas law can plausibly be read in one of two ways — meaning that the Republican-controlled state supreme court could easily choose the reading that is best for the GOP.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/zero-hour-youth-climate-activist-jamie-margolin-video-979679/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_BwabQkUXkUWjc590rhkk4DSgeABBr1gzy9pS74I6zyDpESamfSvF74azMNNKXOVWSWv2Qg_YsBdb3rHmYdtJfyWsxAg&_hsmi=86449357

Between founding a youth climate coalition, organizing a national climate march, writing a book, and going to high school, 18-year-old Jamie Margolin’s schedule is pretty packed. “What am I doing to address climate change?” asks Margolin. “Girl, what am I not doing to address climate change is the real question.”

The engaged teenager started working on issues surrounding the climate crisis when she was a freshmen in high school in Seattle. She testified on and lobbied for legislation at the city and state levels, gave speeches, and organized and attended events.

“Then after about a little over a year of doing this, I was growingly frustrated that the work I was doing locally was not enough; people were not taking enough action,” Margolin explains. She took to social media and started an organization called Zero Hour to put together a youth climate march in Washington, D.C., and around the world, which took place on July 21, 2018.

According to Margolin, governments should be treating the climate crisis as an emergency of the same importance as COVID-19. “I’m not saying that they’re acting perfectly, because a lot of governments, including the United States government, have been making a lot of mistakes in the handling of it. But the general idea of the way that they’re treating the coronavirus — with that urgency, that, ‘Oh, my god, this is an emergency, we need to act!’ — that’s how they need to be treating the climate crisis.”

She points to fossil-fuel divestment, lowering emissions, reforestation, protecting wildlife, investing in renewable energy, and investing in and listening to communities of color and low-income and indigenous people as all much-needed solutions.

For individuals to feel empowered, Margolin implores others to focus on systemic change over individual change. “We can’t blame someone for using a plastic utensil if that’s all they have,” says Margolin. “We’re not in this climate crisis because a couple of individuals were irresponsible. We’re in this climate crisis because there has been mass systematic oppression, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism. All of these systems have been pushing people down for so long, and communities are suffering.”

https://t.co/QibYl0Tp0k pic.twitter.com/ItYIf6ICLE

— Majority Report (@majorityfm) April 17, 2020

A shady political group bankrolled by the family of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos helped organize a protest against Michigan's stay-at-home order.

Proud Boys, men with swastika tattoos & others flying Confederate flags showed up. https://t.co/tlIIWIcAUQ

— Alex Kotch (@alexkotch) April 17, 2020