Warren voters should condemn the WFP's endorsement shenanigans

The Working Families Party has endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president. And it looks probable that she won with votes from only 22 to 40 percent of the rank-and-file, Matt Bruenig writes - votes that were overruled by an 82 to 100 percent majority among the leadership. But the WFP has refused to release the specific totals, making nonsensical claims that doing this would violate "the secret ballot" and lying about its access to these numbers.

Predictably, Sanders supporters aren't happy about this - but it seems to me that there are some simple reasons why Warren's supporters should also condemn the WFP's endorsement shenanigans.

The quiet death of "Bernie hasn't been vetted"

Bernie Sanders continues to dominate Donald Trump in head-to-head polling: he has now defeated Trump in 20 consecutive polls tracked by RealClearPolitics. And in fact, except for a single outlier - a Rasmussen poll the firm describes as "a virtual tie" - Sanders has defeated Trump in every head-to-head tracked by the aggregator this cycle.

This isn't a new trend; Sanders has been annihilating Trump in head-to-heads since 2015. But during the last election, pundits developed a standard explanation for why this wasn't a big deal: Sanders, we were told, "hadn't been vetted."

Everyone agrees: rich countries have to help poor countries with climate change

Ask any demographic group, and most people will agree - rich countries need to help poor countries with climate change. That's what YouGov / Economist found in its latest poll:

Who isn't paying attention to the 2020 primaries? The poor and oppressed.

A new poll from Morning Consult confirms an ongoing trend: voters who pay a lot of attention to politics are more likely to support Elizabeth Warren, while those who pay less attention are more likely to support Bernie Sanders.

I was wrong about Twitter

For several years now I have persistently argued that Twitter discourse is not actually a significant force in US politics. And for the most part, I still think this is true. For one thing, even though we often talk about Twitter as if it's some grand forum of public opinion, very few people actually use it. For another, even though we often talk about our politics as if it's downstream from the discourse, usually it's the other way around: the people in our society who have power wield it, and then the rest of us post about what they've done.

Usually - but two fairly recent developments have inclined me to acknowledge some exceptions.

CAP's rebrand of "universal health care" is vacuous and dangerous

Yet again, Neera Tanden is repeating the Center for American Progress's talking point that "universal health care" applies to a full range of proposals that are not single payer. The marketing reasons for making this point are obvious: UHC is an extremely popular brand on the liberal-left, and opposing it is extremely unpopular, which means that anyone who wants the liberal-left's support for their agenda needs to make some claim to the brand.

David Koch, 1940-2019

David Koch, a radical plutocrat who funded right-wing extremist movements for decades and pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, has died at 79.

From around the World Wide Web ("internet")

• Two recent posts - The “Biased Electorate” Myth Has Been Debunked Again and The Quiet Death of the “White Bernie Bro” Attack - have both been reprinted at Jacobin.
• Bernie Sanders has released his climate change plan - and some of it looks a lot like 3P's Global Green New Deal! My comments over at People's Policy Project.

The quiet death of the "white Bernie Bro" attack

Bernie Sanders faced ferocious criticism in the media throughout the 2016 primaries - and central to that critique was what The Washington Post called Bernie Sanders' big black-voter problem. Black voters, we were told, decisively rejected Sanders' politics - and, by extension, left flank challenges to the Democratic establishment. And the proof was in the polls: overwhelming majorities of black voters preferred Hillary Clinton.

What's going on with the Sanders / Warren crossover vote?

In short: we don't know. Because to measure this directly, you would need to ask respondents "have you switched from Sanders to Warren, or vice versa?" - and no one is actually asking this. There is, however, an indirect way to look at this: ask voters who their second choice is. If we then suppose that first choice votes are "stolen" from a respondent's second choice, we can get rough idea of what the crossover vote looks like. Here's a graph of how this has played out since Warren began her micro-surge in June: