UPDATED: Mini-Mike, Bernie, and PC

If there's one thing that came through loud and clear from the I Believe Weissmann post, it's the anxiety for Election 2020 that many conservatives feel. Let's take a look at some of the dynamics on the Dem side that I believe are working against them--and working for Trump. And the Republican party if they're willing to accept the lessons that Trump has been laying out for all who have eyes to see.

Mini-Mike is, for the moment, the great hope of a certain element in the Dem party--big money, anti-Bernie. His biggest impact so far seems to be in pricing other Dem candidates out of the race--except for Bernie, who has the resources to go all the way. But the weaknesses of Mini-Mike as a candidate are becoming ever more apparent. His lack of knowledge of America-beyond-the-Hudson is painfully apparent. His lack of concern for a huge sector of the US economy (agriculture) is remarkable. And then there's his unique ability to offend virtually every significant demographic in the Dem party--not every segment, but most. His "kill it" comment certainly makes Trump look refined in his attitudes toward women. Then, too, one wonders what Ruth Bader Ginsburg fans think of Mini-Mike's idea of cutting off health care to oldies who get cancer?

Now AmThinker has a nice article that highlights another aspect of Mini-Mike that's sure to alienate the entire US working class and much of the middle class that feels threatened by foreign labor market competition:

Bloomberg’s China Conflict of Interest 

Would a President Bloomberg with so many ties to a potentially desperate and belligerent China, and subject to potential extortion, act in the best interest of the United States?

A few excerpts make the problem exceedingly clear:

But along with Bloomberg comes his de facto business partner and long-time close ally: China, ...  

... in 2013 Bloomberg News was caught in a scandal when it killed news stories revealing corruption related to Xi Jinping’s family members, prompting various reporters and editors to resign. It turned out that Bloomberg News leadership told the editors that stories about the families of politburo members were off limits. 

... 

As Josh Rogin of the Washington Post points out, among the ways Michael Bloomberg and his company Bloomberg LP make a considerable amount of money in China is not only through the extraordinarily profitable licensing of its financial software but via its massive Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index.  Bloomberg LP is helping finance Chinese companies by sending billions of U.S. investor dollars into the Chinese bond market.

In 2019, the index began a 20-month plan to support 364 Chinese firms by directing an estimated $150 Billion into their bond offerings, including 159 controlled directly by the Chinese government. Bloomberg, along with other Wall Street firms, is effectively supporting the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, their resistance to Donald Trump’s efforts to rein in Chinese trade exploitation and espionage, all the while exposing American investors to increased risk in a nation that habitually obfuscates its economic statistics and manipulates its currency.

...   

The myriad conflicts of interest that Donald Trump has been falsely accused of over the past four years pale by comparison to the actual potential conflicts of Michael Bloomberg, particularly in regard to America’s primary global adversary, China.   Further, on a daily basis new stories emerge concerning his tyrannical management style, egocentrism, racial insensitivity and overt sexism -- all factors that should be determinative in disqualifying anyone for a major political party presidential nomination. 

Nonetheless, the Ruling Class, desperate to rid themselves of the dual existential threat to their hegemony, Donald Trump and his America First Movement and Bernie Sanders and his Democratic Socialism, are coalescing behind Michael Bloomberg. He is willing to buy not only the American Presidency but the Ruling Class’s loyalty and endorsements. And many are willing to sell. If there was any doubt that power and money motivate the American Ruling Class, thanks to Michael Bloomberg, that doubt will now been put to bed.

The picture that emerges is so absurd from the standpoint of Mini-Mike fielding a serious run for the Dem nomination that some are speculating that Mini-Mike's real role is to clear the field for a "moderate" Dem--whether Hillary or someone else. Anybody but Bernie! It sounds crazy, but then Impeachment Theater was pretty darned crazy too, putting the likes of Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler forward to the nation as the face of the Dems. Tom Luongo has a piece today at Zerohedge in which he tries to make the case that Mini-Mike is trying to clear the way for Hillary--or possibly a Hillary surrogate: Mike Bloomberg: Trojan Horse For Clintonista Revival.

Wall St. buys the Dem party, then buys Election 2020? Sounds nuts, but ...

As for Bernie.

A week or so ago I mentioned that I had a recollection that a not insignificant portion of Bernie primary voters had crossed over to Trump in 2016. Commenter Bebe dug up a reference for that thought--a Newsweek article from August, 2017, that takes a fairly deep dive into the post election data. The author obviously has an agenda--elections have a lot of moving parts, so they're rarely this cut and dried--but it's a real thing: BERNIE SANDERS VOTERS HELPED TRUMP WIN AND HERE'S PROOF.

It turns out that my recollection was not off. Fully 12% of "Sanders voters" crossed over and voted for Trump. What's going on here?

Well, it turns out that those "Sanders voters" who voted for Trump in the general election were a special subset of "Sanders voters." What I mean is, the Sanders vote contained a fairly large percentage of voters who were essentially protest voters. These were voters--both Republican and Democrat--who were disgusted with the way things had been going in the country and were looking for an alternative. When Trump emerged as a viable alternative for protest voters, many of them naturally gravitated toward Trump. And away from Hillary--who only got 75% of the so-called "Sanders voters." You can see in the chart below that the Trump voters and those who voted "other" were in fact anything but solid Dem in orientation:

less than 10 percent considered themselves strong Democrats, while less than 50 percent even leaned Democrat.

Trump found them. And my guess is that those voters are pretty happy with the results. They will not be voting Dem in 2020. That's very bad news for the Dems in general, and not just Bernie, because those voters made a real difference:

Sanders -> Trump voters…

WI: 51k
MI: 47k
PA: 116k 

Trump win margin… 

WI: 22k
MI: 10k
PA: 44k 

WI: 9% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.
MI: 8% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.
PA: 16% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

On to the PC factor!

Eric Kaufmann, a professor of Political Science, has a pretty perceptive article out: Why the Left Is Losing. Basically, he's saying that Progressive ideology--which is adhered to by only about 8% of the population--has taken over the Dem party and boxed it in to positions that are anathema to the much of the rest of the population (that last link will give you data on that). Key to that is the complex of issues that revolve around immigration. The dynamics of this are playing out not only in the US but in Europe as well, rendering the Left unelectable in much of the West because they've alienated normal people but can't stop doing it. Sound like anything you've seen or experienced?

The mainstream Left is in serious trouble in the West. In the December 2019 election, the UK’s Labour Party was trounced by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives 365-203 in seats, and 44-32 percent in the popular vote. This was the worst result for Labour since 1935. 

Yet, as Matthew Goodwin recently noted on Twitter, the most recent election was also the worst result ever for the French Socialist Party of Benoît Hamon, and for the Left in Italy and the Netherlands. It was the second-worst performance since 1949 for the German Social Democrats, the worst finish for the Austrian Social Democrats since 1945, and the worst for the Finnish socialists since 1962. In Sweden, the Social Democrats sunk to their lowest level since 1908. This is more than a coincidence. 

Cultural Realignment 

Underlying the trend is a wider realignment of politics away from the economic conflicts of the 20th century toward the cultural battles of the 21st. Instead of just talking about state redistribution versus free markets, elections increasingly revolve around questions of immigration, national identity, and domestic security. This disadvantages the Left. 

Why? Because, as David Goodhart remarked in an interview, it’s easier for right-wing parties to move left on economics than for left-wing parties to move right on culture. 

That is, left-wing parties cannot move to the vote-rich zone of most electorates where the median voter—typically somewhat conservative on culture and centre-left on economics—resides. Conservatives can do so more easily as they are less beholden to libertarian economic orthodoxy than left-wing parties are to progressive cultural values. 

Identity politics and multiculturalism are central motivating forces for the highly-educated activists who have dominated left-wing parties since the ’68 generation rose to prominence. These ideas tend to be considerably less popular than the Left’s economic offer, hence the bind the Left finds itself in.

Remember, "Identity politics and multiculturalism are central motivating forces for the highly-educated activists"--who make up about 8% of the population. They have big mouths and the MSM is theirs, but normal people tend to look askance at them.

Kaufmann then goes on to try to explain why Leftist PC is so much more rigid than anything comparable on the Right. The important thing is the result:

The rise of identity politics stanched discussion of the cultural anxieties of many white working-class voters, who instead find themselves the object of scorn for their apparently retrograde social attitudes. ... 

The result of the new cultural realignment has been to upend the class composition of the main parties. ... In Britain, for instance, a majority of manual working-class voters plumped for Labour between 1945 and 1975. Even after that date, at least 40 percent voted for the party, with over half backing Tony Blair’s New Labour in the 1997 election. Since then, however, Labour’s support within the white working-class has fallen relentlessly, dropping to only 20 percent among such voters by 2015. 

... It appears that Conservative voters are now more working-class than Labour’s, something unthinkable in 1945 or even 1995.

Trump showed the way. The question is, can GOPer politicians internalize these lessons?

There's plenty more, so follow the link if you're interested.

UPDATE: Some people are trying to talk up Amy. Here's the take of a smart liberal: Chastising Amy #20: So you want to address the 'challenges of our time'?

In her triumphant speech after a strong third place finish in New Hampshire, new MSM darling Amy Klobuchar said this: 

America deserves a president who's gonna take on the challenges of our time: Climate change and affordable education and college, immigration reform, justice and democracy and, yes, bringing down the cost of health care 

... 

But look at her list:. Those are the big challenges?

I'm one of the people who thinks ... that Trump was elected because of deep, often unstated misgivings about where the country and its culture were going under its mainstream, state-of-the-art bipartisan political leadership. These issues go way beyond the simple whites-becoming-a-minority worries emphasized by the press. The status quo, even a status quo that was successful by its own terms (e.g. a bigger economy), wasn't working for many Americans. 

Are Klobuchar's issues the ones that might have been giving voters that sense of anxiety in 2016 -- or now, in 2020 even when jobs and GDP numbers are good? Or are they a bunch of topics you might staple together if you were running a standard, maybe-good-enough-to-win-the-nomination moderate campaign? Let’s see.