Let’s get right into some of the latest primary data...where African Americans seemed to have had a lot to say (finally!)
Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post lays out the data from a new poll that definitely shows that Joe Biden is the presidential candidate of choice for black folks...and why.
Before you @ me, remember the truism: No candidate will win the Democratic presidential nomination without significant support from African Americans. They are the foundation of the party, and black women are its backbone. And the Post-Ipsos poll, like many national polls before it, makes it clear that they want Trump defeated and they think former vice president Joe Biden is the person to do it.
Biden snagged 48 percent of those surveyed when asked which candidate they would vote for or caucus for in their state. The next-closest was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with 20 percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) came in third with 9 percent.
Biden had the highest net approval rating among registered Democrats (69 percent) and overall (78 percent). Sanders followed with 63 percent and 71 percent, respectively. And Warren came in third with 51 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
You don’t have to like it. Heck, I personally don’t like it because I don’t accept the premises of folks like Capeheart’s Aunt Gloria...But the data is the data; make of it what you will...and I am still looking over it...but I do have a couple of observations
1) As in 2016, it’s not that Bernie Sanders does not have decent favorables with African Americans...he does. Joe Biden simply has higher favorables.
2) The data indicates that black voters, by and large, do not have a problem supporting a gay man. Black voters do have a problem supporting the gay man currently running in the Democratic primary, though.
Jason Johnson is right about this. Listen to and understand what he is saying. Do read the thread.
Salon’s Dan Froomkin notes that the MSM has completely normalized, accepted, and reported on serial liar Donald Trump’s claims of imminent American embassy bombings.
Donald Trump can still rely on a remarkable amount of credulousness from top news organizations, particularly in their headlines and initial tweets.
Trump on Thursday morning ad-libbed that he ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani “because they were looking to blow up our embassy”. When asked what evidence he had, he simply said it was “obvious.” At a political rally on Thursday night, he went further: “Soleimani was actively planning new attacks and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad.”
He still got the kind of coverage normal presidents get when they say something controversial, rather than the coverage that a compulsively lying president ought to get when he says something that’s obviously made up.
Yep, Niral Shah at the Chicago Reporter is correct when he asserts that racism dressed up as a “compliment” is still racism.
The narrative that “Asians are good at math” is pervasive in the United States. Young children are aware of it. College students’ academic performance can be affected by it. And Asian American presidential candidate Andrew Yang has made his mathematical aptitude a feature of his campaign.
On the surface, the “Asians are good at math” narrative sounds like a compliment. After all, what’s wrong with saying that someone is good at something? But as I explain in a recent article, there are two problems. First, the narrative is false. And second, it is racist.
I’m an experienced teacher and researcher of STEM education. Research tells us that racism is a part of students’ classroom experiences in these subjects.
If we don’t understand how racism works – even in supposedly “neutral” areas like STEM – we might unintentionally recycle racist ideas.
Sometime next week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will formally deliver the Articles of Impeachment over the U.S. Senate and The Atlantic’s Russell Berman asks: Was Speaker Pelosi’s delay worth it?
Her decision ends a standoff with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that yielded few tangible benefits to House Democrats. Pelosi contends that the delay in sending the articles trained the national spotlight on the debate over rules for the Senate trial, boosting their side in the battle for public opinion. But she was unable to force either McConnell or a sufficient portion of his members to commit to calling witnesses, such as former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who Democrats believe would strengthen their argument that Trump abused the power of his office by withholding aid from Ukraine while he pressed its president to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden. “We need to see the arena in which we are sending our managers,” Pelosi told reporters on Thursday, explaining her decision to withhold the articles. “Is that too much to ask?”
The Senate will be in play in 2020, according to Charlie Cook and The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift is all over it.
Democrats need to pick up four Republican seats if they win the White House, which would put them at 51 seats (49 Democrats plus two Independents). If the president wins re-election, Democrats would need five pickups because the vice-president has a vote in the event of a tie.
That looked wildly out of reach until Republican-held seats in red states like Kansas, Georgia, and Iowa, where Joni Ernst once looked invincible, late last year began to exhibit weakened support and an opening for a Democrat, the right kind of Democrat.
But job No. 1, Cook says, is winning the White House. “If they’re losing the White House, they’re not going to be winning a majority in the Senate,” he told the Daily Beast in a telephone interview where he laid out the path for Democrats to a narrow majority that would unseat GOP leader Mitch McConnell from his preeminent perch as the lord and master of everything that happens in the upper chamber.