Center and center-left Democrats are starting to come to grips with the reality that Bernie Sanders is going to be the party’s presidential nominee.
The moment of reckoning could come as soon as next week’s Super Tuesday, in which roughly a third of the delegates will be up for grabs.
In fact, it’s likely that, even if the race isn’t decided, it at the least will be seriously winnowed down to Sanders and perhaps one or two other top candidates, plus maybe a spoiler who doesn’t get it that the writing is on the wall.
I’m expecting it to come down to Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, personally, a classic left vs. center.
I’m personally not a great fan of either, but to be fair, I’ve not been sold on any of the candidates in the mix on the Democratic side for 2020.
Sanders concerns me because it doesn’t seem to me that he has any chance of being able to get anything from his platform accomplished.
Bloomberg, on the other side of the ledger, likely loses a big enough chunk of the Sanders base to guarantee re-election for Donald Trump, which in my view the American experiment just can’t stand.
Similar logic, of course, do center and center-left Democrats peel off from Sanders to the degree that Trump is the odds-on favorite in a head-to-head with Sanders?
I think that’s just as likely as the first scenario.
Republicans, from the polls I’ve seen of late, are perfectly content to hold their noses to pull the lever for Trump, with in the area of 90 percent of self-identified Republican voters saying they’ll vote Trump in November, no matter what.
Republicans are doing everything they can to keep the base energized. Here in Virginia, for example, Republicans have been whipping up a frenzy in the hinterlands by playing up the Second Amendment sanctuary nonsense that was highlighted by a faux siege of the State Capitol last month.
I don’t see what they’re doing here working enough to flip Virginia back into the red column in November, but it will be close here, and similar efforts ongoing in the Midwest seem to have muddied the waters there enough to think a repeat of 2016 in those battleground states is in the offing.
It’s going to be close, which makes no sense, because the current president is historically underachieving, putting a restrictor plate on economic growth with his senseless trade wars and budget-busting tax breaks for the ultrawealthy, and that’s not even considering the unprecedented corruption that has to date marked the Trump years.
Republican voters only seem to care that a supposed one of their own is in the Oval Office, and on the other side, Democratic voters seem intent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Logic would seem to dictate that doing what is necessary to save the Republic from a person using the White House to claw himself out of massive personal debt by selling our country to the highest inimical bidder would be the paramount priority, but, then, we are talking about Democrats here.
This is the group of people who figured out ways to lose not one, but two, presidential elections in the past two decades on the heels of having had successful and popular two-term incumbents to take the ball from and run with.
Basically, if there’s a way for somebody to eff up a sure thing, it’s Democrats, and it seems clear at this writing that Democrats are dead set on doing what is necessary to give us four more years of Trump, whichever way they go.
It’s going to be Sanders.
The center and center-left will revolt.
But hey, good news there being, once that happens, we won’t have to worry about effing things up again in 2024, because the republic as we know it isn’t going to be long for any of this.
Story by Chris Graham
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