New Hampshire Done - On To Super Tuesday

The New Hampshire primary is done - on to Nevada and South Carolina, then Super Tuesday. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leaves NH with a win. South Bend Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg leaves NH with a strong showing. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar heads to NV with hopes of building on her momentum move in IA and NH. Sanders and Buttigieg each came out with nine delegates from the state, and Klobuchar gained six. NH voters were not high on former Vice President Joe Biden or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Neither crossed the 15% threshold needed to receive any pledged delegates.

Perhaps Biden and Warren can kickstart their campaigns with Nevada caucus goers and the South Carolina primary voters. Nevada’s caucus is held on February 20, a day after the next debate on Feb 19, just a week away.

Candidate	Pop Vote	Percent	Delegate Count
Bernie Sanders	121,579	26.10%	21
Pete Buttigieg	115,297	24.75%	23
Amy Klobuchar	79,455	17.06%	7
Elizabeth Warren	62,132	13.34%	8
Joe Biden	48,428	10.40%	6
Tom Steyer	11,058	2.37%	0
Tulsi Gabbard	9,594	2.06%	0
Results through New Hampshire

But, by the time South Carolina primary voters go to the polls on Saturday, February 29, early in person and by-mail voting will have run its course in Texas, Colorado, California and many other Super Tuesday states. More than half - and up to 70 percent - of voters in most Super Tuesday states will have already cast their ballots early, in-person or by mail, by SC primary Election Day. Indeed a good portion of SC voters will have already cast their ballot early by SC Election Day too.

Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia will all hold their presidential primaries on Super Tuesday. 1,357 of the 3,979 total available pledged delegates will be awarded to candidates in the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. More than one third of the U.S. population is expected to vote across the Super Tuesday states.

It may well be too late for any candidate to kickstart their campaign by the time SC voters go in-person to the polls on their primary Election Day on February 29. By then, it will be all but over for all but the top two or three leading contenders - at least for any hope of winning nomination on the first round of national convention delegate voting.

Billionaire, former NYC Mayor, Michael Bloomberg has been much in the news this month for his late entry to the race and the $200 million he has spent to date on massive TV and social media ad buys across the Super Tuesday states.

So far, Bloomberg has not accumulated any pledged delegates or national votes. His campaign to amass votes and delegates effectively starts with the SC primary. He will have to accumulate mass qualities of votes and delegates during the Super Tuesday early voting period - already underway in several Super Tuesday states - to be anything more than a spoiler at the national convention by making impossible for any candidate to accumulate enough pledged delegates to win nomination on the first round of national convention voting.

Bloomberg’s late entry to the race makes it more than likely he will be able to, at best, suck up just enough pledged delegates to throw the national convention into multiple rounds of contentious broker nominating voting.   — https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/482245-democrats-see-chances-rising-for-brokered-convention

The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that. Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Read the full story at The Atlantic: The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

Read more: The Electoral College was terrible from the start

Open Letter to the DNC From an American Centrist

Dear DNC officials:

I come from a long line of Democrats. My grandparents survived the Great Depression because of FDR’s New Deal, and both of my parents were loyal Democrats as well. In my adult lifetime, I proudly registered as a Democrat at age 18, in the 1990s. Since then, I have become extremely disillusioned, watching the Democratic Party become more and more corporate-funded and corporate-aligned to the point where I do not recognize it anymore.

Texas Democrats Mirror Nation

Republicans have dominated Texas politics for more than two decades, but as the state’s population trends younger and becomes more diverse, Democrats are having greater success. In 2018, former congressman Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, came close to beating Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and brought national attention to the state’s changing politics. That same year, Democrats flipped two suburban congressional districts and picked up a dozen seats in the Texas House, putting Democrats just nine seats away from taking control of the chamber — and just ahead of the next redistricting process.