My choice in the Democratic Primary has always been “Anyone.” I didn’t allow myself to fall in love with any one candidate, because I didn’t want to have my heart broken, and I really wasn’t very picky this time around. I want to replace Donald Trump as president, and I was going to support any candidate who had the clearest path towards victory.
If I had let myself fall in love, I might have gone with Warren. She’s been a favorite of Apt. 11D for a long time, since we are interested in many of the same topics.
Now, it looks like it’s going to be Bernie. The centrists are destroying each other. And a few minutes on a debate stage in Vegas negated billions of dollars of paid ads from the Bloomberg campaign.
Is Bloomberg totally done? The pundits seem to think so, but the ads keep coming and coming on the radio and tv around here. Maybe they’ll make some headway, even though the primary in Jersey isn’t until June, and things will be settled by that time. March 3rd will be the big day. Can’t wait.
The pundits are now getting worried about Bernie’s electability and what kinds of policies he’ll put in place, if he wins. A sample of columns in the New York Times: “Bernie Sanders is Making a Big Mistake,” “Would Bernie Sanders Be a Drag on Vulnerable Democrats, ” and “The Democrats Are in Trouble.”
I’m not too worried about Bernie should he become president. I think he’s more of a realist than an ideologue; just look at his position on gun control — he’s probably to the right of Bloomberg on this issue, because he comes from a state with a lot of recreational hunters. I do worry about him getting the suburban vote, because he isn’t offering them anything.
I’m also worried about the fact that the Russian bots have been promoting his candidacy. Steve thinks that they’re doing it just to stir up chaos. I’m worried that they’re promoting him, because they believe that Trump can beat him more easily than the other candidates.
Let’s talk about the Russian election wranglers for a minute. I find it fascinating that how Putin’s Geeky Minions are getting involved in our elections. It not just virus-building and coding. They’re doing it by manipulating people through social media. They figure out what kinds of conspiracy stories will take off among certain groups of people. They play into basic fears and prejudices. They are the ultimate social scientists, who seem to have a better handle on the American electorate than the best campaign managers and political scientists in our country. It’s dark, cynical understanding, but it is probably correct and is probably effective. If so, democracy is dead.
But back to Bernie. I have to say that this is the best drama on tv right now.
Do you think Bernie can beat Trump? Place your predictions here, folks.
Apt. 11d 
If you look at a New York City precinct map reflecting election results, you will see a sea of blue with a few red islands: Staten Island, along the south shore from Bensonhurst to Mill Basin to Howard Beach, up north in the area of Whitestone, Douglaston, etc., the Pelham Park area, maybe one or two more. (Fundamentally, these are all the white Christian neighborhoods in the City.) Also, usually, there will be red areas on the Upper East Side, Riverdale, and Forest Hills. But the 2016 presidential election was unusual, as those last three areas went blue. I predict that if Bernie is the nominee, they will revert to their usual red status. As to how anyone other than UMC law/finance/tech professionals will vote, I don’t know enough such people to guess. But this is one group of swing voters that will go for Trump.
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Hello, “heartland voter” here! Yes, Bernie can beat Trump. It seems almost impossible to overestimate how popular Bernie is out here. He was popular last time, but this time….it’s like wildfire. He has all the supporters he had from last time and then some. From where I sit (translation: one foot in downstate Illinois, my home state; one foot in Omaha/CB, my home away from home for…let’s say “quite awhile”, a probably quite awhile to come), he’s the *only* Democratic frontrunner who has the chance of beating Trump. Remember, Trump has his cult—and I’m trying to be charitable here, but I can’t. I made the mistake of friending some of my mother’s family on FB (I always resisted getting on FB to begin with, but it has become the de-facto best source of information for work, and keeping up with fellow electricians on the road, so…..). These people (my famiglia), the older ones, are nuts. They regularly repost blatantly false memes and info, and will not believe any neutral fact checking source (especially if that source has a dot gov). And it is unreal the level of conspiracy theories. On the upside—this cult-virus is age-related. You want to beat Trump, you have to be able to garner enough voters to knock out the cult-members.
Bernie does that. It’s like Obama in 2008, but stronger. Much stronger. There has been a real shift. Hillary’s loss had a real impact with Democrats out here. Now, people are voting their choice (and not just Bernie supporters—this is across the board), because no one believes that trying to pick “the winner” is a winning strategy. Now, it’s—I got nothin’ to lose.
And that “nothin’ to lose” is a phrase that computes for a hell of a lot more than elections. I’m on several Democrat pages (am a moderator on one), umpteen labor pages, and a couple of broad-scale (demographically, but local to Illinois) “action” pages that cropped up literally in the aftermath of 2016. What I can see: Gen X and younger are Bernie supporters, hands down. What I see in “real life”: same thing. Bernie gained black voters, Latino voters, and in the IBEW? Well, the International Office in D.C. came out early in support of Biden. The reaction amongst members was swift and brutal. These aren’t bots. These are real people, livid that the I.O. was trying to put their thumb on the scale (most Locals do not endorse until after the primaries, and most of the time the I.O. doesn’t either). Bernie was popular with IBEW members last time (oh, the online arguments I had with upper middle class people who swore that hard hats wouldn’t vote for a “socialist”—and I was surrounded by Bernie bumperstickers and hard hat stickers. Then it was “he won’t play in Peoria”—funny you should say that….! And then it was “but he’s Jewish!”—yeah, like my job steward. Good times!). This time? It’s near goddamn universal. People like Warren, or Klobuchar, or Gabbard, and to a much lesser extent Buttigieg….but Bernie is and always was their first choice. Bloomberg has a snowballs chance in hell. He is universally hated, not just by Democrats. A lot more hated than Hillary was. Any thought he has about putting Hillary as his running mate and winning is delusion of the highest order.
My daughter informs me that at her community college Bernie is the clear winner—the only political contest amongst the young people there has been Bernie and Trump from the go-get. Every other candidate was more-or-less ignored.
Why? Because times are tough for most of us. I had the best financial year of my life, working like an animal with ridiculous hours and night shift differential. Driving back and forth seven hours on a one-way trip at least once a month to take care of business back home. (translation: I lose money doing that. No paid leave for construction.) And I’m still firmly in the precariat. I can’t take even a good year for granted, since so much is eaten up by travel costs (it costs a LOT to work on the road—you don’t save very much. Side note: this is where Trump lost most of the swing voters he picked up by lying about bringing jobs back to the USA—the Trump tax plan took away ALL of our road deductions. Ain’t a motherfucker out here that’s voting for Trump this time, LOL!! No, seriously—the media narrative was that Trump voters were ideological. No, there were a lot of Trump voters who voted for Obama (read the Democratic Autopsy!). He lost the traveling tradespeople for sure—being able to deduct the cost of travel helped get us through hard times. Now? Second side note: the so-called “labor shortage” in the trades is almost totally about this—the cost of travel versus the pay scale. Skilled tradespeople can’t afford to work in the South. Even the southern brothers are up here, because they’re trying to raise their families—so they move the whole family up here, and their wives get higher-paying jobs up here too.).
If you’re doing well financially—well enough to risk taking out a loan for a home remodel, or enough to pay for your kid’s education past community college—you are in the minority. Candidates that talk about tax breaks or an increase in EIC…that isn’t giving us anything we can use. We need JOBS. Real jobs. Not “but look at how low unemployment is!” jobs, with their piss-poor wages and no benefits. Jobs that pay. We need things like MFA and free college tuition and an aggressive infrastructure plan that takes climate change into account. If you don’t? Awesome. But you are in the minority. Wages for most people have stagnated, while the cost of necessities has risen. You can talk about all the cheap tech, but you can’t eat it, you can’t pay for housing with it, and you can’t pay your utilities with it either.
The internet changed the game. Yes, bots are out there with misinformation stirring up old hatreds and new. But people are out there too—people who know each other. In my world, no one answers the phone for a number they don’t know. And they don’t FB friend anyone they haven’t met either. I understand it may be different for people in other lines of work, where networking with strangers is a thing. But conversations are being had across state lines that didn’t happen back in the day when long-distance phone calls were the means. And these are group conversations. The internet has false information, yes. But it also has true information. It is easier to fact-check than ever before. And more people who have never been out of the country (except for maybe once or twice to a Mexican or Caribbean vacation) now have knowledge about other countries, and what life is like in other countries for people like them, right at their literal fingertips.
Which means it’s a lot harder to tell us that universal healthcare is pie-in-the-sky, because we are seeing—in real time—how well it functions elsewhere, in countries less wealthy than our own. And for Gen X, this is really salient because we are entering the age in which Shit Starts Happening medically, after a lifetime of barely scraping by. That’s a game changer. Furthermore, the children of Gen X are old enough to vote this time. There’s a lot more of them, and they grew up living hand-to-mouth (most of ’em). They’re pretty pissed off, because they jumped through a helluva lot more hoops than we did trying to prove themselves and get a foothold on their future and…are left holding nothing but a cell phone, while being told how great cheap tech is while they try to get a goddamn minimum wage job that offers more than ten hours a week.
Yeah, there is precedent for this in US history. We can FDR it, or we can descend into something really, really ugly. And it doesn’t matter who the new FDR is (though it won’t be Bloomberg, guar-an-fucking-teed). We’ve got one more election cycle to start a new New Deal, or the shit will really hit the fan. You can’t have a critical mass of people lose their way of life (whether rural or urban) and ability to support themselves without the shit hitting the fan. The tipping point is here.
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thanks for that
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You are welcome. Signed, La Lubu, Cassandra since freshman year in high school, seeing all the “for sale” signs on her block and in her city during the Reagan years with all the factory closures. Google “Danville, Illinois” (note the “people also ask” section. That’s the fruit of outsourcing. Oh look, “Danville named the 10th worst U.S. city to raise kids”, noted by a Chicago station, no less). I dusted the dirt of Danville off my feet at 19, but….Danville kept following me everywhere I went. It’s just a more extreme example of what is happening elsewhere in the rust belt.
My dad still lives in Danville. He’s 78. Like me, he already voted for Bernie.
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Another thanks here too. I look forward to all of your comments because you cut through the gamesmanship/intellectual exercise/amateur punditry that elections seem to be for many. And to be honest, your comments are encouraging to read when a lot of the noise is about “pick the most electable” and “be pragmatic”.
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“On the upside—this cult-virus is age-related.”
Had a student last term who wrote pro-Trump papers for persuasive writing. Except they had no content, no argument. Just name-calling like “pathetic nancy Pelosi” (capitalization from the original text). The kid is 18 years old from the Boston exurbs.
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Thanks for writing this, Lubiddu. It needs to be an op ed. Much of this is *exactly* what I hoped/suspected – I’m in a very blue New England town, but I have a number of red state Trump-voting relatives who would have preferred to vote for Bernie, given the chance.
It’s frustrating to me how down on Bernie everyone is in my world. WTF, people?
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I now actively dislike both Bloomberg and Buttigieg. That’s about all that has changed for me. I’m still on the fence about donating to Sanders before the primary is done.
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Here’s my hopeful take: Bernie is very popular among young voters (the under-45s for whom “socialism” is not associated with the USSR), and they might buck longstanding trends and show up in greater numbers than in previous years. Candidates for a long time have been told to ignore the youth vote, because of the lack of turnout historically, but if they show up – and show up in the right states – this could swing things. Also, they are really worried about climate change, because they can see it in their own actual future. I may not be around in 2050, which sounds like a weird futuristic date, but they sure will.
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Well, I’m also an “I will work for any Democrat” person, but I’m going to be door knocking in Wisconsin or possibly Michigan (I live in Illinois and will spend Saturdays in a neighboring state and Sunday afternoons working to keep a newly-Democratic congressional seat (in 2018) in the blue column). And I’m not looking forward to campaigning for Bernie. I don’t look forward to saying something like, “He’s better than Trump and he won’t be able to pass even half of the things he is pushing.” The one thing that will help is that he’s not big on gun control. He claims jobs are important to him, but his big policy issues are all about making everything free, which any nitwit realizes will come with much higher taxes and not just on the 1%. This is the rust belt; as a wise commentator said after 2016: people don’t want social programs, they want jobs. Yes, they want access to health care, but they’re fine if its through private health insurance. Yes, they want college to be affordable, but they also want the option of a good job without college. And I hate to say it, but at my age (70’s) it will be hard to sell people on a man who is even older than I am, with a recent heart attack. I sure hope he chooses a running mate who will play in the Upper Midwest.
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This nitwit wants socialist benefits that do come from much higher taxes on the top 1%. There is no reason that is not possible—It worked from the 1950s to the 70s, and it can work again. (91% in the 50’s for the top brackets vs. 35% now.)
I went to a big state university in the late 70s., It was pretty close to free and I think it would be fair for todays kids to have the same socialist benefit that I enjoyed then—with the money coming from taxing the top 1%, just like the good old days.
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I wish we could go to a big state U for nearly free too. But they have raised their tuition sky-high and I don’t think the US gov’t under Bernie or any other president will be able to cover that expense just by raising taxes on the 1%, and almost every economist agrees.
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cy said,
“This nitwit wants socialist benefits that do come from much higher taxes on the top 1%. There is no reason that is not possible—It worked from the 1950s to the 70s, and it can work again. (91% in the 50’s for the top brackets vs. 35% now.)”
Way fewer kids went to college then.
Also, the generous funding was mostly happening at the state level at that point, wasn’t it? So it wasn’t getting paid for out of federal taxes on the “1%.”
Furthermore, US federal tax receipts are historically extremely similar as a percentage of GDP, regardless of the tax structure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law
If you click on that, you’ll get a chart showing US federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP from 1945 to the near-present. You’ll find that it’s quite consistent. As Wikipedia says, “Hauser’s law is the proposition that, in the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate.Historically, since the end of World War II, federal tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product averaged 17.9%, with a range from 14.4% to 20.9% between 1946 – 2007.”
There’s only one clear venture above the 20% line that occurred in the late 1990s (presumably the tech bubble).
Also, total government spending in the US is currently about 38% of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States
Some morals: a) there’s a limit to how much money in taxes the federal government can hope to get its mitts on and b) the federal government is spending a heck of a lot of money right now.
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You all know I’m a Bernie supporter and yes, my prediction is that Bernie can beat Trump.
In an election between Bernie Sanders and Trump, the polls this month from RealClearPolitics show Sanders beating Trump by anywhere from 3 to 8 points.
Of course, these are polls, probably representing only old people with land lines that still answer their phone at dinnertime—but if Sanders support is stronger with young people, the prospects look even better for him.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-6250.html
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As an old guy with a landline, yes, I think groups differ. The folks I hang out with think that a Bernie nomination hands the Presidency to Trump. Well Hell I drink coffee with these guys, how can I not think them prescient? I also don’t want Bernie to be President, so we have a motivated cognition problem here. In our primary, I will vote for either Klobuchar or Bloomberg, and wait for results.
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Would you vote for Bernie if Klobuchar was his running mate? Just curious.
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Wendy would I vote for Bernie with a Klobuchar veep? No. For one thing, seems unlikely enough that something weird would have gone on in making the choice. Also, mostly veeps don’t ascend – after the cheese slipped off Reagan’s cracker, his appointees and Nancy kind of ran things, not GHWBush. Similarly, Edith Wilson was more or less President in fact when the vile Woodrow had his stroke. And take a look at the history of Duke Short, ‘shadow Senator’ from South Carolina during Strom Thurmond’s decline.
If the President dies, that’s one thing. But if s/he gets enfeebled, it’s not all that likely to mean replacement.
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The Philadelphia suburbs are must-take for any present-day winner of the electoral college, and I see a lot of Bloomsberg signs, no Bernie signs, in Chester County, PA. I don’t think most folks around here will vote for Trump, whom many loathe, but they might stay home or passive-aggressively mean to vote but not get around to it if it’s Bernie. A party realignment that started over the past decade around here—beginning with Obama, and accelerating with the 2018 midterms, where offices never in the history of the country held by Democrats turned blue—will come to a screeching halt.
That would be okay if the other re-alignment—working class whites that left the democrats for Trump—were to be undone by Bernie. But that’s not going to happen. Trump is very popular with the people he was popular with in 2016. He’s consolidating those voters, not losing them. And he’s doing significantly better than Romney and McCain with minority men. I hate to argue with those in the bubble, but Trump does much better with African American men then you might think. I noticed this with my HBCU students in 2016. I never had a student defend Bush Jr., or say they liked Romney or McCain. Not so with Trump. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/democratic-strategist-predicts-trump-popularity-surge-with-black-voters-in-2020
Anything can happen, the times we love in are so weird. But I think most intellectuals are living in even more of a bubble than in 2016. I think Trump takes PA, Ohio, and Florida easily. He may lose the popular vote, but that’s irrelevant. The democrats simply cannot win in this country without a decent showing among moderates in the suburbs. The math doesn’t add up.
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“..does much better with African American men ..” the Reep got 15% of AfAm women in Fla gov – mostly because he was for charter schools and they wanted to get their kids free of the public schools. Can Trump repeat that? He was clearly playing to it with the kid at SOTU who got a scholarship. Dems have a problem when their teacher union constituency is at loggerheads with their AfAm moms constituency.
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That’s interesting. As I have said, I don’t have enough insight into the thinking of anyone other than white UMC law/finance/tech professionals to make generalizations or predictions, but I was intrigued when a political discussion started up among the paid custodial staff at our church Sunday morning. They are uniformly non-white, and working class (obviously), but Trump had his defenders. Just a straw in the wind.
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Our state representative is a Democratic Socialist. As near as I can tell, it just means “Democrat who doesn’t apologize for not being liked by Republicans.”
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I attended a conference about the political parties, voting, and the 2016 elections in 2017. I’ve never been more depressed about the state of American politics as I was after attending that conference. So I think many political scientists get what’s going on in American politics pretty darn well. If you set a bunch of us loose and asked us to mess with elections and gave us lots of $$, we’d probably be just about as effective as the Russians. However, it’s a lot easier to mess with elections than it is to fix elections – that’s where I think the real debate is in the last few years and in this election cycle in the discipline. There are probably some things that would work, but are not politically feasible. All of this is why I can barely muster the energy to engage personally outside of my work duties teaching and researching this stuff.
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It’s also hard to fix things when one party’s hold on power depends on things staying unfixed.
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Doug said, “It’s also hard to fix things when one party’s hold on power depends on things staying unfixed.”
Exactly what did Republicans do that caused the Iowa Democratic caucus disaster?
And what are Republicans doing to stand in the way of Democrats reforming their primary and caucus process?
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I would actually like to hear some of the solutions, even if they are super expensive and unworkable.
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We spent a lot of time at the Southern talking about empowering political parties. Because if parties had more power over the nomination process, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in – definitely no Trump and probably no Bernie. And that right there makes a lot of people uncomfortable, particularly Bernie supporters. Ultimately though, the real problem is that people hate parties, loathe them, so selling the American public on this is probably impossible. Case in point: Julia Azari had a column in the WaPo recently about giving more power over the nomination to party regulars. The WaPo editors gave it a catchy title about giving power to the elites. As a result, she has spent the last week or so dealing with absolutely horrific garbage coming in to her inbox, going to her campus administration, etc.
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Ultimately though, the real problem is that people hate parties, loathe them, so selling the American public on this is probably impossible.
But this hate isn’t ideological, it’s a reaction to being shut out of the process. Yes, I said shut out. In theory, “everyone” can participate. In reality, the old order of machine politics that allowed rank-and-file members to climb to leadership positions died in a fire a long time ago. Most of us (“us” meaning the average U.S. citizen) never see anyone who resembles us in positions of real power. We hate parties because parties don’t represent us—they represent the rich and powerful, at the expense of us. If you want me to trust a political party, then I need to see its leadership composed primarily of people like me, people who live like me—people who live in neighborhoods like mine, who send their children to public schools like the one mine attended, who have the same household budget I do, and the same concerns about health, healthcare, retirement, child care, elder care. I’ve had a lifetime of party leaders (in either party) who do not experience my, or my neighbors’, struggles. They are insulated and oblivious. And they like it that way. At best, they present a blithe paternalism. When they think we aren’t listening, an abiding contempt.
Which is a lot of words to say, “classism is real”.
And that right there makes a lot of people uncomfortable…
It ought to. Because if you take away the ballot, people start thinking seriously about the bullet. Think of voting as an immunization against civil war. Empowering political parties to circumvent the voices of the people they claim to represent is a bad idea, particularly in an age of extreme inequality coupled with excellent communications technology. (duh.)
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Hi all! If your comments don’t show up, please let me know. I’ve been getting destroyed by Russian bots lately and my spam filter has been working over time and probably filtering out the good stuff, too. If you let me know, I can fix things. Thanks!
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Laura, could you do a post on how that works?—the Russian bots and what happens to your blog?
I’m interested in the actual process and how it affects one person/blog site and I really don’t understand it that well.
If you have the time.
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I’m not sure I can say much other than I get probably about a hundred fake comments per day on this blog, which the platform that I uses filters out. I don’t even have to deal with it, which means that I don’t notice when occasionally legitimate comments get eaten up by the system. Sometimes the comments are entirely in Russian, sometimes they are gobble gook, and sometimes they link to porn sites or fake viagra sites.
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I’m not going to get excited about any candidate until after Super Tuesday.
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My pol sci professor friends on Twitter are extremely worried about a Bernie candidacy. I’ll write about it soon.
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I am inclined to think a Bernie presidency would be worse for the country than has been the Trump presidency so far, the summation of expected costs of his initiatives is enormous and would put the kibosh on economic activity in many ways. That’s even assuming that the results of a Bernie candidacy wouldn’t be a huge Trump victory and/or loss of the House, failure to gain the Senate.
What’s going on now looks to me like the mirror image of Trump’s nomination – one candidate who is really different soaking up the backing of a large but not majority fraction of the primary electorate, and the first-past-the-post nature of the allocation of delegates (modified slightly) resulting in the mass of more acceptable candidates ending up with very low delegate counts.
There is some special-to-this-election stuff, a lot of the Bernie backers are attracted to his constancy “He is saying the same thing he has been saying for years” where Warren, who might have been expected to fish in the same ponds, has the Fauxcahontas problem and has been trimming her sails as she tries to find the right formula. Robert O’Rourke totally collapsed, after having been seen as a big force on the left, too.
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Jeez, there I was typing my fat little fingers down to the bone, and – today’s NYTimes editorial “Primaries are dumb” said everything I just said, better and at greater length. Oh, well…
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I’ve been fairly freaked out about COVID-19. An airborne respiratory virus with a 2% death rate is a scary thing. I was comparing my reaction to our previous scares — swine flu in 2009 and ebola in 2014, and there are specifics about the diseases that play a role. But a significant impact on my anxiety level is the politicization of the discussion of something as apolitical as an airborne virus. Mike Pence vetting Fauci? not good. I just heard Trump giving alternative facts about influenza death rates, arguing with Gupta about the .1% death rate for seasonal flu. Worse than arguing with meteorologists about hurricane trajectories and much worse than arguing about assessments of Russian interference.
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I have a theory that Trump is trying to hurt the groups that voted for him and aren’t rich just to show he can. Given the death rates by age group for this virus, I think it fits.
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My ranking of worse, because of the degrees of certainty — Doctors really do know the death rate from seasonal flu. There’s lots of data. No one can be really really certain about intelligence. But, maybe we need to rely on experts significantly for information about which we are less, certain, too. I’ve said it before, because in my modern political experience, the degree to which Trump has undermined the experts in every field, his belief in his own alternative of information, facts, analysis, best practices and his utter unwillingness to be corrected, updated, or informed, and his willingness to punish those who don’t agree with him (asking for ridding of turbulent priests) seems very high.
I hope COVID-19 blows over — these scares do, much of the time, because we need to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. But, we have been fearing for sometime a serious pandemic that spreads because of the interconnections of the modern world, and I worry.
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Comrade Lysenko will be the next adminstration appointee.
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I worry about it too.
I recommend laying in at least a 3 month supply of any medication. I just renewed my medication; without asking for it, I received twice my normal # of asthma medication. Also, buy any item your business needs to function in the next year, if it may include any parts from China. We just bought a printer under that theory.
I can’t bring myself to buy masks, goggles, etc, because I’m sure that by the time we know it’s here, it will be impossible to avoid. (I’m also too cheap to pay that much money for masks.) In addition, that equipment should be supplied to medical personnel, who will be on the front lines.
I am pretty sure it’s already here; we weren’t testing for it. It could help explain why this was thought to be “a bad flu season” already.
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Sick kid. Hospital. Back soon.
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Yikes. Hope it all gets taken care of.
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So, Biden won in South Carolina. Buttigieg and Klobuchar have dropped out.
That means all three of the leading contenders, according to 538, are 77 or over. With the exception of “no one,” which has a 65% chance.
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Indeed, all three of the leading contenders are very old, straight, white males. Oddly, two of them are Jewish.
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