“The Democratic National Committee’s council on climate change irked party leadership when it published policy recommendations this month that ventured beyond presidential candidate Joe Biden’s plan,” Reuters reports.
“The party tension shows the tricky nature of climate politics as Biden seeks to court young and more progressive voters without turning off voters in energy-producing swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where a boom in shale gas drilling had created blue-collar jobs.”
“Three months before their national convention is to kick off in Milwaukee, Democratic Party officials are planning for three scenarios depending on the severity of the coronavirus pandemic at the time. But the planners face a substantial problem in putting on the quadrennial event that is recognizable to Americans as the traditional launch of the presidential general election campaign: Many of the delegates don’t want to go,” the New York Times reports.
“Interviews with 59 members of the Democratic National Committee and superdelegates who will formally nominate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in August found that the vast majority of them don’t want to risk their own health or the health of others by traveling to Milwaukee and congregating inside the convention facilities.”
“The Democratic Party plans to adopt new rules Tuesday to narrow the scope of its presidential nominating convention, potentially paving the way for either a limited in-person gathering or a virtual event this August,” the Washington Post reports.
“The proposed changes, which are expected to be adopted in virtual meeting of the party’s rules and bylaws committee, would allow delegates to participate even if they do not attend the convention in person. No final decision on the convention is expected to be made in coming weeks as organizers await a decision by federal, state and local health officials.”
“Hospitals in Japan are increasingly turning away sick people as the country struggles with surging coronavirus infections and its emergency medical system collapses,” the AP reports.
“Japan initially seemed to have controlled the outbreak by going after clusters of infections in specific places, usually enclosed spaces such as clubs, gyms and meeting venues. But the spread of virus outpaced this approach and most new cases are untraceable.”
New York Times: : “As with false claims by Republicans about vote-by-mail fraud, there is no evidence to back up the argument from the right that all-mail elections favor Democrats. But Mr. Trump and some of his allies are warning that vote-by-mail poses an existential threat to their party, in hopes of galvanizing Republican opposition to a voting method that is widely seen as safer than in-person voting in the era of the coronavirus.”
“Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — now have all-mail elections, in which ballots are sent to every registered voter without their having to request one. Others, like Arizona and California, allow voters to add themselves to a permanent list of mail voters.”
“And there are also cases like Nebraska, which allows counties of less than 10,000 people to mail ballots to all voters (many of them Republicans) but forbids it in large urban areas (where many voters are Democrats). Texas allows no-excuse absentee voting for people 65 or older, another group that skews Republican. None of these states have seen an appreciable shift favoring Democrats that officials and experts attribute to mail voting.”
CBS News: Offciials sound alarm about November elections.
CBS News: “Democratic Party leaders across the country are calling on party bosses to curtail, postpone or dramatically rethink the party’s national convention scheduled for July in Milwaukee, concerned that holding a mass gathering just as levels of infection are expected to ebb could expose thousands to the coronavirus once again.”
“Calls from the party faithful to rethink the Democratic National Convention come as the party’s presumed presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, for the first time publicly expressed doubt that the gathering could proceed as it has in the past.”
Politico: “The 2008 financial crisis reshaped American politics, birthing a politics of outrage in the Tea Party on the right and an enduring strain of progressive populism on the left. The coronavirus is already on a similar trajectory, triggering massive prospective bailouts and other policy proposals that stand to rewire the Republican and Democratic parties for a generation — or longer.”
“Last week, Republicans joined Democrats — and in some cases got in front of them — in calling for direct payments to Americans to help cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic. The Trump administration, after laboring for years to repeal Obamacare, said it was considering creating a special enrollment period for the program due to the coronavirus. When Donald Trump himself suggested the government could take equity stakes in private companies that receive federal aid, it was a Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, who accused the president of being a socialist.”
“The immediate effects of the pandemic on blurring the parties’ ideological distinctions have been acute — and the virus’ toll still remains far from reaching its peak.”
“When the Democratic National Committee decided to move its convention up to mid-July—roughly two weeks earlier than in 2016—it was billed as a way to give the party’s nominee more time to focus on President Trump and spend general election dollars earlier,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The coronavirus pandemic is making that move seem riskier in retrospect, as Democrats face the possibility that much of the nation will be hunkered down for weeks or months to come. The earlier timetable is placing greater pressure on the party to decide whether the convention will move forward as planned.”
“Officials at the Democratic National Committee have begun to plan for the possibility that their July convention in Milwaukee may be scuttled or dramatically upended because of the spread of 2019 novel coronavirus,” the Daily Beast reports.
“Discussions over what to do if coronavirus makes it difficult, if not impossible, for delegates and the public to come to the convention have been mostly informal up until this week. But two top Democrats said they expected far more serious planning to begin in haste as infections and deaths accumulate and experts warn the virus will spread in the United States and, potentially, seriously disrupt travel and commerce.”
For the first time since 2010, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in New Hampshire, WMUR reports.
“The Democrat Party, as it’s currently constituted, poses a much greater threat to this country than the coronavirus does.”
— Rush Limbaugh, quoted by The Hill.
This piece is only available to Political Wire members.
Your support makes this site possible. Join today for the complete Political Wire experience and get exclusive analysis, new features and no advertising.
Sign in to your account or join today!
If you’re already signed in and still seeing this message, your subscription has expired. To renew your membership, navigate to your account, adjust your credit card information and click Renew Now.
Join for just $5 a month or $50 a year.
New York Times: “Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.”
“Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.”
This piece is only available to Political Wire members.
Your support makes this site possible. Join today for the complete Political Wire experience and get exclusive analysis, new features and no advertising.
Sign in to your account or join today!
If you’re already signed in and still seeing this message, your subscription has expired. To renew your membership, navigate to your account, adjust your credit card information and click Renew Now.
Join for just $5 a month or $50 a year.
CNN: “Last week on Capitol Hill, Perez even conducted an apology tour of sorts, meeting privately with select members of various Democratic constituencies to calm concerns about the integrity of the primary process, according to three people with knowledge of those meetings. He also called several House Democrats directly to head off a rumor that a petition was circulating calling for his ouster.”
“Now, with the Nevada caucuses one day away, Perez remains under close scrutiny. … This time, Perez will be on the ground in Nevada, according to a DNC official. The intended message is that the Democratic nominating process is in good hands. But Perez’s presence also means he and the national party will assume more responsibility for what happens — good or bad.”
Wall Street Journal: “Self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Trump rose in politics by developing strong personal brands, while keeping only tenuous ties to—and frequently criticizing the leaders of—the parties they later sought to lead.”
“Their ascents are the latest sign that the nation’s political parties have lost influence in choosing their own presidential nominees, a development that some party officials see as inevitable in the modern media environment and an era of billionaires funding their own campaigns, as Mr. Trump initially did and Democrat Michael Bloomberg is doing today. But it is one that they say has made politics more volatile and partisan.”
While the Democratic National Committee over the past 10 days has tried to distance itself from the troubled app that threw the results of the Iowa caucuses into disarray, a copy of the contract and internal correspondence provided to Yahoo News demonstrates that national party officials had extensive oversight over the development of the technology.
“Troy Price resigned his position as chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party Wednesday as the organization grapples with the fallout of a botched caucus process that has left the party and the state reeling,” the Des Moines Register reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.