Unprecedented Number Of Candidates In Dem Primary Still Favors Biden And Sanders

The number of presidential candidates in the Democratic primary is unprecedented and it could lead to a contentious and unpredictable nominating process. With a recent poll of Democratic presidential preferences showing no less than 19 candidates, it is possible that the primary vote could fracture in ways that cannot be foreseen.

Most of us have probably become numbed to the neverending campaign atmosphere, but Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight reminds us that it was not always this way. Silver tweeted yesterday, “At this point in 2015, no major Republicans had officially launched their campaigns. Cruz was the first on 3/23/15. Although 8-9 Republicans had established PACs to formally explore a candidacy.”

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1103004293815246849

To see how a large number of candidates can upend a primary, we need only look back as far as 2016. Seventeen Republican candidates, 16 traditional Republicans plus Donald Trump, contested in a large primary that year. In the 2016 Republican primary, a recurring theme was that Donald Trump benefitted from the large field. Longtime Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich split the Republican vote, leaving Trump with a plurality in many state primaries. Trump won a majority of delegates after a long, drawn-out primary campaign, but he only won about 45 percent of the Republican vote.

History may repeat itself in the 2020 Democratic Primary. The large number of candidates may prevent the party from coalescing around a consensus candidate. This is particularly true if Joe Biden, who commands 31 percent support in recent polling, decides not to run. Bernie Sanders, the second place candidate, sits atop a heap of second-tier, mostly unknown candidates, only one of whom, Kamala Harris, currently has support in the double-digits.

Excluding Biden, Sanders is also currently the top second-choice of Democratic voters. Biden supporters picked Sanders as their top alternate, giving the Vermont Democrat-in-name-only a significant advantage if Biden decides against running. Still, Sanders lacks support among the upper-income Democrats who would provide much campaign backing. If these donors rally behind another candidate, it could cause trouble for a Sanders candidacy.

The number of Democratic candidates could start to dwindle soon. Democrats have announced a series of 12 primary debates with the first scheduled to be held in June 2019. With so many candidates, competition will be fierce for donor funds and candidates who don’t do well in the first debate may be quickly forced to drop out of the race.  

In a best-case scenario for conservatives, if Joe Biden does not run, Democratic moderates could reject Bernie Sanders and the Democratic vote could splinter among the remaining viable candidates: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Corey Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. This could possibly result in Klobuchar, the most moderate of the bunch, eking out a plurality in a situation that is the reverse of the 2016 Republican primary where the most extreme candidate won without a majority. To make this scenario a reality, Klobuchar has a long way to go in increasing her name recognition and building support.

If Biden decides to run and if Sanders maintains his popularity, the two old white guys are the strong favorites to win the nomination. This would be a bad thing for Donald Trump since polling shows that both Democrats are significantly more popular than the president. In recent polling, both Biden and Sanders show a double-digit advantage over Mr. Trump. It’s true that Trump polled poorly against Hillary Clinton in advance of the 2016 primaries and managed to win anyway, but the conditions that allowed Trump to eke out a victory in 2016, such as Hillary’s email scandal and James Comey’s October surprise, are unlikely to be replicated in 2020.

Despite the large number of candidates in the Democratic field, Joe Biden remains the man to beat even though he has yet to officially enter the race. It would likely take a decision from Biden to bow out once again and an implosion of the Sanders campaign to turn the Democratic primary into a fractious free-for-all.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Bernie Bros Throw Tantrum Over DNC Treatment

It looks as if the Republican Party is not the only major political party that is beset by internal divisions. While the Republican divisions have been on display since long before the nomination of Donald Trump, Democratic divisions have been masked by their united opposition to President Trump. However, an incident that occurred in late July may underscore just how fragile the Democrat coalition is.  

Bernie Bros and sisters in his group, Our Revolution, are upset with their treatment at the hands of the DNC. Per Buzzfeed, Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, marched on DNC offices in Washington, D.C. on July 25 to deliver petitions supporting Our Revolution’s “People’s Platform,” a policy agenda for 2018.

Turner, a member of the DNC and a former Ohio state senator, complained that the emissaries from Our Revolution were greeted outside the building by a handful of DNC staffers. Security barricades prevented the group from approaching the building.  

“I was absolutely stunned,” Turner said. “For them to be that tone-deaf, or that arrogant, to think that it’s OK to put up a barricade so that the people can’t even — I mean, we were not even good enough to stand on their stairs.”

DNC spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said that the barricades and security were put in place by the “building security team” rather than party officials. Hinojosa said that such steps were deemed necessary by the current security climate.

A table of water and donuts set up by the DNC as a peace offering did nothing to temper Turner’s outrage. “They tried to seduce us with donuts and water,” she said. “They’re pompous and arrogant enough to say to the people, you’re not good enough to be on our property — and, oh by the way, we’re just gonna [sic] hand you donuts and water over the barricade. That is insulting. Absolutely insulting.”

Turner wrote about the incident in a fundraising email in which she complained that the DNC response was another example of why progressives mistrust the Democratic Party. Citing remarks in which DNC political director Amanda Brown Lierman asked for support in 2018, Turner said, “That’s the problem. You think people are just gonna [sic] do what you say, and you don’t have to really listen.”

The host of adjectives employed by Turner to describe the meeting with DNC officials also included the phrases “dictatorial,” “pompous,” and “arrogant.”

DNC officials offered a different take on Lierman’s speech to the Our Revolution delegation. Hinojosa said that Lierman “expressed gratitude on behalf of the DNC” and spoke about “shared values.”

DNC officials also noted that Our Revolution has been invited to meetings with other progressive groups at the DNC, but that so far “they haven’t showed up” other than to join a party unity tour headlined by DNC Chairman Tom Perez and Deputy Chair Keith Ellison earlier this year.

Turner, who took the reins as president of Our Revolution in July, seems intent on a combative role. She has called upon Perez to apologize for the incident, saying, “The chairman would be wise to embrace this energy. He would be wise to make a phone call. He should have reached out to me by now to apologize for the way the people who came to the DNC were treated.” In her email to Our Revolution supporters, she wrote, “It is time to make the Democratic Party ‘Feel the Bern’ again.”

Sanders himself has maintained a low profile about the incident. One Sanders aide noted that the Vermont senator, who is officially an independent, is working “inside the system” while Our Revolution is working “outside the system.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

FBI Seizes Democrat Computer Equipment – But Not The Ones You Are Thinking Of

The FBI has seized hard drives in connection with an investigation into the former information technology administrator of former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-Fl.). The hard drives in question are not the ones that you are thinking of. The hardware in question is apparently unconnected to the Russian hack of the DNC.

The Daily Caller reports that hard drives belonging to Imran Awan, a Pakistani IT worker for Wasserman Schulz since 2005, were found by the new tenants of a rental home formerly occupied by Awan. The new tenants, a Marine veteran married to a Navy officer, thought the equipment looked suspicious and called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. According to the renter, the trove contained “wireless routers, hard drives that look like they tried to destroy, laptops, [and] a lot of brand new expensive toner.”

“It was in the garage. They recycled cabinets and lined them along the walls. They left in a huge hurry,” the Marine said. “It looks like government-issued equipment. We turned that stuff over.”

The FBI an Capitol Police arrived later to confiscate the equipment and interview the couple.

Imram Awan, together with two brothers, their wives and two other friends also worked for several House Democrats. The Daily Caller reports that the group was paid more than $4 million by Democrats since 2009. The Awans and their colleagues were fired by House Democrats last March amid an investigation into theft of computer equipment and committing illegal violations of the House IT network.

Whatever is on the computer equipment, Awan is apparently desperate to get them back. The Marine renter reported that Awan, who is his landlord, threatened to sue the couple to get the items back. He says that Awan also refused to have mail forwarded to his new address.

The investigation of the Awans is still unfolding, but it may cause problems some congressional Democrats as well. In May, Wasserman Schulz demanded the return of a laptop believed to belong to Awan. The Daily Caller reported at the time that Wasserman Schulz claimed that the laptop belonged to her and asserted congressional privilege. Police have not examined the laptop, citing the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause, but they also did not return it. Wasserman Schulz is currently in negotiations to provide police with access to the data on the computer.

An FBI spokesman said, “FBI does not have anything to provide on this and I will still have to refer you to [Capitol Police] for any public comment.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

True facts about Seth Rich

http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com

It has been less than a year since the murder of Seth Rich. In that short time, the story of his murder has taken on a life of its own. Like the murder of John F. Kennedy, it has already difficult to separate fact from fiction in the tragic case of Seth Rich.

Seth Conrad Rich was a 27-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska who worked for the Democratic National Committee as the Voter Expansion Data Director. His job there entailed working on a computer applicationto help voters find their local polling place.

On the morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, Rich was walking home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At 4:19 a.m., police patrolling the area heard gunshots and used Sharp Spotter, a system that uses acoustics to determine to direction of shots, to locate the scene of the attack.

Multiple sources say that Rich was still alive when police arrived at the scene, which was only a block from his house. He had multiple gunshot wounds and there were signs of a struggle. Early reports, such as this one from a local CBS affiliate, state that Rich was alive and conscious when he was taken to the hospital where he died a few hours later. Police have never revealed whether he was able to provide information about his killer.

Other early reports do support the claim that none of Rich’s personal items seemed to be missing. The local NBC affiliate quoted Rich’s mother, Mary, who said, “There had been a struggle. His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything. They took his life for literally no reason. They didn't finish robbing him, they just took his life.” Rich’s father, Joel, also confirmed to the Washington Post that nothing was taken.

The New York Daily News reported on July 11 that police had said that there was no indication of robbery, but that attempted robbery had not been ruled out as a motive for the attack. Joel Rich said that he believed that Seth had attempted to fight off his attacker before he was killed.

Many of the sources also point out the high crime rate in the neighborhood where Rich was killed. NBC’s Channel Four pointed out that robberies using guns were up 12 percent in the Metro Police Fifth District and that seven people had already been killed there in addition to Rich that year. The New York Daily News noted that armed robberies had doubled in Bloomingdale over the previous year.

Almost two weeks after Rich’s murder, on July 22, the first dump of Democrat emails from WikiLeaks was posted. Even as the emails were posted, there was immediate speculation that the source of the emails was of Russian origin. The date range of the first DNC hack was from January 2015 through May 2016, about two months before Rich’s murder. A second trove emails stolen from John Podesta was dumped by WikiLeaks beginning on October 7, 2016, three months after Rich’s death.

The conspiracy theories seemed to have started within days of the murder. On July 13, a conspiracy site called Whatdoesitmean.com cited a Kremlin intelligence report that said that Rich was preparing to meet with FBI agents in order to testify against Hillary Clinton. The story reports that the FBI agents were really a “hit team” that was then “captured yesterday after a running gun battle with US federal police forces just blocks from the White House.” There were no reports of captured hit men or “running gun battles” in other sources.

The WikiLeaks angle to the story came several weeks later. WikiLeaks founder and accused rapist, Julian Assange, appeared on Dutch television on August 9, almost a month after the murder, and hinted that Rich was the source of the pilfered emails, although he never expressly stated any connection with Rich.

The same day, WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s murderer. The District of Columbia Metropolitan Police had previously offered a $25,000 reward. Other individuals, including Rich’s brother, have offered additional rewards.

On May 15, 2017, a private detective named Rod Wheeler told a local television news reporter that he had evidence that Rich had contacted WikiLeaks before his death. Two days later, Wheeler retracted his claims. NBC News reported that Ed Butowsky, a Dallas businessman and Breitbart contributor, hired Wheeler to investigate the murder on behalf of the Rich family. Butowsky initially denied being connected to Wheeler, but eventually admitted his involvement to CNN. A spokesman for the family said that Wheeler had showed them no evidence to support the allegations that Seth had contacted WikiLeaks.

Police also told the Washington Post that Rich’s computer and email had been examined and that there was no evidence that he was connected to WikiLeaks. A former law enforcement official with knowledge of Rich’s laptop told NBC News, “It never contained any e-mails related to WikiLeaks, and the FBI never had it.”

Still, the rumors keep coming. The Russian embassy tweeted on May 19 that Rich was the “WikiLeaks informer” and accused the US media of ignoring the truth about his murder. At about the same time, Kim Dotcom, a European hacker fighting extradition to the US from New Zealand on money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud charges, claimed to have known Seth Rich as the WikiLeaks source.

District of Columbia Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kevin Donohue recently told NBC’s local affiliate that Rich’s murder was still under investigation, but that there was no truth the WikiLeaks rumors. “This is a robbery that ended tragically. That’s bad enough for our city, and I think it is irresponsible to conflate this into something that doesn’t connect to anything that the detectives have found," Donahue said. "No WikiLeaks connection.”

If Rich’s murder is still unsolved, the mystery of the DNC hacking is not. In January 2017, the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified version of a report detailing the unanimous assessment of the American intelligence community that the Russian government was behind the cyberattack. The assessment echoed the findings of CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm retained by the DNC.

In the case of John Podesta’s emails, investigators have identified a fraudulent email that urged Podesta to click a link and change his password. Podesta did so and compromised his email password as a result. This sort of breach is known as “phishing.”

Time reported in January that the CIA had even identified the individual Russian officials who had passed the stolen emails to WikiLeaks. The report said that the information followed a “circuitous route” to WikiLeaks so that Assange could plausibly deny Russian involvement.

At this point, there are a few basic problems with the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was the source for the stolen Democratic Party emails. First, Rich was murdered before WikiLeaks published the emails. Second, the DNC’s internal investigation pointed to the Russians, not an internal leaker, as the source of the breach. Third, US counterintelligence has identified the real perpetrators of the theft, the Russian government. Most importantly, there is not a shred of evidence that ties Rich to WikiLeaks other than unsubstantiated innuendo. There is not even evidence that Rich had access to the emails that ended up the hands of WikiLeaks.

Conversely, it would be logical for the Russians and WikiLeaks to implicate the conveniently dead Rich in the leak to distract attention from the real culprits. Intelligence agencies agreed that the Russian covert operation that interfered with the election seemed to be partly to sow chaos and partly to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Even with Trump in the White House, Vladimir Putin seems to relish causing chaos and doubt about the US government.

Rich’s family, who have the most to gain in seeing their son’s killers brought to justice, reject the conspiracy claims. Rather than embracing the conspiracy, the family released a statement that called upon the conspiracy theorists to stop defaming their son’s reputation and distracting attention from the real killers. “We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth's murderers,” the statement said.

“It's sad but unsurprising that a group of media outlets who have repeatedly lied to the American people would try and manipulate the legacy of a murder victim in order to forward their own political agenda,” a spokesman for the family told Business Insider. “I think there is a special place in hell for people like that.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

DNC to Every Staffer: 'You're Fired'

If there was any doubt that the election of Donald Trump presented the Democratic Party with an existential crisis, the dire state of the liberal political party is evident by a report that Tom Perez, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has requested the resignation of all DNC staffers. The request may signal that Perez intends to move the Democrats away from the influence of the Clintons and their ties to Wall Street.

NBC News reports that Leah Daughtry, an advisor to outgoing DNC chair and Clinton ally Donna Brazile, asked that all staffers submit a resignation letter dated April 15 after the selection of Perez in February. Perez will have the option of accepting or rejecting the resignations and asking some staffers to stay on under his administration.

The DNC insisted that there was nothing unusual about the request. “This is longstanding precedent at the DNC and has happened during multiple Chair transitions,” said spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa. “The process was started before the election of the new Chair. From the beginning, Tom has been adamant that we structure the DNC for future campaigns.”

Perez previously assembled a committee of 30 Democrats to aid in selecting and interviewing new staff at the DNC per NBC. The committee includes Democrats from a variety of backgrounds including Bernie Sanders supporter Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Black Lives Matters activist Deray McKesson, immigration activist Astrid Silva, Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), former South Carolina Gov. and DNC Chair Don Fowler, and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Perez, who served as the Secretary of Labor under Barack Obama, bested Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) for the DNC chairmanship in February. Ellison had the backing of Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) while Perez, who was endorsed by former Vice President Joe Biden, was seen as a candidate of the Democratic establishment.

Clues to the new direction of the Democratic Party can be seen in Perez’s promise to not accept money from lobbyists and his realization that the Democrats are out of touch with rural voters in traditional Democrat strongholds. “One of the reasons we lost in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania is we're not speaking to rural voters,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in February.

The new DNC chair has two difficult tasks ahead. First, he must bring the varied factions of the party together after the bitter primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. There is some evidence that enough Democrat voters disillusioned with Clintonian corruption voted third party to make a difference in swing states.

Second, the Democrats must repair the damage that the Obama Administration did to their appeal to working class voters. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones pointed out that Clinton lost 14 points among white working class voters and eight points among Hispanic working class voters compared with 2012.

“This strongly suggests that the working class was primarily motivated by economic concerns and only secondarily by racial issues,” Drum writes.

The economic stagnation in Rust Belt states, many of which are led by Democrats, arguably pushed many blue-collar voters toward Donald Trump. After eight years of Barack Obama’s various wars on business and coal, the Democrats have much to do to regain their footing in some states that were deep blue in the near past.

Perez’s task is made all the more difficult by the fact that state and local Democrats took heavy losses in the Obama era. Republican wave elections ended the careers of many promising Democrats in 2010 and 2014. In all, Democrats lost more than 1,000 seats under President Obama according to Fox News.

Given these challenges, it is unsurprising that Perez might want to start with a clean slate as he rebuilds the DNC from scratch. “What we're trying to do is culture change,” he told NBC News. “We're repairing a plane at 20,000 feet. You can't land the plane, shut it down, and close it until further notice.”

Originally published on The Resurgent