Slow But Steady Wins the Race

It sure looks like it today. The latest Iowa State University poll of likely caucus attendees shows Elizabeth Warren’s slow but steady approach to the 2020 nomination may be bearing fruit. With everyone else in single digits, this is what the top four look like:

Even if this is an outlier poll (Real Clear Politics has a list of four different ones that suggests that it is) Biden at 12% in any poll cannot be good for him. And that’s not the real bad news: the Biden campaign spent $2 million more than it brought in in the third quarter. Biden’s burn rate – the speed at which campaign funds are spent – is higher than any of his top competitors, and only Kamala Harris’s is worse.

Oh yeah, and when you weren’t looking this morning, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan dropped out of the Democratic primary contest “to focus on his re-election bid in the House.” Good idea: if there is a lower number than 1%, I think that’s where Ryan was.

In other news:

• Cristina Cabrera at Talking Points Memo reports that Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to cancel their Washington Post and New York Times subscriptions. (10/24/19)
• Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark explains why Democratic voters think capitalism is, as the literary critics would say, problematic, and are voting for Warren and Sanders. Exhibit A is WeWork’s Adam Neumann who, in return for  putting 2,000 employees on the street, is getting a $200 million payout on top of the $700 million he has already extracted from the company. Yup. (10/23/19)
• Carolyn  Fiddler at The Daily Kos is calling it: she thinks that the Dems will flip the Virginia Senate in 2020. They only need one seat, and she thinks they will get two. Or three. (10/24/19)
• This has nothing to do with the election, but do you want to know the details about the weird Katie Hill scandal that is burning up conservative blogs? Instapundit has a bunch of links on the California Congressional Democrat: apparently, there’s a bong, an Iron Cross tattoo, congressional staffer, and an open marriage involved. (11/24/19)
• Taegan Goddard at Political Wire reports that Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) will endorse Elizabeth Warren, suggesting that the California sand is slipping away from under Kamala Harris’s feet. (1/24/19)

And, finally, according to The Washington Post, “Hours before announcing that she would not seek another term in Congress, Gabbard appeared on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show Thursday night to criticize Democrats for holding impeachment hearings in private.” Everyone thinks his is weird because it happened in the middle of the night: but if Gabbard’s primary audience was her Hawaiian constituents, this makes perfect sense.

Gabbard’s move is once again sparking online rumours of a third-party presidential bid. Despite Democrats’ fears of another Jill Stein fiasco, social media exchanges with my conservative friends suggest that a Gabbard candidacy would appeal to Republicans (particularly veterans) disgusted with Trump. @MSNBC’s Jason Johnson agrees.

Whatever else, the woman has a plan: it’s either run as the libertarian she clearly is, or take a lucrative pundit job at Fox, where Lachlan Murdoch seems to be tacking away from Trump and the conservative populism that built the network’s brand under Roger Ailes.

Claire Bond Potter is co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Professor of History at The New School for Social Research.