Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Feb. 20th, 2020 03:47 pm
mithriltabby: Flashing biohazard symbol over a donkey-elephant chimera (Politics)
[personal profile] mithriltabby

As usual, I’ve done my research for the upcoming election and written up my notes to share with the rest of the class. I’ve given my conclusions, and invite you to come to your own. Even if we disagree on every issue, I’m happy if this saves you a headache.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s 2020 Voter Guide. The Mercury News has a Q&A on this year’s voting.

Party-Nominated Offices

President of the United States

I don’t know why anyone is talking about “electability” and whether anyone is “prepared to be President” any more. That clearly went out the window in 2016. The interesting questions are: what will a candidate do in office? How well do they learn? What principles do they exhibit? And how can I maximize the positive impact of my vote?

I’m disappointed that Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker had to drop out already. I would have happily ranked them all above Klobuchar, Biden, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg; if this had been done with proper ranked-choice voting I would have had Castro right after Warren. And when I next vote for delegates to the state party convention, I will be very interested in the ones who want to improve the primary system.

The primary process allocates delegates proportionally to candidates winning at least 15% of the vote. A vote for a candidate who gets less than 15% will send a statistical message, but it won’t affect who goes to the convention to pick a nominee. FiveThirtyEight have a graph; I will limit my analysis to the top six. If you care more about sending a statistical message than affecting delegate counts, I expect you are following this matter closely enough that my analysis won’t be useful to you.

Every one of these candidates has their share of flaws, any of which may be deal-breakers for you, and I respect that may decide your primary vote. No matter who the nominee is, they will be hit with a fire hose of mud and an avalanche of disinformation, and I don't see any of them being worse equipped than the others to deal with it.

In the general election, I will vote for the Democrat, even if we get a brokered convention that drops acid and nominates Elizabeth Warren’s dog Bailey, because a golden retriever would be a considerable improvement on the current POTUS. (The ads write themselves. “Vote for the good boy!”)

Here are the top candidates in my order of preference:

  1. Elizabeth Warren. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Indivisible Score: 95%. Greenpeace Ranking: A. Vox makes the case and explains her policy positions. SF Chronicle: What President Warren Would Mean for California. Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center (a thinktank of former libertarians who followed the data about what policies actually produce the best indices of freedom) has a lengthy perspective on Warren that is well worth reading. She pays attention to the world and adjusts accordingly, which is why she switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic one back in 1996. She makes mistakes and learns from them. While she’s famous for having plans, she is consistent that her top priority is addressing the problem with corruption. Her perspective is that the system is flawed and needs to be improved, which will be easier to sell to Congress. Of the viable candidates, I believe she will be the most effective at running the country and driving positive change.
  2. Bernie Sanders. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Indivisible Score: 89%. Greenpeace Ranking: A+. Vox makes the case, explains his policy positions, and says mainstream Democrats shouldn’t fear him. Will Wilkinson makes a libertarian case for Sanders. SF Chronicle: What Presdident Sanders Would Mean for California. Sludge notes that the PACs backing Sanders are not the same as those backing other candidates. The other remaining viable candidate who is standing up for significant change. I’m concerned about his ability to actually effect change, since his movement has not flipped a lot of seats in the House or Senate; there is no “Bernie” or DSA caucus in Congress that people have to worry about negotiating with as a group. His perspective is more revolutionary, which will be harder to sell to Congress. I would happily vote for a Warren-Sanders or Sanders-Warren ticket.
  3. Amy Klobuchar. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Indivisible Score: 57%. Greenpeace Ranking: C+. Vox explains her policy positions. SF Chronicle: What President Amy Klobuchar Would Mean For California. Endorsed by the Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle. She has yet to break 10% in a California poll, though she and Warren were easily the top two when we held an informal caucus at the Sunnyvale Democratic Club meeting last Saturday. I have no idea if she’ll be able to hit the 15% threshold on Super Tuesday. I am concerned about reports of her temper, but I have to wonder how many male candidates have similar issues that go unreported because of the double standard.
  4. Joe Biden. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Indivisible Score: under 50%. Greenpeace Ranking: B+. Vox makes the case and explains his policy positions. SF Chronicle: What President Biden Would Mean for California. Sludge notes that he takes money from union-busting lawyers, Comcast executives (who own MSNBC), and ExxonMobil’s lawyers. His “get back to normal” message is probably resonating with a lot of voters, but the world has changed, and there is no going back, and I don’t fancy sitting through his learning curve as he figures that out.
  5. Pete Buttigieg. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Indivisible Score: 77%. Greenpeace Ranking: B+. Vox makes the case and the countercase and explains his policy positions. Sludge notes Buttigieg is getting “dark money” assistance and takes money from union-busting lawyers and a pharma lobbyist who sought drug price hikes in poor countries, and tracks his transformation into a Medicare-for-All critic with donations from pharmaceutical and health insurance interests. He’s already talking deficit hawkery, enough that the American Prospect is calling him Austerity Pete and economist Dean Baker is calling him out, though Slate think it’s just talk. I see him as a substantial risk because, like Klobuchar, he’s having trouble winning over voters of color, and he also lacks working relationships with Capitol Hill, so he’ll have more trouble getting things done than Biden.
  6. Michael Bloomberg. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. Greenpeace Ranking: C+. Vox makes the case and the countercase, explains his policy positions, and argues he’s a disaster. He’ll need quite the blind trust if he gets elected. SF Chronicle: What President Bloomberg Would Mean for California. Having a billionaire jump in the race and drastically outspend the rest of the candidates from his personal fortune makes me really, really enthusiastic to vote for Warren or Sanders. If he wins the primary, that will set a devastatingly bad precedent for our democracy; he has outspent any other candidate by a factor of 10. If that turns out to be the recipe for winning the nomination, future candidates will either be billionaires or have to suck up to them. Jeet Heer makes the case that Bloomberg could destroy the Democratic Party. And given Bloomberg’s history of racism and sexism, he could depress turnout enough to lose the race entirely. (And no, Obama hasn’t endorsed anyone yet, let alone Bloomberg; note that all the Bloomberg ads featuring Obama have old datestamps in the corner.)

Note that in Massachusetts and Vermont, there will be a special election to replace Warren or Sanders if either becomes President, so you don’t need to worry about their governor nominating a Republican replacement.

County Committee

Vote for no more than six.

Voter-Nominated Offices

Thanks to California’s “jungle primary” rules, the top two vote-getters in the primary will face off in the general election. If you would like a better system than that, I commend your attention to Californians for Electoral Reform.

United States Representative, District 17

State Senator, District 13

Several good choices here. Lots of money is pouring into this race. I like Lieber and Becker, and am narrowly landing on Lieber’s side because I know her better. Nancy Smith (current city councilmember and longtime member of the Sunnyvale Democratic Club) vouches for Shelly Masur.

Member of the State Assembly, District 24

Nonpartisan Offices

Judicial

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No. 7

Judge of the Superior Court, Office No. 27

County

Member, Board of Supervisors, District 3

Measures Submitted to the Voters

State

  • Proposition 13: Authorizes Bonds for Facility Repair, Construction, and Modernization at Public Preschools, K-12 Schools, Community Colleges, and Universities. Legislative Statute. Ballotpedia. Voter’s Edge. This authorizes $15bn in bonds to build and repair schools, with $9bn for preschool and K–12, $2bn for community colleges, $2bn for the CSU system, and $2bn to the UC System and Hastings College of Law. The Mercury article has a good argument for how it subsidizes developers at the expense of longtime residents, but I’ll go with Pete Stahl: this is good enough.
    Supported ByOpposed By
    San Francisco Chronicle
    Sacramento Bee
    Pete Rates the Propositions     		San Jose Mercury
    Orange County Register
    • Yes.

City of Sunnyvale

  • Measure B: District Elections. Voter’s Edge. Coverage of the issue. So this is a mess. There’s a California law that makes it possible to sue municipalities whose voting systems shut out minority representation, and a group has threatened to invoke it. Defending these lawsuits is expensive. The way to short-circuit the expense is to switch to district elections. A “yes” vote on this measure moves to a system with six districts and a directly elected mayor. A “no” vote does not keep the existing system. It does not give us a seven-district system. What it gives us is a Mystery Box based on whatever a judge will rule if we reject this plan. (Alternatively, they could do whatever they want by ordinance.) I am disappointed that the City Council has given us this kind of choice.

    The Sunnyvale government is structured so that the executive is the City Manager, and the City Council operates as the board of directors that sets the priorities for the City Manager. Under the current system, the mayor is someone who can get a majority of the council to back them; since their powers are essentially “running meetings”, this works out pretty well. Introducing a directly elected mayor creates the possibility of a mayor who could be at odds with the rest of the Council; on the other hand, it means that in addition to having a district representative, you have an overall city representative as well. It also means that we have someone more directly empowered to speak for the city when attending regional gatherings, which currently leads Sunnyvale to punch below its weight in such venues.

    I’m not thrilled with districts; I’d rather see the City use proportional representation like the single transferable vote so we don’t have to worry about whether district boundaries were drawn fairly. Three seats elected in gubernatorial years and three in presidential years would mean every councilmember spoke for at least 25% of the population, and we could fill the last seat with a directly elected mayor chosen by instant-runoff voting. Since that’s not on the ballot, I will hold my nose and vote for a well-defined solution rather than the Mystery Box.

    Supported ByOpposed By
    Yes on B
    San Jose Mercury
    Sunnyvale Democratic Club     		No Directly Elected Sunnyvale Mayor
    Yes.

School

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  • Current Location: Sunnyvale, CA
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