Bloomberg/Morning Consult Polls a mess

According to the Bloomberg / Morning Consult polls Kamala Harris has wiped out Trump's lead in most swing states and now has a commanding electoral college lead.  This is what the map looks like if their data is to be taken seriously:

Just how fantastical is it? One week ago polling showed Trump with a slight lead or at least a tie in Michigan.  Now according to the Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls, Harris leads Trump by... 11%?????

In one week? Highly suspect, that's all I have to say. I looked at the 500+ page crosstab. It didn't help. I'm not saying their swing state polls are wrong, but I am more apt to believe that than they are correct. Especially when they are so far off from other recent polls.

Bribery? If it quacks like a duck

 Michael Bloomberg is trying to bribe Florida felons to vote for Joe Biden.

Bloomberg drops out

ROFL

So Bloomberg has dropped out and endorsed Biden.  Clearly he was the Democrat Establishment Plan B, and appears to be no longer necessary.   More strikingly, he appears to know it.  It's odd given his speech last night seemingly geared to carrying on.  So he was never a wildcard, he was always a Plan B.  It proves that the Democrat Establishment wants to court socialist voters but doesn't want them to share in the power.

They view socialists, youth, Hispanics, labor, African Americans, women all as useful idiots that they can trick into supporting them so they can continue to consolidate their power.  They have no interest in maintaining America.  They are entirely, ENTIRELY, about self-interest.  American workers, their supporters, indeed all Americans be damned.  Cheap labor in China or Vietnam or through illegal immigrants all serve their desire for profit.  It is a distorted version of capitalism that ultimately will kill itself as they buy their way to power with free handouts and eventually socialism wins not just in America, but everywhere.  They feed the beast to serve their own interests and they end up being eaten by the beast they have nurtured.

But I digress.

It seems like, as I mentioned earlier, that Bloomberg dropping out serves Biden quite well.  Don't expect Warren to drop out if it is indeed an Establishment play to go all in on Biden.  They want Sanders out, she siphons voters from him.  Although if it becomes too transparent and they risk alienating the Sanders voters she may be prodded to leave as well.  She's an Establishment type masquerading as a progressive.  At least it seems so.  It's either that or she truly believes the ridiculous platform positions she's taken.  She may actually believe she's American Indian - so there's that.

In any case, Sanders route to the nomination just got more difficult, but no matter what, Democrats are still the underdog to win back the White House.

Really Democrat establishment? This guy?

It looks like going into Super Tuesday the Democratic Establishment has decided to circle the wagons around Joe Biden in order to put a stop to Bernie Sanders (and possibly also Bloomberg).

But why Biden?  His campaign is already going down in flames thanks to... Joe Biden:

Viability is a real thing but it seems like the Democrats are fresh out. It's hard to know whether Sanders, Biden or Bloomberg would be the easiest candidate for president Trump to defeat but right now it's looking like any one of them will lose to the president. That leaves Elizabeth Warren. Although it looks like voters have already left her so that's a no-go too.

Annnnnnd.....Klobuchar Out!

President Trump was right - pre-Super-Tuesday both Buttigieg and now Klobuchar drop out (in addition to Tom (who now?) Steyer) drop out to clear a path for either Bloomberg or Biden to go mono-a-mono with Sanders and take him out.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is suspending her presidential campaign after failing to break into the top tier of Democratic candidates.

She plans to drop out of the race and endorse former Vice President Joe Biden in Dallas on Monday night, according to her campaign.

It's just hours before polls open in her home state of Minnesota on Super Tuesday.

Don't be surprised if Warren is encouraged to stay in. That hurts Sanders too.

Pete Buttigieg is OUT. All of his SuperTuesday votes will go to Sleepy Joe Biden. Great timing. This is the REAL beginning of the Dems taking Bernie out of play - NO NOMINATION, AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020

This is all happening pre-Super-Tuesday.  That matters because the votes do not get split as much.  Clearly Establishment  Democrats are enthusiastic given Biden's win in South Carolina.  This could really backfire on them.

Democrat Debate Free For All on Bloomberg

We know that his opponents are going to go after Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg at the upcoming debate in Nevada.  It's his first debate in a long time, and he does pose an existential threat to all of their chances for the nomination.  If he wants to win, he should be prepared for an onslaught.  Everyone else in that debate has something to prove - either their own ability to withstand an advertising blitz and a faltering campaign of their own (Biden), or their ability to take on a billionaire and ultimately president Trump (e.g. Warren), or the fact that he represents the antithesis of the ideology of the future of the party (Sanders) or even just the viability of their continued campaigns (Buttigieg or Klobuchar  -the former seems oblivious and almost seems to be embracing Bloomberg, the latter too, seems resigned to acceptance).

I expect that save for the latter two, who oddly may have pre-conceded to Bloomberg and are busy vying for a VP slot, there will be a battle for a change from the previous love-in debates.  But what will be the fallout?

Does Bloomberg effectively acquit himself of all of the recent charges of racism and sexism?  Does he falter?  Does it even matter if he has become the perceived first choice thanks to his ad blitz?  This is all hard to predict.  But my suspicion is that this will not be a game changer for everyone.  But I do think it will winnow the field. Anyone who does not go after Bloomberg will become irrelevant and start to fall in the polling in the coming weeks.  Warren has signaled her intent so Sanders has to outdo her and so too does Biden.  The question is who will be the most effective.  

I think the result of this debate is that you will see Buttigieg and Klobuchar will start to fade.  Here are the IFs:

-If Bloomberg looks like he handles it all well, he will knock Biden into an also-ran.  If he does not, Biden may see a resurgence (unless Buttigieg actually does go after Bloomberg and does so better than Biden)

-If Warren does a better job than Sanders in attacking Bloomberg she will experience a mini-revival and continue to pull votes from Sanders.  If not then she will fade as well and it will allow Sanders to become one of the 2 people in what seems to be headed towards a two-person race.

Bloomberg is the iceberg that will hit the Titanic of democracy

Yesterday I postulated that we should be cheering for Sanders because Bloomberg could swamp the system.  It turns out, I am not alone in that thinking.

Maybe all that money can't overcome who Bloomberg really is, but if you aren't worried, you've got your head in the sand as much as most Bernie Sanders supporters do.

Michael Bloomberg enters the race, crickets ensue

Nobody outside of Michael Bloomberg's immediate family want him to be president, and I can't even say with certainty that his family want him to win.  It might just be him.  Democrats have moved so far left that because he's a billionaire he will be despised by Democrat voters and attacked by fellow candidates.

Of course conservative voters want nothing to do with the man whose platforms and policy positions are simply inane.

But Bloomberg has one thing going for him.  Actually, it's billions.  If he wins it will be because he spends his way to victory.

Let me say this now: He will not win.  He won't win the presidency and he won't even win the nomination. He cannot spend his way to victory.  Hillary Clinton tried to spend her way to victory in 2016.  She failed.  She did not engage voters or even the media.  Maybe Michael Bloomberg will learn from that and back up his money with engagement. But, uh, a video of him sitting in what seriously looks like a wheelchair saying he is entering the race is almost creepy and does not bode well for that theory.  He looks all of his 77 years.  He does not have president Trump's energy or the charisma level of a potted plant.

He won't win the primary.  His candidacy is being portrayed as a panic situation by the Democrat establishment by Republicans but if that's true the person hurt most will be Joe Biden, whose candidacy is probably dead in the water already.  This is so bad for Democrats you almost have to wonder if it's a Republican idea.

If Bloomberg has to wage war on other Democrat candidates to have a chance of making waves in the crowded candidate field, it will get messy.  And no matter who emerges they will be so badly damaged that they won't be able to win. As a conservative, this announcement is good news.

Bloomberg belatedly recognizes Obama's alternative facts on Iran nuclear deal

Everyone with any modicum of intelligence knew that the Iran nuclear deal was horribly bad.  Everyone except president Obama and the mainstream media.  Bloomberg belatedly has figured out the truth; Obama's deal was a bad deal and the American people were being peddled a lie to sell a horrible, horrible deal.

It's not just bad, it's this bad:

When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions. America, President Barack Obama told us, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran's regional predations through sanctions and other means.

Thanks to stunning new reporting from Politico's Josh Meyer, we can now assess these assertions and conclude that they are … well, "alternative facts."

Meyer reports that while the U.S. and other great powers were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran's nuclear program, top officials in Obama's government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation Cassandra, intended to undermine Hezbollah's global drug trafficking and money laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart. Agents were reassigned. Leads and sources dried up. Bad guys got away.

The Politico story is so bad, that yesterday I linked to it but didn't comment because I could not believe how truly terrible it was.  It's getting harder to ignore though that this actually seems to have happened.

Bloomberg won't credit Trump for DOW rise

A Bloomberg article tells us not to thanks president Trump for the Dow Jones rise above 20,000 to a historic high. That's after saying this:

The Dow has gained about 10 percent since Trump was elected, and for good reason: His proposed policies would augment the stream of cash flowing to investors. Reduced corporate tax rates, for example, would leave more money to pass on to shareholders, while cuts in capital-gains rates would allow them to keep more for themselves. The mere possibility of such a windfall offers investors ample motivation to bid up stocks.

The policies are something that will help the Dow,  but it's not a recipe for economic success relative to GDP growth the editorial argues, loath to credit president Trump with anything despite the obvious Dow success.  The following several paragraphs outline why it won't necessarily translate into success for middle America.  There are arguments to be made (and also refuted) because we're only a week into the new presidency and the extension of the Dow success has yet to happen - it's too early.

But that does not take away from the editorial's title: "Dow 20,000 Is No Vote of Confidence".

Wrong. That's exactly what it is. A Dow at 20,000 is not a report card on success; after one week as president that would be akin to giving president Obama a Nobel Peace Prize based on his potential to ferment global peace after 8 months in office and no concrete accomplishments tied to it. For those of you unable to catch that, I mean that it would be crazy. No, a soaring Dow indicates precisely a vote of confidence in the potential of Trump (perhaps that was the Nobel committee's misguided intention with Obama in 2009, conflating aspiration with success). Bloomberg makes the reverse mistake from the Nobel cabal here - conflating success with aspiration. The Dow is driven in large part by aspiration because trying to divine the future of stock performance depends on where you see the economy and business environment heading. This is exactly what the market is doing - it's confident that business will operate in a more business-friendly environment and therefore perform better.

Is there a vote of confidence in Trump's stated policies? Well, anecdotally it's not just the Dow's rise that indicates this is the case. Consumer confidence has soared since the election of Trump as seen below:

That sure looks like a surge of confidence to me.  Maybe Bloomberg is seeing something else that I'm missing.  But probably not.  What they are seemingly arguing is that it's not going to translate to GDP growth and ultimately the little guy  by way of jobs and purchasing power.

More money for investors, though, doesn’t automatically translate into more prosperity for everyone. Economic growth has been weak since the recession of 2007 to 2009, in part because of very low levels of capital investment. Companies would be more likely to increase this spending if Trump offered some specific enticements, or if they saw more demand for their goods and services.

On those fronts, the future is less clear. Stock investors tend to be relatively wealthy and hence less likely to spend each added dollar they make, so their gains probably won’t do much for demand. Companies, for their part, are getting conflicting signals: Lower taxes would of course be attractive, but Trump’s public meddling in hiring and investment decisions might push in the other direction.

They're using a microscope to look at a macroscopic situation. Trump's 'meddling' is window dressing for public consumption. Yes it's made a difference in terms of specific jobs. But Trump understands that he cannot spend the next 8 years sitting down with every company and tell them to hire American, buy American and build American. He's merely setting a tone with that. More importantly however, is the idea that a better business climate via his policy agenda, will invite capital investment and inflows (repatriation of capital) and that will necessitate hiring and therefore jobs. Trump and a lot of others are betting on that and it looks like it's going to be a pretty safe bet.

Jeremy Irons is smarter than Mayor Bloomberg

What is going on?  An actor, Jeremy Irons blasts NYC mayor Bloomberg's "nanny state" soda bans and it happens on Hoff Post Live, a liberal media outlet?

I'm officially lost.  Aren't all actors liberals and isn't Huff post a far left media outlet?  What gives?

Maybe I'm not entirely lost.  He does veer into the idea of the government spending money to discourage behavior. That too is a questionable proposition, nevertheless it is a highly preferable idea to what mayor Bloomberg has done. Irons makes a lot of sense.

Bloomberg and Trump Wild Cards

Let's run!

Think of the worst possible scenario, an Obama win with a popular vote share of 41%.  How does that happen?  A third, and maybe fourth party candidate.  Two possible entrants along those lines are Donald Trump and New York City mayor Bloomberg.

If either or both of those independently wealthy, and not-really-conservatives run, on the basis that they want to rid the country of a leader that they think is doing a bad job, they'll just ensure that he wins.  It's not hard to figure out - a two or three way split of the anti Obama vote only helps Obama.  In an electoral college battle that is bound to be close and come down to a few key states, a percentage point or two each is likely to skew heavily towards the anti-incumbent vote.  And both potential candidates would probably take mo0re than 1 or 2 percent.  

Both candidates are smart enough to realize they are hampering their own stated cause by merely running. So why on earth would they run against him if they want Obama defeated?  Because they don't want him defeated, they want him re-elected.

Give me...lieberty?

“Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose.”

~Michael Bloomberg.

(HT: Allahpundit at Hot Air)