DALLAS -- Former Vice President Joe Biden's Democratic presidential bid picked up steam on Monday with the endorsements of two former 2020 rivals - Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - who planned to join him on the stage at a rally on the eve of the Super Tuesday primary elections
But Biden still faces a challenge from billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg among voters hoping the party will nominate a moderate.
Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota, will become the third 2020 candidate in as many days to drop out of the race when she announces the suspension of her campaign in Dallas, where she will also publicly back Biden, a Klobuchar aide said.
Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ended his White House bid on Sunday, also plans to endorse Biden in Dallas, a top adviser said.
Biden is fresh off a resounding victory in Saturday's South Carolina primary and is aiming for a strong showing on Super Tuesday against Senator Bernie Sanders, the national frontrunner and a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont.
The Super Tuesday contests offer the biggest one-day haul of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the party's nomination at its national convention in July, with about 1,357 delegates, or nearly one-third of the total number, up for grabs.
Fourteen states - California, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Vermont, Colorado, Utah, North Carolina and Maine - as well as American Samoa and Democrats living abroad cast ballots on Tuesday. (The primary for expatriate Americans is scheduled to run through March 10.)
Bloomberg, a late entrant to the race, will make his ballot-box debut. He is betting the $500 million of his own money he has poured into his campaign will allow him to make up for not competing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Five candidates - Biden, Bloomberg, Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and US Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii - remain in the running for the nomination to take on Republican President Donald Trump in November's election, down from more than 20 earlier in the campaign.
Bloomberg and Biden have emerged as the main contenders for the votes of moderate Democrats, while Sanders is the progressive front-runner nationally, eclipsing Warren.
BIDEN'S MOMENTUM
Biden's high-stakes triumph in South Carolina, where his campaign had said his popularity with black voters would propel him to victory after early disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, helped winnow the field.
Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer also gave up his campaign on Saturday night after a third-place finish in the Southern state in which he had invested most heavily.
One of Buttigieg's top fundraisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of his supporters planned to donate to Biden's campaign.
Sanders' momentum might not be easily slowed. On Monday, his campaign downplayed the efforts by moderates to present a united front.
"The establishment is nervous, not because we can't beat Trump, but because we will," said Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir. "And when we do, the Democratic Party will again be a party of the working class."
It was not immediately clear who would immediately benefit from the departures of Buttigieg and Klobuchar. A Morning Consult poll taken Feb. 23 to 27, for example, before Buttigieg exited the race, showed that 21 percent of his supporters named Sanders as their second choice, 19 percent picked Biden, another 19 percent chose Warren and 17 percent favored Bloomberg.
Biden still lags his rivals in spending and organization in Super Tuesday states and beyond, but his campaign said on Sunday it had raised more than $10 million over the preceding two days.
Endorsements of the former vice president from elected officials and community leaders poured in on Monday as Democrats who believe a moderate is the best candidate to defeat Trump tried to circle the wagons around Biden.
Backing from Ohio Democrats including Representative Marcia Fudge and former Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory added to endorsements from Senator Tim Kaine and state House of Delegates Majority Leader Charniele Herring of Virginia. In Colorado, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock has backed Biden. In California, Representative Gil Cisneros is supporting the former vice president.
On Wednesday, Hollywood mogul Sherry Lansing is hosting a fundraiser for Biden featuring Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Supporters of Sanders and Warren also rushed to weigh in for their candidates. The progressive magazine "The Nation" endorsed Sanders, and the women's fundraising organization Emily's List endorsed Warren.
Former President Barack Obama planned to wait until after the primaries to endorse a candidate, a source familiar with his thinking said.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
DETROIT -- Pete Buttigieg, who entered the Democratic presidential race as a relative unknown and positioned himself as the future of the party during an improbable rise to the top tier of a crowded field, ended his White House bid on Sunday.
Buttigieg, 38, a former two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an Afghanistan war veteran and the first openly gay candidate to make a competitive run for the US presidency, narrowly won the Iowa caucuses that kicked off the nominating race in February and finished a close second in New Hampshire.
But his early momentum from those rural, mostly white states did not translate into electoral success in the more diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina.
After finishing a distant third in the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg came in fourth on Saturday in South Carolina, where he won support from just 3 percent of African-American voters.
The centrist Democrat's withdrawal from the race could help former Vice President Joe Biden, a fellow moderate who got a much-needed victory on Saturday and now is looking to wrest momentum from liberal front-runner Bernie Sanders in this week's 14-state Super Tuesday nominating contests.
Speaking in South Bend, Buttigieg said his campaign began its "unlikely journey" with a staff of four, no big email lists and no personal fortune.
"We got into this race in order to defeat the current president and in order to usher in a new kind of politics," Buttigieg told a crowd of supporters. Now, he said, it was time to "step aside and help bring our party and our country together."
In a tweet, Biden said Buttigieg had run a “trail-blazing campaign based on courage, compassion, and honesty,” adding: “This is just the beginning of his time on the national stage.”
Buttigieg had sought to unite Democrats, independents and moderate Republican voters, arguing his status as a Washington outsider could rebuild a majority to defeat Republican President Donald Trump in November's election.
But he faced persistent questions about his ability to win over black voters, a core Democratic voting bloc.
Buttigieg's tenure as South Bend mayor, which ended on Jan. 1, drew scrutiny for a lack of diversity on the local police force and a fatal shooting of a black resident by a police officer. He also lacked Biden's national profile or long-standing relationships with the black community.
HISTORIC CAMPAIGN
Buttigieg would have been the first openly gay major-party presidential nominee in US history. He did not make his sexuality a centerpiece of his candidacy, although his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, a teacher he married in 2018, regularly accompanied him on the campaign trail.
Buttigieg, often referred to simply as "Mayor Pete," promised a departure from the politics of the past. As a "proud son" of Indiana, he argued he could speak directly to voters struggling economically in crucial swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin that handed Trump the presidency in 2016.
A US Navy veteran who often spoke of his military service and Christian faith, Buttigieg was critical of Sanders' uncompromising liberal proposals, which Buttigieg warned could alienate moderate Democratic voters ahead of "the fight of our lives" to unseat Trump.
At the televised debate ahead of the South Carolina primary, Buttigieg said Sanders' shifting estimates to fund proposals such as a government-run healthcare system for all would doom the Democratic Party in November.
"I can tell you exactly how it all adds up. It adds up to four more years of Donald Trump," Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg had considerable early success in fundraising, proving popular with the Hollywood and big-tech money scenes. He came under fire from Democratic competitors, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, who questioned whether he was beholden to his big-money donors and criticized his ritzy, closed-door fundraiser in a wine cave in California.
His campaign, however, faced tighter purse strings after heavy investments in the first two voting states and raised only $6 million in January. Sanders, by comparison, raised $25 million the same month.
Before Biden's South Carolina win, Buttigieg had argued he was the only candidate who had proven he could beat Sanders in state contests. His campaign had laid out a strategy to get through Super Tuesday contests and focus on later primaries where it believed it had an edge.
That changed as the race remained outsized and questions mounted about possibly non-viable contenders splitting moderate votes to give Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, an easy path to the nomination. A campaign aide told Reuters that Buttigieg was not going to be a "spoiler" who helped Sanders win.
Still, his decision to drop out before Super Tuesday caught some supporters by surprise. Buttigieg spent the day in Selma, Alabama, commemorating a landmark civil rights march in 1965. A big crowd had gathered later on Sunday for the candidate's scheduled event in Dallas when they learned he was no longer coming.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
LAS VEGAS -- The top 6 candidates competing for the Democratic nomination to take on US President Donald Trump in November participated in the ninth presidential debate on Wednesday, with one quickly becoming the focus: Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor making his first debate appearance in the race, faced criticism from all his rivals on the stage in Las Vegas:
ELIZABETH WARREN
"We’re running against a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-face lesbians. And no I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk."
Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, also criticized Bloomberg for reports that his namesake media company mistreated women employees. She called on him to release women who sued his company from non-disclosure agreements.
"I hope you heard what his defense was: I've been nice to some women. That just doesn't cut it. The mayor has to stand on his record and what we need to know is what's lurking out there."
"This is not just a question of the mayor's character. This is also a question about electability. We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many non-disclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against."
PETE BUTTIGIEG
The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor went after both Bloomberg and US Senator Bernie Sanders.
"Most Americans don’t see where they fit if they have to choose between a socialist who thinks money is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power. Let's put forward somebody who actually lives and works in the middle class neighborhood in an industrial Midwestern city. Let's put forward somebody who's actually a Democrat."
"We shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out. We can do better."
JOE BIDEN
The former vice president assailed Bloomberg over the stop-and-frisk policing policy in New York City that was criticized for ensnaring disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos.
"The fact of the matter is he has not managed his city very well when he was there. He didn't get a whole lot done. He had stop-and-frisk - throwing close to 5 million young black men up against the wall - and when we came along in our administration, President Obama and I said we're going to send a mediator to stop it, he said that's unnecessary."
Biden said that the Obama administration worked to put an end to the policy.
"Let's get the facts straight. Let's get the order straight. It's not whether you apologize or not, it's the policy. The policy was abhorrent. And it was in fact a violation of every right people have."
AMY KLOBUCHAR
The Minnesota senator responded to reports of the Bloomberg campaign saying the other moderates should drop out to let him fight the liberal Sanders.
"I have been told as a woman, as someone that maybe no one thought was still going to be standing up on this stage, but I am because of pure grit ... I've been told many times to wait my turn and to step aside, and I’m not going to do that now ... I think we need something different than Donald Trump. I think don’t you look at Donald Trump and say, 'We need someone richer in the White House'.”
BERNIE SANDERS
"We are giving a voice to people who would say we are sick and tired of billionaires, like Mr. Bloomberg, seeing huge expansions of their wealth, while a half a million people sleep out on the street tonight ... Maybe it's time for the working class in this country to get a little bit of power in Washington, rather than your billionaire campaign."
Sanders added later: "Maybe we can talk about a billionaire saying that we should not raise the minimum wage, or that we should cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If that's a way to beat Donald Trump, wow, I would be very surprised."
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
"I’m a philanthropist who didn’t inherit his money, but made his money. I’m spending that money to get rid of Donald Trump – the worst president we’ve ever had. And if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and to my kids.”
Bloomberg said he had not mistreated women employees but defended his decision not to release those he settled with from non-disclosure agreements, saying they were made consensualy.
"We have a very few non-disclosure agreements. None of them accuse me of anything ... maybe they didn't like the jokes I told."
Bloomberg criticized his opponents, particularly Sanders, for advocating higher taxes on corporations and forcing unions onto boards.
"I can’t think of a better way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation. We’re not gonna throw out capitalism. We tried that, other countries tried that, it was called communism and it just didn’t work."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — The Democratic presidential primary is entering an intensely tumultuous phase, after two early contests that have left former Vice President Joe Biden reeling and elevated Sen. Bernie Sanders but failed to make any candidate a dominant force in the battle for the party’s nomination.
Within the Democratic establishment, the results have deepened a mood of anxiety and frustration: The collapse of Biden’s support in the first two states, and the fragmentation of moderate voters among several other candidates, allowed Sanders, a Vermont progressive, to claim a thin victory in New Hampshire and an apparent split decision in Iowa with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.
In both states, a majority of voters supported candidates closer to the political center and named defeating President Donald Trump as their top priority, but there was no overwhelming favorite among those voters as to which moderate was the best alternative to Sanders. Unless such a favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael Bloomberg as a potential savior.
In an unmistakable sign of Bloomberg’s growing strength and Biden’s decline, 3 black members of Congress endorsed the former mayor of New York City on Wednesday, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, a high-profile lawmaker and gun-control champion in her first term — and a senior adviser to Bloomberg told campaign staff that internal polling showed the former mayor now tied with Biden among African Americans in March primary states.
The turmoil in the party has the potential to extend the primary season, exacerbating internal divisions and putting off the headache of uniting for the general election for months.
The Democrats’ proportional system of allocating delegates and the nature of the calendar this year could make it all but impossible to avert such an outcome. With no winner-take-all contests, and no indication yet that Sanders can broaden his appeal or that a moderate can coalesce support, the candidates are poised to keep splitting delegates three or four ways, as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“We are obviously going to have a longer battle here,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who directed an anti-Sanders ad campaign in Iowa.
The leading candidates are plainly worried about the party’s divisions, and signaled as much in their speeches in New Hampshire on primary night: Sanders, blamed by much of the party for his slashing approach to the 2016 primaries, stressed in his victory speech that the most important task was defeating Trump, while Buttigieg urged his supporters to “vote blue, no matter who” in November.
In a particularly urgent plea, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who slumped to a fourth-place finish Tuesday, warned that no candidate should be “willing to burn down the rest of the party in order to be the last man standing.”
At the moment, no one is close to being the last candidate standing. But unless another Democrat rapidly consolidates support, Sanders could continue to win primaries and caucuses without broadening his political appeal, purely on the strength of his rock-solid base on the left — a prospect that alarms Democratic Party leaders who view Sanders and his slogan of democratic socialism as wildly risky bets in a general election.
The Biden team stoked that sense of alarm Wednesday: Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a chairman of Biden’s national campaign and a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, warned on a conference call with reporters that Democrats would risk “down-ballot carnage” if they selected Sanders.
“If Bernie Sanders was at the top of the ticket, we would be in jeopardy of losing the House,” Richmond said. “We would not get the Senate back.”
Yet in a reflection of the multidimensional melee that allowed Sanders to claim victory in New Hampshire with the smallest plurality of any winner in decades, Richmond also criticized two other candidates, Bloomberg and Buttigieg, lumping them into the same risky group and arguing that Democrats should not “take a chance with a self-defined socialist, a mayor of a very small city, a billionaire who all of a sudden is a Democrat.”
Mellman said Sanders would continue to benefit as long as there was a relative abundance of moderate candidates in the race. “The longer more of those people stay in,” he said, “the easier it is for Sanders to skate through.”
There is no sign that any of the half-dozen major candidates left in the race are headed for the exits: Buttigieg and Biden will have to contend in the Nevada caucuses against Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who finished a strong third in New Hampshire, while on the left Sanders still faces a dogged competitor in Warren. Unless one candidate comes out of Nevada and South Carolina with a powerful upper hand, it is quite likely that the same atomized delegate count could continue into Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all delegates in the Democratic race, cast ballots on March 3.
Indeed, with early voting already taking place in California and other Super Tuesday states, and no dominant front-runner, the fragmentation may already be well underway.
In Arkansas, a Super Tuesday state where early voting starts next week, a poll taken after Iowa illustrated the Democrats’ dilemma: Bloomberg, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg were each winning 16 percent to 20 percent of the vote.
All of those candidates are increasingly confronting Bloomberg’s presence as a rival in the March primaries. Bloomberg skipped all four February contests but has climbed into double digits in national polls on the strength of an enormous and sustained advertising campaign, funded from his personal fortune.
On a conference call with campaign staff members Wednesday afternoon, Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s senior adviser, said that internal tracking data showed that the former mayor had pulled “very narrowly” into first place across the March primary states, inching ahead of Sanders overall and tying Biden among African American voters.
Though Wolfson did not provide specific numbers, he said Biden had “rather precipitously fallen” in the larger array of states voting next month, according to Bloomberg polling.
But Bloomberg is facing new tests as a candidate: For the first time, he may qualify for a televised debate, next week in Las Vegas, and he has come under newly direct criticism from other Democrats for his record on policing and much else.
Wolfson acknowledged as much on the conference call, telling staff members that Bloomberg would have a “bigger target on his back” as his numbers rose. He said Bloomberg would address scrutiny of his support for stop-and-frisk policing by calling it “the biggest regret of his 12 years as mayor,” and saying that the language he had used in the past to defend it did not “reflect who he is or what is in his heart.”
But the recently circulated audio recording of Bloomberg in 2015 matter-of-factly stating that “the real crime is” almost always committed by young “male minorities” quickly ricocheted across the tight-knit community of black political leaders.
J. Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the South Carolina House, said many African Americans had increasingly recognized that Biden did not have “what it takes” and had been ready to bolt to the former New York mayor.
“A lot of people would’ve said Bloomberg last week, but now I don’t know,” said Rutherford, alluding to the recording and declaring that the gnawing uncertainty hanging over the Democratic race was “really scary.”
Biden and other candidates have indicated that they intend to challenge Bloomberg on race in the coming days, and his resiliency, or lack thereof, on the subject could shape the primary campaign.
Yet even supporters of Biden acknowledge that if one of the moderates does not take a clear lead with that faction of the party after Nevada, the eyes of many establishment-aligned Democrats will turn to Manhattan.
“The longer the waters are muddy, the better off Bloomberg is,” said former Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina, who recently backed Biden.
The campaign in Nevada is as disordered as anything else in the Democratic race, according to people closely watching the contest there. But as in New Hampshire, Biden long held a considerable advantage as the candidate perceived as the safe and electable choice, while Sanders entered the race with a strong bloc carried over from his last run for the presidency. It remains to be seen whether Biden will bleed support there as rapidly as he did in New Hampshire, or whether any other candidate will be able to take advantage of his fall.
Tick Segerblom, a prominent Sanders backer in the state who is a member of the Clark County Commission, said Biden’s national plunge would upend the campaign in Nevada. He said that Sanders could count his “25 percent” but that his ability to expand his coalition was an open question.
“Bernie is still alive and Biden is definitely a disaster,” Segerblom said. “I think Pete is going to do very well — he’ll be able to pick up the Biden people.”
Rep. Dina Titus, perhaps the most prominent Biden supporter in the state, said the campaign needed to send in the political cavalry to stave off defeat.
“He could certainly use more hands — and they’re supposedly coming now,” she said.
She added that she would spend her time helping Biden with senior groups and labor unions. But the former vice president’s hope that the most influential union in the state, the Culinary Workers, would endorse him in an effort to halt Sanders has been dimmed after his poor performance in the first two states.
In South Carolina, even moderate Democrats who are sympathetic to Biden believe he is in grave danger of losing the state.
“He’s wounded,” Tyler Jones, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist, said of the former vice president. Like other political professionals in the state, Jones is increasingly less concerned about Biden’s weakness than about billionaire Tom Steyer’s strength — and what it means for the nominating process.
Steyer has been pouring money into South Carolina, cutting into Biden’s lead with black voters and raising the specter of Sanders’ winning another state with a plurality thanks to a divided electorate.
“A vote for Steyer is a vote for Bernie, which is a vote for Trump,” said Jones, who believes Sanders cannot win the general election and wants to stop his campaign “dead in its tracks.” But he acknowledged that urging voters to act strategically and reject Steyer was easier in theory than in execution.
Other Democrats are turning to what they believe is a more simple solution.
In early January, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York offered an off-the-cuff assessment of the Democratic race: Should Biden wheeze in the early states, many in the party would turn to Bloomberg as a Plan B.
“If Mr. Biden can’t get out of New Hampshire and Iowa, then Bloomberg has Super Tuesday,” Meeks said at the time.
On Wednesday, he was one of the three black lawmakers who endorsed Bloomberg.
2020 The New York Times Company
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Jackie Wellman worries that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are too liberal to defeat President Donald Trump, thinks Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, may be too inexperienced and, while she is fond of Joe Biden, she is also uneasy about his tendency to misspeak. “I am worried about the top four candidates because they all have issues,” said Wellman, a 54-year-old Iowa caucusgoer from West Des Moines who likes Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Wellman is not the only Democrat who keeps finding flaws as she searches for the best candidate to win the White House.
“Voters are holding back because just when they start to fall in love, they find something that gets them a little nervous,” former Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago said. “The reason it’s so fluid is because they’re still searching for the horse that can win.” Michael R. Bloomberg believes that may be him. But Bloomberg’s apparent decision to mount a late entry into the presidential race represents something more than just the robust self-confidence of a New York City billionaire; it’s a manifestation of the Democratic angst that has been growing, particularly among moderate voters and party establishment figures.
Bloomberg has jolted the Democratic primary, drawing fire from the leading liberals in the field who said he was trying to buy the presidency while posing a direct threat to the centrist candidacy of Biden. But he has also exposed the jitters among establishment-aligned Democrats who fear that the leftward turn of the party is endangering their chances of building a winning coalition.For weeks, senior Democratic officials and donors have been musing about whether a new candidate could be lured in the race, a striking illustration of nervousness just three months before the Iowa caucuses. Some talked up Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, but others wondered if Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio might make a late entry to unite a party splintered along ideological lines.
And while some party leaders have muted their concerns in an effort to be neutral, that restraint has started to give way to open expressions of alarm. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been repeating the same mantra — “Remember November” — in private about focusing on winning the general election, and has told Democratic allies she was uneasy about a nominee running on “Medicare for All.”
In an interview last week with Bloomberg News, the San Francisco-based speaker let her concerns slip, saying that creating government-run health care “would increase the vote in my own district, but that’s not what we need to do in order to win the Electoral College.”
Many voters are just as uneasy. “I like Elizabeth Warren,” said Janet Mayo-Smith, 64, who was attending an event for Biden in Franklin, New Hampshire, on Friday, before adding that she had concerns about whether Warren was too “radical” to win. She expressed some openness to Bloomberg, calling him “a good candidate” but also noting that it was late to join the race.
Stanley Brown, 49, also from New Hampshire, called Bloomberg’s move “interesting.’’ Asked if there were too many voices in the race already, he replied “no such thing.’’
“I’d consider anybody,” he said.
Yet if there is consensus around the high priority of finding the strongest candidate to take on Trump, there is less agreement among rank-and-file voters that the party needs a white knight to enter the race and rescue them. Interviews with Democrats across four states on Friday showed that many were content to pick from those who remained in the sprawling field.
“I’m not sure what his logic is exactly,” Ricky Hurtado, who attended a Hispanic voters forum in North Carolina that featured Warren, said of Bloomberg. Ticking through a number of the leading Democrats in the race, Hurtado, who is running for the state legislature next year, said, “I think we have enough voices in the primary right now covering the majority of the spectrum in the Democratic Party.”
In New Hampshire, where Biden and businessman Andrew Yang were at the statehouse on a frosty day, filing paperwork to be on the state’s primary ballot, voters mostly shrugged about Bloomberg, who on Friday filed paperwork to qualify for the Alabama primary. A few groused about a bloated field getting bigger.
Carolyn Stiles, 75, said she worried that such a large field would make it difficult for Democrats to unify behind one candidate, and described Bloomberg’s potential entrance into the race as “unhelpful.” She said she was considering Biden, Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris.
To some center-left Democratic candidates in the race, though, a Bloomberg bid could prove more than unhelpful. Were he to finance a major advertising campaign, he could siphon support, news media attention and ultimately votes from the more moderate candidates, clearing a path for Sanders and Warren.
“I don’t know who he hurts, but it’s not going to be Bernie or Elizabeth,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is hoping to establish herself in Iowa as a centrist alternative to Biden. “We don’t need another billionaire,” she added.
Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, was even blunter.
“It takes a whole lot of moxie to look at the Democratic field and say, ‘None of them can be president and I’ll enter the race and be the savior,’” Richmond said. “What does Bloomberg offer that’s different? It’s not like he’s 27 — he’s 77.”
Bloomberg may not prove to be the tonic the party is looking for. His record on policing and economic issues, and his skepticism about the #MeToo movement, could alienate large swaths of the Democratic electorate. And he is choosing an unconventional path in the primary; his advisers signaled Friday that if he runs, he’s unlikely to compete in the first four states.
But it is clear enough why he is tempted to run.
Biden’s unsteady performances in debates and on the campaign trail have undermined confidence in his ability to beat the president. They have hurt Biden’s fundraising and early-state polling while exacerbating what may be his biggest liability — that at 76, he may not be nimble enough to beat an unpredictable figure like Trump. Buttigieg is gaining support in Iowa, but polls show he has yet to draw any sizable support from nonwhite Democrats.
On the other flank of the party, Democrats are eyeing Sanders, a 78-year-old democratic socialist who just suffered a heart attack, and Warren, who is tightening her embrace around a pricey single-payer health care proposal that would terminate private insurance plans.
Both candidates have large and devoted followings, but Democrats have not put forward avowedly liberal presidential nominees in decades; a new New York Times/Siena College poll showing Warren and Sanders losing to Trump in some battleground states only further frayed nerves.
“That frightened a lot of people,” Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and DNC chair, said of the survey.
Then came Tuesday’s elections, in which Democrats had great success with mostly moderate candidates who posted large margins in suburban jurisdictions — heightening the conviction among many that the party needed a centrist standard-bearer.
Bloomberg’s prospective run has mostly agitated Biden’s supporters, who were already on edge over his fundraising troubles, his dip in the polls in Iowa and Trump’s unrelenting assault on him and his son Hunter. “I don’t like that,” Marge Cudney, who came to celebrate Biden’s filing for the New Hampshire primary, said of Bloomberg. “He’s going to divide the team and will weaken everybody. I think he could pull some people away.”
Yet two former lawmakers who are supporting Biden — Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Bob Kerrey, a former senator and governor of Nebraska — spoke favorably about Bloomberg and said they would be comfortable with him as a candidate if Biden faltered.
“I’m for Joe,” Rendell said, “but if something were to happen where Joe was no longer a candidate, which I don’t believe is going to happen, I would enthusiastically consider the mayor as a good strong candidate, and I think he’d make a fine president.”
And not every voter dismissed Bloomberg, whose advisers believe will be viewed more favorably once Democrats nationally become more familiar with his business career and record as mayor.
Bryant Tolles, 80, of Concord, New Hampshire, gave Bloomberg high marks for his political experience. “I’m glad he entered the race,” said Tolles, who is undecided, adding, “They need another centrist who can appeal to the broad electorate.”
For all the heartburn in a party that is often given to indigestion about its presidential field, polls show that Democrats are generally pleased with their options. In a Monmouth University poll released this past week, roughly three-quarters of Democratic voters said they were satisfied with the field, while just 16 percent said they were not.
Moderate and conservative Democrats were more likely to say they wished someone new would get in the race, but only 22 percent of them expressed discontent with their choices.
What is more revealing is how many in the party are not yet settled on a candidate: The Times/Siena poll of Iowa, where voters are paying closest attention to the race, found that roughly two-thirds of likely caucusgoers could still be persuaded to change their minds.The ranks of the undecided include Alan Seabrooke, 89, of Elgin, Iowa, who said, “If you get somebody too far to the left, it scares people.”
Alex Stroda, a 40-year-old from Ottumwa, Iowa, who called himself a “leftist libertarian,” was just as concerned about 2020 but for the opposite reason: He thinks too many of the candidates are not progressive enough.
Stroda, a former vice chair of the Wapello County Democrats, who is considering Sanders, Warren and Yang, dismissed the logic behind a Bloomberg candidacy.
“This notion that he needs to ride in on a white horse and save the Democratic Party from somebody who is too left-wing,” he said, “is just an extension of the problem we have understanding politics in America, where we have the Democrats tacking to the right as the Republicans tack farther and farther right.”
2019 The New York Times Company
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump criticized Fox News again Sunday in the latest hint that he is souring on what has been his favorite and most faithful news outlet.
As part of a flurry of afternoon tweets, Trump took the conservative network to task for interviewing Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
"Hard to believe that @FoxNews is wasting airtime on Mayor Pete, as Chris Wallace likes to call him. Fox is moving more and more to the losing (wrong) side in covering the Dems," Trump wrote, alluding to the Fox interviewer.
Trump added: "Chris Wallace said, 'I actually think, whether you like his opinions or not, that Mayor Pete has a lot of substance...fascinating biography.' Gee, he never speaks well of me."
Trump again mocked Buttigieg, referring to him as Alfred E. Neuman, the goofy, gap-toothed cover boy with protruding ears of US humor magazine Mad.
"Alfred E. Newman will never be president," Trump wrote, using a more anglicized spelling of the name.
Sunday's comments were Trump's most forceful of late against Fox, until now the president's preferred US news outlet and the one that most often gets to interview him.
Another Trump interview was scheduled on the network for late Sunday.
Trump has been critical of Fox's coverage of candidates in the crowded race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 election that will pit one of them against Trump.
Last month, Trump took a swipe at Fox after it hosted a town hall meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermonth.
"So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @Fox News," Trump tweeted.
Trump said the audience "was so smiley and nice. Very strange," and alleged that it had been packed with Sanders supporters.
The president's ties with the most Trump-friendly US television network have hit a rough patch since the departure from his administration of two former big names at Fox.
These are Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who served for nine months as White House communications director -- Trump's fifth -- and former Fox news anchor Heather Nauert, who was spokeswoman at the State Department.
Nauert had been promoted to a senior State post and then considered for a while as a potential candidate to replace Nikki Haley as US ambassador to the United Nations.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
SOUTH BEND - Pete Buttigieg, the gay, liberal mayor of a small American city in the conservative bastion of Indiana, officially launched his presidential bid Sunday, joining a crowded field of Democrats vying for their party's nomination in 2020.
The 37-year-old Rhodes scholar and Afghanistan war veteran is the two-term mayor of his hometown of South Bend -- a left-leaning bubble in America's so-called "Rust Belt" region, where the decline of industries such as steel and automobile manufacturing has hurt local economies.
Voters in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin helped hand Republican US President Donald Trump his victory in the 2016 election.
Buttigieg, who is credited with helping turn South Bend around, has couched himself as a can-do reformer who can speak to voters across the political spectrum. The message has helped catapult him from relative obscurity to becoming one of the leading Democrats in the crowded presidential race.
"My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me 'Mayor Pete.' I'm a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for president of the United States!" he told a jubilant crowd of supporters at a former assembly plant turned high-tech hub in South Bend.
"That's why I am here, to tell a different story than 'Make America Great Again'" he added, referring to Trump's campaign slogan. "This time it's not just about winning an election. It's about winning an era."
The official launch -- in which Buttigieg touched upon a number of liberal talking points such as racial justice, voting rights and health care reform, as well as his faith and marriage to Chasten Buttigieg -- is expected to give his surprisingly strong campaign an additional boost.
Campaign staffers said they have been caught by surprise by the speed with which the mayor has generated nationwide political support, and are still staffing up the campaign. Buttigieg had no speech writer to help him prepare his remarks.
'NEW GENERATION'
So many people showed up for the launch event that a large crowd was left outside in the rain to watch on a large video screen. Buttigieg braved the elements and thanked the crowd moments before making his official announcement indoors.
"He represents a new generation of Democratic leadership. We love his vision," said Jenn Watts, 35, while her three-year-old daughter sat on her shoulders.
They were in the cavernous event space in the former plant of defunct automaker Studebaker waiting more than two hours to see Buttigieg speak.
"As a young mom with a young daughter, he represents what I want my daughter to see in leadership in this country," Watts added.
In the three months since he declared an exploratory committee to test a presidential run, Buttigieg has raised $7 million, more than most other candidates, and jumped to third place in the latest polls of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire -- the earliest states to vote in next year's primary elections.
The popular mayor who speaks eight languages and plays classical piano has been the focus of countless news stories and profiles.
The fascination has been in no small part due to his background: he would be the youngest, first openly gay, first millennial and first mayor to become president.
But Buttigieg must still overcome the perception that his youth and thin resume as mayor of a town of just 100,000 leaves him lacking the experience necessary for the presidency.
"I recognize the audacity of doing this as a Midwestern millennial mayor," Buttigieg said. "But the moment we live in compels us to act."
Drew Corbin, a 24-year-old college student clutching four campaign T-shirts he had purchased for friends and wearing a campaign cap, said he still had not fully committed to the candidate.
"There's a lot of candidates. I don't want to make up my mind so soon, almost a year before the primaries," Corbin said. "But he's definitely my favorite right now."
'DESTINED FOR NATIONAL POLITICS'
Buttigieg's launch at Studebaker called to mind the plant's closure in 1963 that was still reverberating in the city in 2011 when he was elected mayor.
He set out to tear down decaying, abandoned homes and restore the blighted Studebaker complex to make it suitable for new high-tech companies.
In an unlikely feat, the city has reversed decades of population decline and attracted new businesses and development, with the mayor's popularity growing in the process.
"His appeal, for many people in South Bend, is his ability to look forward and to focus on better days ahead," South Bend-based political science professor Elizabeth Bennion of Indiana University told AFP.
"Once people looked at his resume and heard him speak, many started talking about the fact that he was destined for national politics."
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON -- Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay mayor who is running for US president, said Sunday he believes America will judge him based on the quality of his ideas and experience.
Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, launched his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in January.
If elected -- which for now seems unlikely -- Buttigieg, a former naval intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, would become the first openly homosexual president of the United States.
He is among a crush of Democrats vying to unseat Republican Donald Trump next year. Other declared Democrats include Trump nemesis Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, a California senator who aspires to be the nation's first black female president.
But are Americans ready for a president who is openly gay and in a same-sex marriage? The question was put to him in an interview on ABC's "This Week."
"I think there's only one way to find out," said the mayor of the city whose population is about 100,000.
Buttigieg, 37, recalled that he came out as gay in 2015 in the middle of a re-election campaign.
South Bend is a conservative community and at the time Mike Pence was governor of the state, Buttigieg said, recalling that he still got re-elected with "80 percent of the vote."
"So, I think the lesson we learned is that people are prepared to get to know you and judge you based on the quality of your ideas and your experience and your work. And I trust that America could do that too."
Buttigieg, who has been South Bend's mayor since 2012, married junior high school teacher Chasten Glezman last year.
Same-sex marriages have been legal throughout the United States since a 2015 Supreme Court decision.
In last November's mid-term elections, Jared Polis became the first openly gay governor in US history when he was elected in Colorado, after serving in Congress.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
CHICAGO - Democratic mayor and military veteran Pete Buttigieg announced Wednesday that he is entering the 2020 presidential fray, aiming to become America's youngest and first openly gay commander-in-chief.
Buttigieg said he had formed a presidential exploratory committee, a key opening step to formally launching what would be a longshot campaign to catapult from local politics onto the national stage.
Little known outside of South Bend, Indiana, where he is the two-term mayor, Buttigieg even includes a guide to pronouncing his name on his Twitter account -- it's "BOOT-edge-edge."
The 37-year-old Democrat, Rhodes Scholar, and Afghanistan war veteran, who married his husband last year, announced his intentions while emphasizing his millennial pedigree and track record in improving the economy in his "Rust Belt" city.
Areas of the Midwest that have struggled for years amid a decline in manufacturing jobs were vital to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory.
"I am obviously not stepping onto this stage as the most famous person in this conversation," Buttigieg told reporters at a news conference.
"But, I belong to a party whose characteristic has always been to look for fresh voices, new leadership, and big ideas. And, I think that's what 2020 is going to be about."
'LONGEST OF LONGSHOTS'
The young mayor faces substantial odds from a growing list of charismatic Democrats seeking to carry their party's torch into 2020, including three female US senators -- Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand -- and Hispanic-American former Obama cabinet member Julian Castro.
In a campaign-style video posted online, Buttigieg portrayed himself as a can-do reformer who revived his mid-sized city after decades of population flight and economic decline brought on by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
He makes no mention of Trump, instead taking aim at what he called the "show" in Washington: "The corruption, the fighting, the lying, the crisis. It's got to end."
"We're the generation that lived through school shootings, that served in the wars after 9/11. And we're the generation that stands to be the first to make less than our parents -- unless we do something different," he said.
Buttigieg was born and raised in South Bend, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a degree in history from Harvard University.
He has been mentioned as a potential presidential hopeful for years and was in the early primary state of Iowa last year, testing out a campaign message and attempting to build name recognition.
"Longest of longshots, but this 37-year-old gay, Afghanistan War vet has a remarkable story," David Axelrod, who was a senior aide to former president Barack Obama, said on Twitter.
The Democratic field of contenders is expected to broaden in the coming months to likely include former vice president Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker, former congressman Beto O'Rourke, and Senator Bernie Sanders, the runner-up for the 2016 Democratic nomination.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
