PHOTO: J. Stephen Conn, Flickr CC
It’s Super Tuesday Eve, if that’s a thing, and I’m up with a new column in the Minnesota Reformer. Check it out.
Here’s a taste:
Minnesota won’t be the pivotal Super Tuesday race. The winning campaign here might not even survive the night. And, as I said, there’s no telling what voters will do at the last minute, or the effect of early voting that started before the first contest in Iowa.
So instead I’ll tell you my observations about the primary voters I’ve met. I’ve been around Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor politics for a couple decades. So “awhile” but not “Hubert Humphrey borrowed my chapstick” kind of time.
I’ve nevertheless noticed a trend. It started in 2008 when Barack Obama carried the state caucuses. It continued when Sanders swept the 2016 caucuses. But this year this phenomenon seems omnipresent. Voters aren’t voters anymore; they’re pundits. Voters go into the booth with their heads full of polling data, hypothetical outcomes and assumptions about what everyone else might do.
Why wouldn’t they? That’s what cable and internet news sources feed us.
But I think the effect is pronounced this year because the most unifying desire by Democrats is to defeat President Trump next November.
…
The problem with this is that there is no cohesive policy platform or ethos that goes with this kind of thinking. Nor is it organized.
Read the whole thing at the Minnesota Reformer.
Thanks. Why you are the writer is nicely revealed with this timely line in speaking of the orange pus sac….”… Moreover, he seems to have done these things as an involuntary reflex. He functions much like a virus that feeds on grievance and foments social division…” I am not the writer so excuse my possible hyperbole but he seems to come from a “corner of humanity” that might give contaminated blankets to the already sick.