From Mark Barabak, "It’s the electoral college, stupid. And the Supreme Court. And the filibuster ...":
How do you stand out in a crowd of nearly 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls? Talk about something different.https://t.co/ynCAtYsybh— Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) April 15, 2019
In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House focused on a message so elegantly simple the slogan became campaign legend: It’s the economy, stupid.
In this presidential race, it’s a lot of things.
Abolishing the electoral college. Ending the Senate filibuster. Refashioning the Supreme Court. Paying reparations for slavery.
A whole raft of issues that were little noted, if not wholly overlooked, in previous presidential campaigns have assumed a significant role in this early phase of the Democratic nominating contest, reflecting the party’s leftward shift, the power of social media and, perhaps above all, a field of contenders the size of a small platoon.
“The pressure on all the candidates to figure out how to differentiate themselves from the other candidates is intense,” said Anna Greenberg, a pollster working for former Colorado governor and presidential hopeful John Hickenlooper, one of more than 20 Democrats running or deciding whether to do so.
Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., launched his upstart campaign with a push to eliminate the electoral college and was one of the first to propose expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices. He suggests five members appointed by a Democratic president, five by a Republican president and the remainder coming from the appellate bench, subject to unanimous consent from the 10 other justices.
Other Democratic hopefuls, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, have said they are open to both ideas.
“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is … get rid of the electoral college,” Warren said, amplifying the issue by pitching it during a recent CNN town hall.
Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have discussed the issue of reparations, which has largely been consigned to academic and theoretical debate, in the context of their broader proposals to help the poor. Several rival candidates, including Buttigieg, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, have said they too support ways of compensating victims of systemic racism.
“It doesn’t have to be a direct pay for each person, but what we can do is invest in those communities, acknowledge what’s happened,” Klobuchar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
To a great extent, the Democratic candidates are moving in the direction of left-leaning voters and activists, who have the power on social media to organize around issues and elevate concerns, rather than what has typically been the other way around.
Healthcare, education and the economy are still matters of great interest and routinely come up wherever White House contestants appear. But underlying those issues is a broader frustration — particularly among those on the left — with the political system and its institutions, which, in their view, have thwarted the political will of most Americans.
The Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in all but one of the last seven presidential elections, yet twice in the last two decades it was a Republican — George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 — who claimed the White House by receiving the most electoral college votes.
In the Senate, Republicans refused to even consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, waiting out the 2016 election in hopes of filling a vacant seat, and have wielded the filibuster in such a way it now requires a super-majority to pass any significant legislation.
The Supreme Court, meantime, has moved decidedly rightward under President Trump, who benefited from the Senate’s delaying tactics and filled two vacancies...
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