On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a report that Barack Obama fears a Bernie Sanders presidency, and that some people who voted Democrat in the last two elections may now vote Republican. Video and partial transcript below:
The Democrats are beginning to realize that they have swung too far to the left. Barack Obama, of all people, is telling Democrats that they’ve swung too far to the left. Politico had an article yesterday in which Barack Obama’s aides were quoted as saying that Obama might have stepped in the middle of this presidential race to stop Bernie Sanders if he thought Sanders was going to be the nominee.
According to Ryan Lizza, his report over at Politico, back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him. One adviser told Lizza he “can’t really confirm that,” [and] “he hasn’t said that directly to me,” said the adviser. “The only reason I’m hesitating at all is because, yeah, if Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we’d all have to say something, but I don’t think that’s likely. It’s not happening.”
The Democrats [are] beginning to realize that the full-scale embrace of “Medicare-for-All” democratic socialism is not going to be a successful strategy. This is particularly true in the swing states.
[There’s also a] really interesting article by Nate Cohn and Claire Miller over at The New York Times today called “They voted Democratic. Now they support Trump,” talking about how in 2018, a bunch of people who’d supported Trump in 2016 voted for the Democrats, and now they’re swinging back to Trump for 2020.
According to The New York Times:
Success in the midterms might not mean as much for Democratic presidential candidates as the party might think. Nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for Trump in 2016 — but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 — say they intend to back the president against each of his top rivals, according to recent polling by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College.
The results suggest that the party’s winning formula in last year’s midterm elections may not be so easy to replicate in a presidential election. The Democrats’ relatively moderate House candidates succeeded in large part by flipping a crucial segment of voters who backed the president in 2016. If those voters remain open minded again in 2020, Democrats will have a ready-made blueprint for winning back the crucial Rust Belt battleground.
This group is only a sliver of the electorate — 2% of registered voters — and is not representative of all voters. They are overwhelmingly white, 60% are male, and two-thirds have no college degree. But the president’s strength among them helps explain why he is highly competitive in states the Democrats carried just one year ago.
Many of the voters who said they voted Democratic but now intended to vote for Mr. Trump offered explanations that reflect long standing theories about why the party out of power tends to excel in midterms.
So, for example, some of these Democrats — people who voted Democrat in 2018 — suggested that congressional Democrats had pledged to bring jobs back. Some of them had sought to balance out Trump by splitting the ticket — they’re voting Democrat for Congress, but Republican for the presidency. And, it turns out, a lot of these people just believe that the Democrats have lost touch with the generic swing state voter.
Some voters say they’re preparing to take the leap to vote for Trump after supporting both Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the survey from The New York Times, “7% of people who supported Mrs. Clinton in 2016 said they now approved of the president’s performance — despite his personality and his Twitter account, many said.”
Juli Anna California, 57, a nurse from Coral Springs, Florida, said “In 2016, I hated both candidates” [and] “I went with Hillary because Trump had no history as a politician.” “He’s not exactly the person I’d have as my best friend,” [she said of Trump], “but he’s a great president. Most politicians just talk about doing things, but Trump does them.”
People on the Democratic side also liked Trump’s talk about the unions and trade, so in other words, Trump is running pretty durable in the swing states that he actually needs to win, which is pretty fascinating.
One of the reasons why you’re seeing Democrats embracing, at an electoral level, Biden and Buttigieg — the support level for those two candidates is far greater than the support level for Warren and Sanders in the latest polling data, which means that the left wing of the party is actually losing. Again. There’s a reason for that, because the fact is Democrats understand that if Trump runs against the radical left of the party, he’s likely to win.
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