[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2020-February-13, 14:00, said:

I think you have the wrong movie. We're living Godfather II except in this one Michael was killed in WWII and Fredo is head of the family.

Zel made a similar point a few posts back and I understand. At the risk of looking silly arguing about Waterfront versus Godfather, I will say a bit.

In Waterfront, we hope for better from union members. We do not hope for better from Mafia members.

So yes, my choice for movie analogy goes with the fact that I expect better from Republicans than what I am seeing.. From some of them, not from all of them.

Naivety can be a lazy way of thinking. So can cynicism..

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2020-February-13, 15:47, said:

Zel made a similar point a few posts back and I understand. At the risk of looking silly arguing about Waterfront versus Godfather, I will say a bit.

In Waterfront, we hope for better from union members. We do not hope for better from Mafia members.

So yes, my choice for movie analogy goes with the fact that I expect better from Republicans than what I am seeing.. From some of them, not from all of them.

Naivety can be a lazy way of thinking. So can cynicism..

I no longer consider it cynicism but pragmatism. There may be individual Republicans who are reasonable, but the party is not. It is the party of Trump. They are complicit and just as guilty of all the crimes Trump is committing. We are pretty much screwed as a nation unless our acceptance of complete corruption as normal spoils of political victory is totally and thoroughly repudiated at the ballot box. Republics don't last. This one is teetering.

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2020-February-13, 16:38, said:

I no longer consider it cynicism but pragmatism. There may be individual Republicans who are reasonable, but the party is not. It is the party of Trump. They are complicit and just as guilty of all the crimes Trump is committing. We are pretty much screwed as a nation unless our acceptance of complete corruption as normal spoils of political victory is totally and thoroughly repudiated at the ballot box. Republics don't last. This one is teetering.

I understand. I do not totally disagree, I think we are in a mess. But your approach is more pessimistic than a am prepared to go for, at least for now. I hope we can get out of the mess we are in, and we will need the help of many to do that. Many.

[y66]

kenberg, on 2020-February-13, 15:47, said:

In Waterfront, we hope for better from union members. We do not hope for better from Mafia members.

So yes, my choice for movie analogy goes with the fact that I expect better from Republicans than what I am seeing.. From some of them, not from all of them.

In "The Celebration", the father is a Trump-like figure, the sons are Dems coming to terms with his appalling behavior, the mother is a stand-in for the Senate, and the guests are died-in-the-wool Republicans. By the end, which is similar to the ending of "On the Waterfront", I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. Here's hoping the real life movie ends similarly.

[y66]

From William Barr's master class in Trumpspeak:

Quote

I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases. Such statements about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending here, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.

[Winstonm]

The latest from Bill Barr's Department of Sycophancy is that he ordered 2 weeks ago an investigation into the Michael Flynn case as well as yesterday interfering with the Stone sentencing recommendation:

https://www.nbcnews....guilty-n1136481

Quote

Attorney General William Barr asked the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Jeffrey Jensen, to look into Flynn's FBI interview, the people familiar with the inquiry said. The inquiry began within the past month, they said.

Around that same time, federal prosecutors on the Flynn case came under pressure from senior Justice Department officials to recommend a lighter sentence for him than they had proposed, according to people familiar with the matter.

A third person familiar with the inquiry said Jensen is broadly reviewing the Flynn case.

We have gone full Banana Republic now with enemies prosecuted and friends exempt from lawful measures. Gratis, Republic party.

[Winstonm]

And now this:

Quote

Feb. 14, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. CST
Defense attorneys for Roger Stone demanded a new trial Friday, one day after President Trump suggested that the forewoman in his friend’s case had “significant bias.” The legal motion could delay Stone’s Feb. 20 sentencing date on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress

For anyone who doesn't understand what is going on, it is pretty straightforward. Roger Stone will get either a pardon or a commutation of his sentence from Trump, but to avoid bad PR they are trying to time it after the election. Any and all stalling tactics are helpful to this end. A new trial would be great for that scheme.

It is pretty much criminal-minded behavior to pay back those who didn't 'rat' out the chief.

[y66]

From Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? by Elizabeth Rosenthal at NYT.

Quote

Every politician condemns the phenomenon of “surprise” medical bills. This week, two committees in the House are marking up new surprise billing legislation. One of the few policy proposals President Trump brought up in this year’s State of the Union address was his 2019 executive order targeting them. In the Democratic debates, candidates have railed against such medical bills, and during commercial breaks, back-to-back ads from groups representing doctors and insurers proclaimed how much the health care sector also abhors this uniquely American form of patient extortion.

Patients, of course, hate surprise bills most of all. Typical scenarios: A patient having a heart attack is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and gets hit with a bill of over $100,000 because that hospital wasn’t in his insurance network. A patient selects an in-network provider for a minor procedure, like a colonoscopy, only to be billed thousands for the out-of-network anesthesiologist and pathologist who participated.

And yet, no one with authority in Washington has done much of anything about it.

Here’s why: Major sectors of the health industry have helped to invent this toxic phenomenon, and none of them want to solve it if it means their particular income stream takes a hit. And they have allies in the capital.

That explains why President Trump’s executive order, issued last year, hasn’t resulted in real change. Why bipartisan congressional legislation supported by both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health Committee to shield Americans from surprise medical bills has gone nowhere. And why surprise billing provisions were left out of the end-of-year spending bill in December, which did include major tax relief for many parts of the health care industry.

Surprise bills are just the latest weapons in a decades-long war between the players in the health care industry over who gets to keep the fortunes generated each year from patient illness — $3.6 trillion in 2018.

Here’s how they came to be:

Forty years ago, when many insurers were nonprofit entities and being a doctor wasn’t seen as a particularly good entree into the 1 percent, billed rates were far lower than they are today, and insurers mostly just paid them. Premiums were low or paid by an employer. Patients paid little or nothing in co-payments or deductibles.

That’s when a more entrepreneurial streak kicked in. Think about the opportunities: If someone is paying you whatever you ask, why not ask for more?

Commercial insurers as well as Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans, some of which had converted to for-profit status by 2000, began to push back on escalating fees from providers, demanding discounts.

Hospitals and doctors argued about who got to keep different streams of revenue they were paid. Doctors began to form their own companies and built their own outpatient surgery centers to capture payments for themselves.

So today your hospital and doctor and insurer — all claiming to coordinate care for your health — are often in a three-way competition for your money.

As the battle for revenue has heated up, each side has added new weapons to capture more: Hospitals added facility fees and infusion charges. Insurers levied ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. Most important they limited the networks of providers to those that would accept the rates they were willing to pay.

Surprise bills are the latest tactic: When providers decided that an insurer’s contracted payment offerings were too meager, they stopped participating in the insurer’s network; either they walked away or the insurer left them out. In some cases, physicians decided not to participate in any networks at all. That way, they could charge whatever they wanted when they got involved in patient care and bill the patient directly. For their part, insurers didn’t really care if those practitioners demanding more money left.

And, for a time, all sides were basically fine with this arrangement.

But as the scope and the scale of surprise bills has grown in the past five years, more people have experienced these costly, unpleasant surprises. With accumulating bad publicity, they have became impossible to ignore. It was hard to defend a patient stuck with over $500,000 in surprise bills for 14 weeks of dialysis. Or the $10,000 bill from the out-of-network pediatrician who tends to newborns in intensive care. How about the counties where no ambulance companies participate in insurance, so every ambulance ride costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars?

These practices are an obvious outrage. But no one in the health care sector wants to unilaterally make the type of big concessions that would change them. Insurers want to pay a fixed rate. Doctors and hospitals prefer what they call “baseball- style arbitration,” where a reasonable charge is determined by mediation. Both camps have lined up sympathetic politicians for their point of view.

So, nothing has changed at the federal level, even though it’s hard to imagine another issue for which there is such widespread consensus. Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about being able to afford an unexpected medical bill — more than any other household expense. Nearly eight in 10 Americans say they want federal legislation to protect patients against surprise bills.

States are passing their own surprise billing laws, though they lack power since much of insurance is regulated at a national level.

Now members of Congress have yet another chance to tackle this obvious injustice. Will they listen to hospitals, doctors, insurers? Or, in this election year, will they finally heed their voter-patients?

Good stuff but I wonder why Ms. Rosenthal thinks current members of Congress are not on the same gravy train, or looking to get on it, as the "entrepreneurs" who created this scam and the former members of Congress and former staffers who are now the lobbyists who are writing the legislation she hopes will end it.

[shyams]

shyams, on 2020-February-02, 14:03, said:

I think the current odds suggest that Trump is less likely to be beaten (as per betting odds, he has a 53% chance of winning).

Secondly, if Michael Bloomberg becomes a big player, he is more likely to steal Dem votes than Rep votes. i.e. the stronger he gets in the polls, the higher is the chance that Trump is re-elected.

The odds now indicate the probability to have risen to 59%

[Winstonm]

Re-produced from a comment at Emptywheel: my emphasis

Quote

From a 1937 article in the Modern Law Review on “Theories of Law and Justice in Fascist Italy”

From the same article:
“… the fascist hierarchical idea is really radically different. It is a hierarchy of persons, not a hierarchy of norms.”

And… “The law-making of even the reformed legislature is subordinated to the law-making power of Il Duce. His decrees tweets have the force of law…”

And … “The only difference, according to fascist thinkers, between a democratic legislature and the head of the fascist state, is in the weakness and incompetence of the former.”
https://onlinelibrar...xzE3O36GpENGgYM

FTP

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-February-14, 21:28, said:

From Who's Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? by Elizabeth Rosenthal at NYT.


Good stuff but I wonder why Ms. Rosenthal thinks current members of Congress are not on the same gravy train, or looking to get on it, as the "entrepreneurs" who created this scam and the former members of Congress and former staffers who are now the lobbyists who are writing the legislation she hopes will end it.

The finances of modern medical practice are completely wacky. The author speaks first of the surprise bills, obviously a problem, but later moves on the the more general problem. Part of her article:

Quote

Forty years ago, when many insurers were nonprofit entities and being a doctor wasn't seen as a particularly good entree into the 1 percent, billed rates were far lower than they are today, and insurers mostly just paid them. Premiums were low or paid by an employer. Patients paid little or nothing in co-payments or deductibles. That's when a more entrepreneurial streak kicked in. Think about the opportunities: If someone is paying you whatever you ask, why not ask for more?

Exactly. If someone else is paying, who has an interest in controlling the cost? Some time back I mentioned an early mild example. I had some sort of skin rash, I forget the details, I saw a doc, before prescribing a lotion he asked about my insurance. I have good insurance so he prescribed a lotion that cost $200 a tube. There would be a co-pay, but he gave me a coupon that provided a $40 refund that covers the co-pay. The result was that I paid nothing, the manufacturer got $160. Well, the cream worked so why would I complain? Maybe the stuff was worth $160, maybe it wasn't, but I wasn't paying it. maybe medicare paid it, maybe it was my supplemental insurance, I don't know, I didn't care, it wasn't me.

The article you cite links to another article,
https://thehill.com/...slation-despite

In there Rep. Shalala criticises the bill

Quote

Shalala called the bill "government rate-setting in the private sector," and a "ham-handed attempt to bend the cost curve."

Well, yes, it is government rate setting, or at least government interference in rates. But the problem is that as things are now, there is little reason for anyone to look at cost and say "Wait, is that reasonable?". I didn't care what the lotion cost, I wasn't paying for it. The ham-handed government wasn't interfering. So who, just who, looks at it at all?

My example was for $200, but of course that example gets repeated many times, but it also gets repeated at $2000 or $20,000 or higher, maybe much higher.

Medicare does set rates, at least on some things. But some people fall outside of any coverage,and I don't see how a person, even someone with a decent income, can pay for medical help. The costs are way out of control.

[y66]

From Ross Douthat at NYT:

Quote

For a long time the notion of a Michael Bloomberg presidential candidacy seemed like a Manhattan fancy, a conceit with elite appeal but no mass constituency, a fantasy for Acela riders who imagine that the American people are clamoring for a rich person’s idea of centrism.

This was especially true in the days when Bloomberg would advertise his interest in a third-party candidacy. Third parties are generally founded on ideas that elites are neglecting, like the combination of economic populism, social conservatism and America-first foreign policy that propelled Donald Trump to power. Whereas Bloombergism is elite thinking perfectly distilled: Social liberalism and technocracy, hawkish internationalism and business-friendly environmentalism, plus a dose of authoritarianism to make the streets safe for gentrification.

But with a populist in the White House, a socialist winning primaries, a Democratic electorate desperate for a winning candidate and an establishment desperate for a champion, Bloomberg has become a somewhat more plausible presidential candidate than I imagined even six months back. So it’s worth pondering exactly what his still-highly-unlikely, but not-entirely-unimaginable nomination might mean, and what he offers as an alternative to both his Democratic rivals and to Donald Trump.

Inside the Democratic Party, Bloomberg’s ascent would put a sharp brake on the two major post-Obama trends in liberalism: The Great Awokening on race and sex and culture, and the turn against technocracy in economic policymaking.

Yes, Bloomberg has adapted his policy views to better fit the current liberal consensus, and his views on social issues were liberal to begin with. But he has the record of a deficit and foreign policy hawk, the soul of a Wall Street centrist, and a history of racial and religious profiling and sexist misbehavior. More than any other contender, his nomination would pull the party back toward where it stood before the rise of Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and root liberalism once more in professional-class interests and a Washington-Wall Street mindmeld.

These are good reasons to assume that he cannot be the nominee, and excellent reasons for social progressives and socialists alike to want to beat him. The only way they will fail is if Bloomberg succeeds in casting himself as the unusual answer to an unusual incumbent — combining the Democratic fear of a Trump second term, his own reputation for effective management and the promise of spending his fortune to crush Trump into a more compelling electability pitch than the race’s other moderates.

But Democrats considering this sales pitch should be very clear on what a Bloomberg presidency would mean. Bloomberg does not have Trump’s flagrant vices (though some of his alleged behavior with women is pretty bad) or his bald disdain for norms and rules and legal niceties, and so a Bloomberg presidency will feel less institutionally threatening, less constitutionally perilous, than the ongoing wildness of the Trump era — in addition to delivering at least some of the policy changes that liberals and Democrats desire.

However, feelings can be deceiving. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg’s imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties; Bloomberg ran New York as a miniature surveillance state. Trump has cowed the Republican Party with celebrity and bombast; Bloomberg has spent his political career buying organizations and politicians that might otherwise impede him. Trump blusters and bullies the press; Bloomberg literally owns a major media organization. Trump has Putin envy; Bloomberg hearts Xi Jinping.

He Was Fearless on a Football Field. But He Sensed Something Wasn’t Right.
In our era of congressional abdication, all presidents are prodded or tempted toward power grabs and caesarism. But Bloomberg’s career, no less than Trump’s, suggest that as president this would be less a temptation than a default approach. And the former mayor, unlike the former “Apprentice” star, is ferociously competent, with a worldview very much aligned with the great and good, from D.C. to Silicon Valley — which means that he would have much more room to behave abnormally without facing a Resistance movement of activists and journalists and judges.

To choose Bloomberg as the alternative to Trump, then, is to bet that a chaotic, corrupt populist is a graver danger to what remains of the Republic than a grimly-competent plutocrat with a history of executive overreach and strong natural support in all our major power centers.

That seems like a very unwise bet. Democrats who want to leverage Trump’s unpopularity to move the country leftward should support Bernie Sanders. Democrats who prefer a return-to-normalcy campaign should unite behind a normal politician like Amy Klobuchar. Those who choose Bloomberg should know what they’re inviting: An exchange of Trumpian black comedy for oligarchy’s velvet fist.

[y66]

From Neil Irwin at NYT/Upshot:

Quote

There was never much doubt that President Trump would make boasts about the economy central to his re-election campaign; that is his style, after all. What is becoming more clear is that the data on the economy are giving him something genuinely worth boasting about.

That was especially evident in the first employment numbers of 2020, released Friday morning. It was about as good a jobs report as an incumbent president could hope for nine months before Election Day — and not just in obvious ways.

The big headline out of the latest numbers was that employers added 225,000 jobs in January, comfortably more than analysts had expected. That alone suggests that economic growth is steady at a minimum, and maybe accelerating as the year begins.

The seemingly bad news in the report — the unemployment rate ticking up to 3.6 percent from 3.5 percent — was actually driven by positive underlying trends. The share of adults either working or looking for work rose to 63.4 percent, its highest level since mid-2013. And the share of adults between ages 25 and 54 who were employed reached 80.6 percent, its highest level since mid-2001.

For years, an open question was whether the many Americans who dropped out of the labor force in the aftermath of the Great Recession would ever come back in. The answer is a resounding yes.

Then there are wages, which have been the weak spot of the employment picture for years. They still are: Average hourly earnings are up only 3.1 percent over the past 12 months, below the rates being recorded for most of last year (the same measure rose 3.5 percent for the year ended in August).

But as much as workers might want to see a few extra tenths of a percent growth in their paycheck, the good news for the Trump administration is that this downshift in wage growth is an important reason the Federal Reserve looks unlikely to raise interest rates this year, and may even cut them.

In effect, if wage growth were sending signs of inflation pressure building in the economy, the Fed would be more inclined to try to prevent it, and in the process could cause a significant slowdown or even a recession. Weak and falling wage growth amounts to the Fed’s permission slip to try to keep the good times going.

Moreover, overall inflation has been low enough that even the soft 3.1 percent growth in average hourly earnings means pay is rising faster than prices for consumer goods — so it’s not as if workers are ending up worse off, on average.

Although most sectors of the economy are revving, creating jobs at a healthy pace, there is a notable exception. Manufacturers cut 12,000 jobs in January, the second straight month of decline.

This partly reflects the effects of the trade war, and may reflect ripple effects from Boeing’s shutdown of production of its troubled 737 Max plane. There’s no telling how the politics of the manufacturing slump may play out in key battleground states.

The good news for the Trump administration is that this opens the door for a rebound in the sector between now and Election Day. Already, the calming of trade tensions with China with a “Phase One” deal in January has settled financial markets. And a key survey of manufacturers suggests that the sector swung from contraction to expansion in January.

Presidents’ economic records are highly dependent on where the nation is in the economic cycle. They have less control of the economy than a lot of people think.

Tax and regulatory policies matter, certainly, as do appointments to the Fed. But exactly how much decisions in the Oval Office shape the course of a $20 trillion economy is more open to debate. What is more clear is that good economic conditions tend to favor incumbents — a persistent finding in political science, although recent research suggests there’s a smaller effect because of greater polarization.

There are no guarantees in life, and for all we know the economy could hit some slump over the coming months. Coronavirus could spread in a way that damages economies globally, trade wars could re-escalate, or some unforeseen catastrophe could emerge.

But the economy has excellent momentum, jobs are plentiful, and the Fed is unlikely to do anything that will change that in the months ahead.

There are plenty of structural problems in the United States economy, including inequality and a lack of mobility and opportunity for many people. But in cyclical terms, the economy is the strongest it has been in an election year (or really any year) since 2000.

And President Trump will surely not be shy about telling people that.

I am very happy to see the economy doing well. Dems have their work cut out for them.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-February-15, 23:06, said:

From Ross Douthat at NYT:

This is a very good assessment of the situation. I am not sure whether I do or do not agree with the conclusion. My thoughts, a variant of what is said:

Trump: I have always found him to be repulsive, I cannot imagine any self-respecting person working for him, I cannot understand why anyone would trust him at all. And that's just for starters.

Bloomberg: The lines above on Trump do not apply directly to Bloomberg, but yes, there is reason for caution. The article says "grimly-competent plutocrat". That's not quite a dis-qualification.

[y66]

From Katie Bennie who covers the DOJ for the NYT:

Quote

WASHINGTON — More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

They also urged current government employees to report any signs of unethical behavior at the Justice Department to the agency’s inspector general and to Congress.

“Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice,” the former Justice Department lawyers, who came from across the political spectrum, wrote in an open letter on Sunday. Those actions, they said, “require Mr. Barr to resign.”

The sharp denunciation of Mr. Barr underlined the extent of the fallout over the case of Mr. Stone, capping a week that strained the attorney general’s relationship with his rank and file, and with the president himself.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

After prosecutors on Monday recommended a prison sentence of up to nine years for Mr. Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a congressional inquiry, Mr. Trump lashed out at federal law enforcement. Senior officials at the department, including Mr. Barr, overrode the recommendation the next day with a more lenient one, immediately prompting accusations of political interference, and the four lawyers on the Stone case abruptly withdrew in protest.

The Justice Department said the case had not been discussed with anyone at the White House, but that Mr. Trump congratulated Mr. Barr on his decision did little to dispel the perception of political influence. And as the president widened his attacks on law enforcement, Mr. Barr publicly reproached the president, saying that Mr. Trump’s statements undermined him, as well the department.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” Mr. Barr said during a televised interview on Thursday with ABC News.

In the days after the interview, Mr. Trump has been relatively muted. He said on Twitter that he had not asked Mr. Barr to “do anything in a criminal case.” As president, he added, he had “the legal right to do so” but had “so far chosen not to!”

But lawyers across the Justice Department continue to worry about political interference from the president despite public pushback by Mr. Barr, long considered a close ally of Mr. Trump’s.

Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal group, gathered the signatures from Justice Department alumni and said it would collect more.

In May, Protect Democracy gathered signatures for a letter that said the Mueller report presented enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with obstruction of justice were that an option. At the close of his investigation, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III declined to indicate whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, citing a decades-old department opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. That letter was also critical of Mr. Barr.

Even as the lawyers condemned Mr. Barr on Sunday, they said they welcomed his rebuke of Mr. Trump and his assertions that law enforcement must be independent of politics.

But Mr. Barr’s “actions in doing the president’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they said.

The letter comes days after some Democratic senators pressed for Mr. Barr to resign, and after the New York City Bar Association said that it had formally reported the attorney general’s behavior to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Strikingly, the lawyers called upon current department employees to be on the lookout for future abuses and to be willing to bring oversight to the department.

“Be prepared to report future abuses to the inspector general, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress,” they wrote, and “to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office.”

Prosecutors who currently work at the department should withdraw from cases that involve abuses or political interference, the lawyers said.

As a last resort, they asked Justice Department employees “to resign and report publicly — in a manner consistent with professional ethics — to the American people the reasons for their resignation.”

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-February-16, 09:54, said:

From Katie Bennie who covers the DOJ for the NYT:

George Conway is right that there is no one left to stop Trump, which means the only question to answer at this point is: Which does Trump prefer, Der Fuhrer or Il Duce?

[cherdano]

If only those 1100 federal prosecutors had read this thread, they'd know that Bill Barr is a straight shooter, well-respected in the law establishment.

[johnu]

cherdano, on 2020-February-16, 17:50, said:

If only those 1100 federal prosecutors had read this thread, they'd know that Bill Barr is a straight shooter, well-respected in the law establishment.

The Manchurian President's government paid personal attorney is so good that he beat out Rudy for the position. I can't say more than that.

[helene_t]

Since Democratic voters seem to be very concerned about electability, I wonder if there has been much discussion about the various candidates' chances of winning again in 2024?

Bernie does it quite good in head-on-head polls vs Trump, but he will be very old in 2024, and besides, it is obvious that he has a lot of promises to backtrack on. Or am I seeing this wrongly?

[StevenG]

helene_t, on 2020-February-17, 04:31, said:

Since Democratic voters seem to be very concerned about electability, I wonder if there has been much discussion about the various candidates' chances of winning again in 2024?

The way things are going, Trump will win in 2020 and 2024.