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Kamala Harris's plan to crush 2020 rivals on her home turf

WASHINGTON — As she moves swiftly to build a juggernaut in her home state, California Sen. Kamala Harris is revealing what looks like an audacious strategy for delivering a mortal blow to her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination next March.

It relies on her geographical edge at home, her perceived demographic advantage in the South and a primary calendar that brings them together on March 3 — known as "Super Tuesday" because it is the date on which the most delegates to the party's convention are in play in primaries across the country.

California voters alone will send more than 400 delegates to the convention, nearly double second-ranking Texas, and Harris, who is one of two African-American candidates in the race, is likely to have a shot at consolidating the black electorates in Southern states voting on Super Tuesday, including Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.

In 2008 and 2016, respectively, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fueled their nominations with massive delegate hauls in heavily African-American Southern states where black voters formed a bloc behind the winning candidate. Harris would like to repeat those feats — a bigger challenge, for sure, in a multi-candidate race that also features Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who is black.

But for Harris, the real key is to make California — where it is notoriously expensive and difficult to organize statewide campaigns — a maelstrom of wasted time and money for everyone else. And while she's been making the rounds of early states with the other Democrats, her campaign has begun the work of standing up an operation back home.

"You need a long runway to build and run here," said Buffy Wicks, a state House member who ran Obama and Clinton's winning primary campaigns in California. Wicks is something of a secret weapon for Harris: an elected official who has endorsed the senator but also brings to the campaign unrivaled experience in winning contested presidential primaries in the state.


https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/kamala-harris-s-plan-crush-2020-rivals-her-home-turf-n974051?cid=public-rss_20190224

Jonathan Chait: Sanders campaign about to repeat Hillary's 2016 mistake?

During the waning weeks of the 2008 Democratic primary, a time when the front-runner is usually coasting on the momentum of victory, something unusual happened. White working-class voters instead flocked to Hillary Clinton, the doomed runner-up. Clinton won the Ohio primary by 10 points, Kentucky by 35, West Virginia by 40.

And while Obama’s eventual triumph in November soothed the party’s frayed nerves, the panic returned during eight years (and especially two midterm setbacks) when the Democratic base seemed to be shrinking to what a Clinton adviser had prophetically dismissed as “eggheads and African-Americans.” In Obama’s vanquished foe, who saw her popularity soar into the 70s, they saw the remedy.

“Where I think Secretary Clinton has more appeal than any other Democrat looking at running is that with white working-class voters, she does have a connection,” a Clinton adviser told Talking Points Memo. William Winter, the former Democratic governor of Mississippi, told CNN. “Bill and Hillary Clinton are part of the South. They understand the South and they understand the use of political strategies that will bring people in. They are moderate people, and most people in the South are moderate.”

Needless to say, it did not work out this way. And now the hopes for the party’s white working-class revival have settled on the candidate Clinton herself vanquished: Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders campaign has circulated a strategy memo proclaiming their candidate would compete with Trump not only in Michigan and Ohio but even in states like West Virginia, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana. Sanders “is popular with traditional, working-class, industrial workers in those places,” asserts his adviser, Jeff Weaver. “Bernie Sanders,” raves Bhaskar Sunkara, “is the only one capable of reaching millions of working Americans with the message that politics can indeed improve their lives.”

Their evidence is the persistent support Sanders amassed during his struggle against Clinton. But there is something eerily familiar about the pattern of Sanders’s support in 2016. Nate Silver, diving into the numbers, finds that about a quarter of Sanders voters were what he calls “Never Hillary” voters. They leaned conservative, and many of them voted for Donald Trump in the general election.


http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/bernie-sanders-myth-white-working-class.html

Arizona lawmakers move forward on vaccine exemptions for kids

Disregarding warnings by public health officials, an Arizona legislative panel on Thursday endorsed three bills that critics say will erode immunization coverage among Arizona schoolchildren.

The House Health and Human Services Committee approved all three bills in contentious 5-4 votes that were split along party lines, with Republicans favoring the measures and Democrats voting in opposition.

Several critics pointed out measles outbreaks across the country and said the three bills could make Arizona more vulnerable.

One local doctor said the panel was sending a message of vaccine skepticism even though the science says vaccines are far safer than the diseases they prevent.

"Do we want the next outbreak news story to be in Arizona?" Dr. Steven R. Brown, a family physician in central Phoenix, asked the committee. "As a family physician who cares for the health of our citizens and especially our children, I am disheartened and frightened that this is up for debate. ... Nobody is here to tell the stories of people who are alive and not disabled by vaccine-preventable illness."

Two other bills endorsed by the committee Thursday would create more work for physicians. House Bill 2472 requires doctors to offer parents an "antibody titer" blood test to determine whether their child needs a vaccine or is already immune. House Bill 2471 is an informed-consent bill that would give parents information about vaccine ingredients and vaccine risks, including how to file a complaint for vaccine injury.



https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/2019/02/22/disregarding-warnings-arizona-lawmakers-move-forward-vaccine-exemptions/2942680002/

Here's What Beto Could Unleash on Trump

The imperative was always to optimize the campaign for scale rather than precision. By the start of summer, the field team engineered a major shift, freeing organizers from a geographical base and having them share recruitment duties for block walks and phone banks held across the state, in the spirit of the distributed-organizing tactics pioneered by Sanders. Their tool was the Beto Dialer, a phone system developed by the firm Relay that queued up respondents to minimize the seconds that a caller spent waiting for a live voice to answer. It could make more efficient use of staff time, but at the cost of making accountability diffuse: No longer could responsibility for a poorly attended event be squarely placed on the nearest organizer. And for some organizers, it was a jarring adjustment to be calling a stranger in Lubbock one moment and another in San Marcos the next, all while a volunteer in Texarkana recruits people to attend a block walk near your office.

As it grew, the Beto for Senate field program regularly turned to methods that most campaign tacticians would find aimless. There was no mechanism for routing volunteers to unvisited areas, so volunteers were likely walking the same blocks over and over again. The field team rejected, too, advances in data analytics that modern campaigns typically embrace to narrow the range of voters with whom they interact, and perhaps tailor their communications to different groups. When the campaign did finally hire a firm to work on data projects, it selected TargetSmart, which serves primarily as a wholesale provider of voter data rather than a consultancy working on bespoke projects for clients. Casey, the campaign manager, was so sensitive to the idea that she might be paying for something that would violate O’Rourke’s vow not to hire a pollster that TargetSmart began referring to the survey calls necessary for any micro-targeting project as “model training data collection.”

Up until August, the campaign’s objective was to contact all but the most reliably Republican voters in the state, see if they supported Beto, and then cultivate them as prospective volunteers. Hard-core Republicans were excluded only to save existing supporters from potentially unpleasant interactions. “Literally, it could be such a bad experience,” said Malitz. Only then did the campaign narrow its range of potential targets to Texans identified as likely to support O’Rourke.

At the outset, Wysong planned around a modest statewide budget—“It felt like if we could get to $20 million, we could probably hang,” he said—that would require the field operation to be both very fast and very cheap. But O’Rourke’s dynamic digital presence turned out to be ideal for bringing in money. National party committees were still writing him off as too much of a long shot to fund, but small-dollar donors took to O’Rourke’s candidacy, especially as he associated himself with positions—Trump’s impeachment, abolishing ICE, likening the criminal-justice system to Jim Crow—that few other Democratic Senate contenders were willing to touch.



https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/22/beto-orourke-campaign-strategy-2020-225193

FLIPPABLE: Jeremy LaCombe for LA-HD18 (March 30, 2019)

Jeremy LaCombe was born and raised in Fordoche, Louisiana. He was the second child of a construction worker and a homemaker who taught him the core values of family, faith, hard work and service to others. These values serve as the bedrock of his life and career as an attorney, philanthropist, and community volunteer. Its also the same values that he and his wife teach by example to their own two children every day.

During high school, Jeremy excelled in academics and participated in numerous extracurricular programs stressing leadership and team work. He represented Livonia High School at Louisiana Boys State, excelled on the Football & Baseball teams and was named U.S. Army Scholar Athlete. It was these early experiences that taught him how to be an effective leader, to work with others from diverse backgrounds to accomplish common goals and how to handle both failures and successes that come with daily life.

Jeremy then attended Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Jeremy reflects on the time spent in NSU as the most formative of his life. The personal connections and mutual friendships forged from his time in NSU and the lessons learned there served as the basis for any personal and professional success he has had since NSU. While in college, Jeremy was a founding member of the Mu Rho Chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity where he served as the President, was elected by a school wide vote to the Student Government Association where he served for two years, and he selected as a Freshman Connector assisting incoming freshman adapt to college life. He was named Greek Man of the Year, and was a finalist for Mr. NSU. During his time in college, Jeremy also was able to spend time working in the Louisiana House of Representatives, and in the United States Senate in Washington D. C. This work allowed him to get a behind the scenes look at how our state and federal government works for the benefit of all of our citizens, and again reinforced how to work with others from diverse backgrounds and political affiliations to accomplish goals for the greater good.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Jeremy spent two years traveling the country working as a Leadership Consultant for Sigma Nu Fraternity, Inc. Over the course of the next two years, Jeremy traveled to and trained students at 73 Universities from coast to coast on how to be ethical leaders in today’s society. He himself went through extensive training in the areas of leadership development and taught those same principals to college students across the country. His involvement with Sigma Nu continues today as Jeremy serves as a National officer on a volunteer capacity.

In the fall of 2000, Jeremy was accepted to the LSU school of Law in Baton Rouge. As he was preparing to enter law school, his family was shocked by the Cancer Diagnosis of his mother Janell LaCombe and his first cousin Chrystal. The two diagnosis shook the family to the core, but in true fashion the family and community rallied together to lend emotional and spiritual support to each other. Sadly, in June of 2001 Janell LaCombe lost her battle with cancer. From her passing, the LaCombe Family started the Janell Legier LaCombe Cancer Fund. This non-profit organization since 2001 has raised and donated over $500,000.00 to cancer patients and their families. The vast majority of the funds has benefited over 500 families in Pointe Coupee Parish alone, and has helped hundreds of cancer patients get access to medical treatments, supplies, and provide for their unmet medical needs. Further, they established a scholarship program to honor graduates of the all the Pointe Coupee Parish High Schools, and have awarded 146 scholarships to local students who were affected by cancer. They also hosted the largest one-day bone marrow registry drive in Louisiana History, by placing over 600 people on the lifesaving registry. As director, Jeremy has been instrumental in the growth of the foundation and its efforts to assist cancer patients in the local community.

As a husband, father, small business owner, Chamber of Commerce Board Member and director of a non-profit, Jeremy understands the challenges we face on a daily basis in District 18. He will take commonsense approaches to working with stakeholders across broad spectrums or political parties to give District 18 a strong voice in Baton Rouge. He will continue supporting our school systems, working to create jobs, improving our roads, fighting to solve our traffic woes and expanding economic opportunities on the West Side of the River to everyone.

Jeremy is married to Dr. Jessica Jarreau LaCombe, a local physician who shares his love of community and who works daily in providing medical services to those in need. Her medical practice centers around teaching medical students and residents while at the same time working to provide indigent care through the LSU Health System. Jeremy and Jessica have two children, and they work daily to instill their commitment to community and values in them.




https://jeremylacombe.com

Louisiana Democrats have a good night in special elections.

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UK Labour Party leads Tories WITHOUT Corbyn as leader, trail by 8% with him.

I hate the Iowa Caucus