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Post by Admin on Mar 3, 2020 5:25:12 GMT
Pete Buttigieg endorsed Joe Biden for president Monday night, telling a crowd in Dallas the former Vice President is the right candidate to "bring back dignity to the White House."
"When I ran for president we made it clear that the whole idea was about rallying the country together to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for the values that we share," Buttigieg said at a campaign stop.
"And that was always a goal that was much bigger than me becoming president and it is in the name of that very same goal that I am delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for President."
The endorsement is a boon for the former vice president, and comes at the same time that Amy Klobuchar is ending her campaign and backing Biden. The Minnesota senator will officially make her endorsement on Monday night in Dallas, too, a campaign aide told CNN.
The endorsements represent a coalescing of the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party around Biden and a rejection of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who -- after strong showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada -- represents the most significant challenge for Biden.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar ended her presidential bid on Monday and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for president.
"It is up to us, all of us, to put our country back together, to heal this country and then to build something even greater," Klobuchar said at a Biden campaign event in Dallas, Texas.
"I believe we can do this together, and that is why today I am ending my campaign and endorsing Joe Biden for president," the Minnesota senator said.
Klobuchar said, "(Biden) can bring our country together and build that coalition of our fired-up Democratic base, and it is fired up, as well as Independents and moderate Republicans, because we do not in our party want to just eek by a victory. We want to win big. And Joe Biden can do that."
The senator's endorsement comes on the eve of the critical Super Tuesday contests, and shortly after former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg endorsed Biden. Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke also endorsed Biden the same night.
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Post by Admin on Mar 4, 2020 18:29:03 GMT
WINNERS * Joe Biden: The turnaround in the former vice president's fortunes is absolutely remarkable. Prior to his victory in South Carolina on Saturday night, Biden had won a total of zero primaries and caucuses in his three runs for president. In the 96 hours between Saturday night and Tuesday night, he won 10! Biden's strongest pillar of support remained, as it was in South Carolina, African American voters, who propelled him to surprisingly easy wins in Virginia and North Carolina. But he also clearly benefited from the momentum handed to him by South Carolina -- as late deciders and those prizing a nominee who can beat President Donald Trump flocked to him in droves. The race isn't over yet, as Biden seems likely to now engage in an extended delegate fight with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. But the former VP is in a stronger position today than anyone -- including him! -- could have even imagined a few days ago. * Pete Buttigieg/Amy Klobuchar: It's very hard to quantify just how big a difference the decisions by the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Minnesota senator to a) drop out of the presidential race and b) endorse Biden, all within the space of about 24 hours on Sunday/Monday, made on the results on Super Tuesday. But it's also hard to see how Biden sweeps to such a convincing set of victories across the country if both Buttigieg and Klobuchar are still on the ballot and siphoning off pieces of the moderate/establishment/pragmatist vote. If Biden does wind up winning the nomination and then the White House in the fall, he'll look to the endorsements from Buttigieg and Klobuchar as a turning point -- and want to thank them accordingly. Hello, Cabinet! *Mo/Joe-mentum: Sanders, as well as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all spent more money, had larger organizations and spent more time in this slew of Super Tuesday states than Biden did. There were states where Biden barely set foot and simply didn't have enough money to have a large organization or even run TV ads. (Biden spent just over $2 million on TV ads in Super Tuesday states; Bloomberg spent $234 million.) And yet, Biden wound up drastically overperforming almost everywhere on Super Tuesday -- including in places like Massachusetts, where polling conducted before his South Carolina win showed him in single-digits! Biden's Super Tuesday rise is a testament to the power of momentum in campaigns -- especially in a race like this one where voters (or at least those not already aligned with Sanders) seemed to lack any clear sense of who they should be with through the first month of the race. * African American voters: If Biden winds up as the Democratic nominee, he owes a massive debt of gratitude to black voters, who stuck with him through the doldrums of February when he often looked like he was only a day or two from dropping out, and propelled him to the massive comeback that began in South Carolina on Saturday and continued in places likes Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina on Tuesday. In each of those states, Biden won a majority of the black vote -- and it carried him to decisive wins in states where other candidates (Bloomberg and Sanders, to name two) believed they had a path to victory. This isn't a new phenomenon. In the contested Democratic presidential races of 2008 and 2016, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton eventually emerged victorious because they were the preferred candidate of a majority of black Democrats. LOSERS * Michael Bloomberg: Bloomberg spent $234 million in the 14 Super Tuesday states. He doesn't appear likely to win a single one. And his victory in the territory of American Samoa was cold comfort when faced with that stark reality -- and Bloomberg announced his exit from the 2020 race the morning after his Super Tuesday performance. Bloomberg will have won some delegates out of Super Tuesday, yes, but there were a number of states where his team believed he could win -- Virginia and Arkansas being two -- where he got absolutely wiped out by Biden. "Here's what is clear: no matter how many delegates we win tonight, we have done something no one thought was possible," said Bloomberg in a speech early in the night. "In just three months, we've gone from 1% in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination for president." Eh ... remember that the entire premise of Bloomberg's candidacy was that Biden was too weak to win the primary. So now that Biden has ripped through the Super Tuesday map and effectively destroyed the "he can't win" narrative, Bloomberg decided to get out of the race and endorse Biden. * Bernie Sanders: First, the good: Sanders won in Vermont, Utah and Colorado and he's ahead comfortably right now in California with almost half of the votes counted. He seems likely to pick up delegates in virtually every state. Now for the bad news: The Sanders team has quite clearly hoped that Super Tuesday was the day on which he effectively seized the nomination, building a delegate lead substantial enough that no one could catch him -- whether or not he got to that magic number of 1,991 to clinch the nomination. While California is still counting votes, that now seems very unlikely to happen. Losses to Biden in places like Texas, Minnesota and Massachusetts, which all seemed like certain wins just days ago, are body blows. And now, Sanders finds himself in a protracted delegate knife-fight with Biden. Which he could win! But is a very different path than Sanders was hoping to travel over these next few months. * Elizabeth Warren: Not only did Warren finish third -- behind Biden and Sanders -- in her home state of Massachusetts, but she drastically underperformed the expectations her campaigns set for her in a memo on Super Tuesday released last month. "Warren is poised to finish in the top two in over half of Super Tuesday states (eight of 14), in the top three in all of them, and is on pace to pick up at-large statewide delegates in all but one," wrote campaign manager Roger Lau in the memo, which was posted on Medium. Warren didn't come anywhere close to that sort of rosy prediction. While Warren still has plenty of money to carry on through March, the question that now has to be asked is: To what end? She seems unlikely to now accrue enough delegates to be a major player in a brokered convention, and the longer she stays in the primaries, the more votes she takes from Sanders -- her fellow liberal left standing.
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Post by Admin on Mar 5, 2020 2:06:30 GMT
Joe Biden was standing on a stage above a blacktop basketball court just off Obama Boulevard as he watched his path to the Democratic nomination, dismissed just days ago, open up.
The former vice president was racking up Super Tuesday victories over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in states where he'd never even campaigned. Black voters carried him in the South. Suburbanites had fallen in line behind him. Turnout was soaring past 2008 primary levels in some states -- and Biden was winning.
"People are talking about a revolution," Biden shouted in a thinly veiled jab at Sanders during a celebratory speech in the historically black Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood. "We started a movement. We've increased turnout. They turned out for us!"
Biden's comeback was inconceivable just a week ago. In interviews, Biden's aides and allies all point to his win in Saturday's primary in South Carolina as the tipping point that resuscitated Biden and remade the Democratic race. But, they say, it couldn't have proven so pivotal for Biden without a confluence of events -- each one unrelated and some entirely out of his control -- that had started 10 days earlier in Las Vegas. A rival's implosion in a debate in Las Vegas, an endorsement and some tough talk from an old friend in Charleston, a viral town hall moment and a message that had sharpened at exactly the right time solidified Biden's big win in South Carolina. And a raft of departures and endorsements afterward turned that win into rocket fuel.
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 18:32:10 GMT
Twitter has applied its first "manipulated media" label to a video retweeted by President Donald Trump, as first reported by The Washington Post. The tweet was originally shared by the White House's head of social media, Dan Scavino, and it contains a video that appears to show the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden stumble during a speech and accidentally endorse President Donald Trump, saying, "We can only reelect Donald Trump." In reality, however, Biden went on to say: "We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It's got to be a positive campaign." Per The Post, Twitter applied its manipulated-media tag to the tweet at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, roughly 18 hours after Scavino posted it. Twitter announced its new manipulated-media policy last month, designed to combat deceptively edited content. The tag doesn't seem entirely effective, however, as a Twitter representative told Business Insider the company was working to fix a glitch that meant people who searched for the tweet weren't being shown the tag. The person said it was showing up in people's timelines. The tag did not appear when Business Insider searched for the tweet.
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