Like the National Football League season, the presidential election season is never really over. If election night is akin to the Super Bowl, the primary season is like professional football’s regular season, where the weak are separated from the strong. The conventions and the debates could be considered like the playoffs, all of it leading to either the championship or the presidency. Even in that in-between time, moves are being made in anticipation of the next season.
A CNN poll released on October 14, which sampled Democrats and those who lean Democrat, gives former VP Joe Biden the meaningless early lead among Democrats, who CNN believes may run in 2020. Biden is at 33 percent followed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (13 percent) and California Senator Kamala Harris (9 percent). No major candidate has yet announced a 2020 run, although several key Democrats have recently made some interesting off-season moves.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has released the results of a DNA test, which purports to show that there is “strong evidence” backing the senator’s claim that she has some Native-American ancestry in her bloodline. Warren famously claimed Native-American heritage when she listed herself as a racial minority Association of American for the Law School’s Directory of Law Teachers.
The release of the test seems to be an attempt to jab back at President Trump, who has ridiculed Warren’s claims and repeatedly called “Pocahontas” when referring to her. In a video sure to be a future campaign ad, Warren says, “The president likes to call my mom a liar.” Then she asks asks Carlos D. Bustamante, the Stanford professor who analyzed the test, “What do the facts say?” He replies, “The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native-American ancestry in your pedigree.”
Although mainstream media headlines would have you believe that Warren’s ancestors had battled Custer at Little Big Horn, the actual results are far less exciting. The analysis of the DNA showed that the “vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European but that there was “strong evidence” of a Native-American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.”
So Warren may indeed be as much as 1/64th Native-American. She may also be as little as 1/1024th Native-American, if her ancestry goes back the full 10 generations, neither of which would be close to meeting the qualifications to get minority preferences at public colleges as a student — though it does seem to have gotten her advancement in her career as an educator. In fact, according to The Federalist, the average White American has more Native American DNA than Warren.
It’s a risky and bold move for Warren, who had previously said in March that she was not running for president. Now, it seems, she is seriously reconsidering a 2020 run. Currently, Warren is at 8% in CNN’s poll but that was taken prior to the DNA analysis release.
Leftist former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, who changes party affiliation as often as he changes clothes, recently changed back to Democrat and promptly headed to New Hampshire, an early primary state, to headline a get-out-the-vote event for Democrats ahead of the midterms. When the Associated Press asked whether he had any timeline for deciding on a presidential run, the billionaire demurred, “Right now I’m focused on November 6th, plain and simple.”
But Bloomberg hinted that he may be considering a 2020 presidential run a little later, saying, “We’ll see what happens down the road.”
The rally was organized by Moms Demand Action, a splinter group of Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group, which was organized in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy. Bloomberg went on to blast the NRA and gun owners. “Together, Moms Demand and Everytown have landed some big punches against the NRA. We haven’t knocked them down yet, not by a longshot, but we’ve got them on the ropes. And while we’re getting stronger and stronger every day, they’re getting weaker.”
Bloomberg, who can best be described as a nanny-state leftist, once strongly supported a ban of sales of soft drinks over 16 ounces because of public health concerns. The ban was eventually overturned by the New York Court of Appeals, who ruled that the ban exceeded the scope of its regulatory authority. Bloomberg is at 4 percent in the CNN poll, which was done before he — again — switched parties.
Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California who behaved so abominably at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, is also on the move. Trips to Iowa — the nation’s first caucus state — are viewed as essential to politicians seeking the White House. Harris has scheduled such a trip for later this month and will appear in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids on October 22-23.
The crucial Iowa trip follows visits to South Carolina (another early primary state) and battleground Wisconsin, which Hillary Clinton ignored to her detriment in 2016.
Although Harris is running third to Biden in the CNN Poll, many consider her the frontrunner in 2020. Name recognition in early caucus/primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina is essential in boosting her not-yet-announced campaign.
So it never ends, the presidential campaign season. All of this posturing may seem premature, and maybe it is. But the campaign’s pre-season, the Democrat debates, are set to begin only short months from now.
