InsideSources

Three months ago this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren looked like the 2020 frontrunner so many Democrats dreamed she could be. After months of languishing in the New Hampshire polls — a must-win state for the Massachusetts senator — she had roared back to the top of the pack. She was leading in Iowa, too, five points ahead of second-place Joe Biden. She had even managed to raise more money than Bernie Sanders in the previous quarter.

Today? Warren is fading — and fast.

The former frontrunner is in fourth place in both Iowa and New Hampshire. In the Granite State, her support has fallen by a jaw-dropping 50 percent. In a sure sign that the campaign is struggling, the Warren camp is celebrating the endorsement of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro as a big win.

The Washington Post referred to it as a “timely boost.” The New York Times says the endorsement “could help Ms. Warren reignite excitement at a critical moment.”

But in the last New Hampshire poll taken before he dropped out, Castro was polling at 0 percent.

How did Warren, a one-time Democratic rock star who seems to fit her party’s 2020 mood so well, wind up trailing a relatively unknown Midwestern mayor in her own New Hampshire back yard?

Some campaigns struggle with message. That’s Sen. Cory Booker, who’s offering an optimistic vision of unity and partisan reconciliation to a Democratic base that’s ready to rumble with the Republicans.

Some campaigns have structural problems: Not enough money, too little name ID, no natural political base. Would governors like John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee have made good nominees? We’ll never know.

And then there are the campaigns facing the most daunting obstacle of all: Their own candidate. (See “O’Rourke, Beto.”)

The first two problems can be fixed. The last one can’t.  And every day the evidence builds that the Liz Warren campaign’s biggest problem, is Liz Warren.

“She got an authenticity problem,” one DC political operative told NHJournal. “It’s the one thing about her that’s real.”

The authenticity issue appeared again this week when Warren amended her views on the U.S. military strike that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani, after blowback from progressives. Her first reaction was to declare Soleimani a “murderer responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.”

Within 24 hours she was calling him a “senior government official,” who had been “assassinated,” and she repeatedly refused to concede that Soleimani is a terrorist. (He was declared the leader of a terrorist organization by both the Bush and Obama administrations.) Rather than celebrating his demise, Warren was suggesting that Soleimani only died because Trump is facing impeachment.

“Wow. We went from ‘murderer’ to ‘wag the dog’ in the space of a few days,” quipped CNN’s liberal commentator Chris Cillizza.

Why the shift? Because progressives like Sanders were denouncing the Trump administration’s action as illegitimate, and were uncomfortable with criticism of Soleimani that might support Trump’s case.

“Given where she is in the race, Warren simply could not withstand that sort of criticism from the left,” Cillizza wrote.

The Soleimani story is small potatoes. But it’s part of a growing list — her claims of Native American heritage, her debunked story about being fired over a pregnancy, her misleading statements about her children attending public school and her backtracking on Medicare For All — that suggests Warren is willing to say whatever it takes to get elected.

“She started off as a candidate with a strong message: ‘I want to fight for you, I’m going to take on corruption.’ She sounded like someone who knew exactly what she wanted to do,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told NHJournal.

“Now she sounds like a candidate who’s still looking for a message, and that’s not good.”

Some Democrats disagree. “I don’t think the Native American thing or these other stories are hurting her. I think she’s got an explanation for all of them,” said Bob Shrum, director of USC’s Center for the Political Future and a veteran of multiple presidential primaries. “I think it’s one thing: Medicare For All.”

That’s a common explanation for Warren’s weakness. Democrats and pundits point to the release of Warren’s poorly-received $52 trillion healthcare plan as the moment her campaign began to founder. “It’s not true that New Hampshire Democrats don’t like Warren,” one senior Democratic Granite State source told NHJournal. “They just hate her Medicare For All plan.”

But even the Medicare issue highlights Warren’s authenticity problem. One reason she was forced to release the politically-damaging specifics of her plan was because she’d spent weeks refusing to say whether her proposal would require a middle-class tax hike. She gave so many obviously evasive answers that late-night TV host Stephen Colbert begged her on the air to find a better response.

Warren supporters are quick to suggest that she’s the victim of misogyny, that conversations about authenticity and likeability are just code words for being uncomfortable with a woman nominee. But that hardly makes sense in New Hampshire, where three of the four Democrats in the congressional delegation are women, the two previous governors were women and where Hillary Clinton won both the 2008 primary and the 2016 general election.

These are voters who are more than willing to vote for a woman. At the moment, however, they appear reluctant to vote for Liz Warren.

And that’s a ‘candidate’ problem.

Three months ago this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren looked like the 2020 frontrunner so many Democrats dreamed she could be. After months of languishing in the New Hampshire polls — a must-win state for the Massachusetts senator — she had roared back to the top of the pack. She was leading in Iowa, too, five points ahead of second-place Joe Biden. She had even managed to raise more money than Bernie Sanders in the previous quarter.

Today? Warren is fading — and fast.

The former frontrunner is in fourth place in both Iowa and New Hampshire. In the Granite State, her support has fallen by a jaw-dropping 50 percent. In a sure sign that the campaign is struggling, the Warren camp is celebrating the endorsement of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro as a big win.

The Washington Post referred to it as a “timely boost.” The New York Times says the endorsement “could help Ms. Warren reignite excitement at a critical moment.”

But in the last New Hampshire poll taken before he dropped out, Castro was polling at 0 percent.

How did Warren, a one-time Democratic rock star who seems to fit her party’s 2020 mood so well, wind up trailing a relatively unknown Midwestern mayor in her own New Hampshire back yard?

Some campaigns struggle with message. That’s Sen. Cory Booker, who’s offering an optimistic vision of unity and partisan reconciliation to a Democratic base that’s ready to rumble with the Republicans.

Some campaigns have structural problems: Not enough money, too little name ID, no natural political base. Would governors like John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee have made good nominees? We’ll never know.

And then there are the campaigns facing the most daunting obstacle of all: Their own candidate. (See “O’Rourke, Beto.”)

The first two problems can be fixed. The last one can’t.  And every day the evidence builds that the Liz Warren campaign’s biggest problem, is Liz Warren.

“She got an authenticity problem,” one DC political operative told InsideSources. “It’s the one thing about her that’s real.”

The authenticity issue appeared again this week when Warren amended her views on the U.S. military strike that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani, after blowback from progressives. Her first reaction was to declare Soleimani a “murderer responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.”

Within 24 hours she was calling him a “senior government official,” who had been “assassinated,” and she repeatedly refused to concede that Soleimani is a terrorist. (He was declared the leader of a terrorist organization by both the Bush and Obama administrations.) Rather than celebrating his demise, Warren was suggesting that Soleimani only died because Trump is facing impeachment.

“Wow. We went from ‘murderer’ to ‘wag the dog’ in the space of a few days,” quipped CNN’s liberal commentator Chris Cillizza.

Why the shift? Because progressives like Sanders were denouncing the Trump administration’s action as illegitimate, and were uncomfortable with criticism of Soleimani that might support Trump’s case.

“Given where she is in the race, Warren simply could not withstand that sort of criticism from the left,” Cillizza wrote.

The Soleimani story is small potatoes. But it’s part of a growing list — her claims of Native American heritage, her debunked story about being fired over a pregnancy, her misleading statements about her children attending public school and her backtracking on Medicare For All — that suggests Warren is willing to say whatever it takes to get elected.

“She started off as a candidate with a strong message: ‘I want to fight for you, I’m going to take on corruption.’ She sounded like someone who knew exactly what she wanted to do,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told InsideSources.

“Now she sounds like a candidate who’s still looking for a message, and that’s not good.”

Some Democrats disagree. “I don’t think the Native American thing or these other stories are hurting her. I think she’s got an explanation for all of them,” said Bob Shrum, director of USC’s Center for the Political Future and a veteran of multiple presidential primaries. “I think it’s one thing: Medicare For All.”

That’s a common explanation for Warren’s weakness. Democrats and pundits point to the release of Warren’s poorly-received $52 trillion healthcare plan as the moment her campaign began to founder. “It’s not true that New Hampshire Democrats don’t like Warren,” one senior Democratic Granite State source told InsideSources. “They just hate her Medicare For All plan.”

But even the Medicare issue highlights Warren’s authenticity problem. One reason she was forced to release the politically-damaging specifics of her plan was because she’d spent weeks refusing to say whether her proposal would require a middle-class tax hike. She gave so many obviously evasive answers that late-night TV host Stephen Colbert begged her on the air to find a better response.

Warren supporters are quick to suggest that she’s the victim of misogyny, that conversations about authenticity and likeability are just code words for being uncomfortable with a woman nominee. But that hardly makes sense in New Hampshire, where three of the four Democrats in the congressional delegation are women, the two previous governors were women and where Hillary Clinton won both the 2008 primary and the 2016 general election.

These are voters who are more than willing to vote for a woman. At the moment, however, they appear reluctant to vote for Liz Warren.

And that’s a ‘candidate’ problem.

If you woke up New Year’s Day feeling guilty about all those last-second charitable solicitations you ignored, it might ease your conscience to know you aren’t alone. Just ask Liz Warren.

On the campaign trail, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tirelessly attacks the greed and self-interest of America’s wealthy, the “millionaires and billionaires” who, she claims, are “waging war on America’s middle class.”

“It’s time for the millionaires to pay their fair share!” Warren demands.

But when it comes to spreading the wealth to charitable causes and community service, Warren is one of the millionaires who apparently hasn’t gotten the message.

According to the tax returns Warren has posted on her campaign website, she and her husband Bruce Mann have earned more than $10 million since 2008, but they’ve rarely donated more than 4 percent of their income to charitable causes. For example, in 2014 Warren earned more than $1.6 million but gave just 2.7 percent to charity. The following year she took in nearly $1.2 million, but donated just 2.3 percent.

All that changed, however, in 2017 when Warren was preparing to formally enter the presidential race. That year her charitable donations suddenly spiked to 8.4 percent, leading some to speculate that her newfound generosity was more about electability than philanthropy. In 2018, she donated 5.5 percent of her income to charity.

Exclude her “presidential primary” years, and Warren donated an average of just 3.5 percent of her millions in income to charitable causes. That number is low for the average American in her income bracket (the average millionaire donates nearly twice that amount), and it sounds particularly ungenerous given her political platform of income redistribution, trillion-dollar tax increases and “you didn’t build that!” rhetoric.

And yet compared to her fellow 2020 progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Warren’s the Oprah Winfrey of the Democratic field.

In 2016, Sanders donated just $10,600 of his $1 million income — around 1 percent — to charity. His total household donations since 2009 manage to get him to the two percent level.

According to analysis by Forbes magazine, the least charitable Democrat is also the poorest: Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Despite his progressive bona fides, including a “paid” volunteerism program,  Buttigieg has donated just 1 percent of his income to charity since 2009.

And then there’s former Vice President Joe Biden, who made headlines in 2008 when Barack Obama tapped him to be his running mate it was discovered the Bidens had donated just $3,690 to charity over the course of an entire decade. He’s since raised that number to six percent, much of it donated to Biden family foundations.

Thus far the issue of charitable giving hasn’t come up on the campaign trail, perhaps because Democratic primary voters are also less likely to support charitable causes themselves.

According to multiple studies, Americans on the left are less charitable than their Republican counterparts. States that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 were, on average, less generous in their charitable giving than those carried by Donald Trump.

Arthur C. Brooks, a social scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of the book on charitable giving Who Really Cares says his research finds, “People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to donate to charity than those who do not.”

Data from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy show that a smaller percentage of Americans are donating to charity each year, but overall donations are rising. In fact, over this same 2009-2017 period during which millionaire candidates like Warren and Sanders give so little, total U.S. donations to charity rose by nearly $100 billion, from $314 billion to $410 billion.

The same “millionaires and billionaires” whose greed is allegedly endangering our democracy are giving more to charity and community service. Even as progressive politicians give so little.

There are exceptions, most notably Sen. Cory Booker. The former Mayor of Newark has donated nearly half a million dollars — about 11 percent of his income — to charity over the past decade. Unfortunately, Democratic primary voters aren’t being as generous toward his campaign and Sen. Booker continues to linger around 2 percent in the polls.

From free healthcare for illegal immigrants to paying off everyone’s student loan debt, Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans for taxpayer-funded generosity. American voters may want to ask why her charity doesn’t begin at home.

If you woke up New Year’s Day feeling guilty about all those last-second charitable solicitations you ignored, it might ease your conscience to know you aren’t alone. Just ask Liz Warren.

On the campaign trail, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tirelessly attacks the greed and self-interest of America’s wealthy, the “millionaires and billionaires” who, she claims, are “waging war on America’s middle class.”

“It’s time for the millionaires to pay their fair share!” Warren demands.

But when it comes to spreading the wealth to charitable causes and community service, Warren is one of the millionaires who apparently hasn’t gotten the message.

According to the tax returns Warren has posted on her campaign website, she and her husband Bruce Mann have earned more than $10 million since 2008, but they’ve rarely donated more than 4 percent of their income to charitable causes. For example, in 2014 Warren earned more than $1.6 million but gave just 2.7 percent to charity. The following year she took in nearly $1.2 million, but donated just 2.3 percent.

All that changed, however, in 2017 when Warren was preparing to formally enter the presidential race. That year her charitable donations suddenly spiked to 8.4 percent, leading some to speculate that her newfound generosity was more about electability than philanthropy. In 2018, she donated 5.5 percent of her income to charity.

Exclude her “presidential primary” years, and Warren donated an average of just 3.5 percent of her millions in income to charitable causes. That number is low for the average American in her income bracket (the average millionaire donates nearly twice that amount), and it sounds particularly ungenerous given her political platform of income redistribution, trillion-dollar tax increases and “you didn’t build that!” rhetoric.

And yet compared to her fellow 2020 progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Warren’s the Oprah Winfrey of the Democratic field.

In 2016, Sanders donated just $10,600 of his $1 million income — around 1 percent — to charity. His total household donations since 2009 manage to get him to the two percent level.

According to analysis by Forbes magazine, the least charitable Democrat is also the poorest: Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Despite his progressive bona fides, including a “paid” volunteerism program,  Buttigieg has donated just 1 percent of his income to charity since 2009.

And then there’s former Vice President Joe Biden, who made headlines in 2008 when Barack Obama tapped him to be his running mate it was discovered the Bidens had donated just $3,690 to charity over the course of an entire decade. He’s since raised that number to six percent, much of it donated to Biden family foundations.

Thus far the issue of charitable giving hasn’t come up on the campaign trail, perhaps because Democratic primary voters are also less likely to support charitable causes themselves.

According to multiple studies, Americans on the left are less charitable than their Republican counterparts. States that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 were, on average, less generous in their charitable giving than those carried by Donald Trump.

Arthur C. Brooks, a social scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of the book on charitable giving Who Really Cares says his research finds, “People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to donate to charity than those who do not.”

Data from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy show that a smaller percentage of Americans are donating to charity each year, but overall donations are rising. In fact, over this same 2009-2017 period during which millionaire candidates like Warren and Sanders give so little, total U.S. donations to charity rose by nearly $100 billion, from $314 billion to $410 billion.

The same “millionaires and billionaires” whose greed is allegedly endangering our democracy are giving more to charity and community service. Even as progressive politicians give so little.

There are exceptions, most notably Sen. Cory Booker. The former Mayor of Newark has donated nearly half a million dollars — about 11 percent of his income — to charity over the past decade. Unfortunately, Democratic primary voters aren’t being as generous toward his campaign and Sen. Booker continues to linger around 2 percent in the polls.

From free healthcare for illegal immigrants to paying off everyone’s student loan debt, Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans for taxpayer-funded generosity. American voters may want to ask why her charity doesn’t begin at home.

When Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary, she blamed it on her inability to raise money. Some pundits, both left and right, said her lack of a clear message was the problem.

But others saw a more disturbing force at work: White people. In particular, the white Democratic primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Iowa is 91 percent white. New Hampshire is 94 percent white,” Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson tweeted in reaction to Harris’s exit from the 2020 field. “These states are off the charts white, and yet the Democratic Party gives the electorates in these states effective veto power over the nomination process.”

“It’s structural racism masquerading as tradition,” Dickinson said.

Nate Silver of the left-leaning website FiveThirtyEight wrote, “If the Democratic Party wants a field that’s representative of its members and its voters, it probably shouldn’t have two states as white as Iowa and New Hampshire vote first every year.”

“Having two super white states go first is a big disadvantage to nonwhite candidates,” Silver added.

Defenders of the New Hampshire #FITN primary are used to hearing the “too white” complaint. “You go to New Hampshire. There are not any minorities there. Nobody lives there,” then-Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told the Washington Post back in 2015.

What’s new is the more overt suggestion that white New Hampshire Democrats are rejecting candidates of color out of bigotry. That they’re participants in the “structural racism.”

“I’ve seen the bile, the anger, from my family members, to people in the Congressional Black Caucus, to leaders of color across this country who just don’t understand how we’ve gotten to a point now where there’s more billionaires in the 2020 race than there are black people,” Sen. Cory Booker said in response to Harris dropping out of the race.

Progressive writer Lauren Duca was more direct, telling her nearly 500,000 Twitter followers:

“Kamala Harris officially ended her campaign today, which means that all of the candidates who currently qualify for the December Democratic debate are white. White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks.”

So is it a New Hampshire Democratic Party problem?

“I have heard all the arguments and don’t buy any of them,” former Democratic National Committeeman and longtime New Hampshire strategist Terry Shumaker told InsideSources. “They certainly don’t explain Govs. Inslee, Hickenlooper and Bullock dropping out — as well as Beto and others dropping out even earlier — they are all white.”

Shumaker notes that “an African American has won our primary, as has a woman and a Mormon.  Jesse Jackson ran competitively here in the 1980s. He didn’t blame not winning on the voters.”

True, but progressives are. Their argument isn’t just that “New Hampshire voters are too white,” but rather this whiteness prevents them from supporting candidates of color. Call it “racism,” “bigotry” or “lack of wokeness”–it’s a commentary on New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.

“I don’t agree that they are saying Iowa and New Hampshire are racist,” New Hampshire Democratic Committeewoman Kathy Sullivan told InsideSources. “They are saying that having more diversity among voters would better reflect the Democratic electorate. I think the DNC addressed that by having Nevada and South Carolina added to the calendar.”

“I would also add that Barack Obama came very close to winning the New Hampshire primary in ’08, and he won the general election here twice.”

Then there are the New Hampshire polling averages for Castro, Booker and Harris, which are similar to their numbers nationally. Yes, when she dropped out Harris’s RealClearPolitics average was about half a point lower in the Granite State (2.7 percent) compared to her national numbers (3.4 percent), but both Booker and Castro are actually outperforming their nationwide average in New Hampshire.

Even in her racially-diverse home state of California, Harris had been stuck in single digits and well out of the top tier. Are white voters to blame?

And yet it remains the case that the top six Republican frontrunners in 2016 were more racially diverse (one African American and two Hispanic candidates) than the Democrats today. And many on the left see bias at work.

“Women are held to a different standard,” Rev. Al Sharpton said on Tuesday, “and black women especially.”

Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, whose 2020 POTUS candidacy has rarely cleared the 5 percent support mark, has long argued that New Hampshire’s demographics were a problem for Democrats, going so far as to compare it to what he deems Republican voter suppression.

When Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary, she blamed it on her inability to raise money. Some pundits, both left and right, said her lack of a clear message was the problem.

But others saw a more disturbing force at work: White people. In particular, the white Democratic primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Iowa is 91 percent white. New Hampshire is 94 percent white,” Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson tweeted in reaction to Harris’s exit from the 2020 field. “These states are off the charts white, and yet the Democratic Party gives the electorates in these states effective veto power over the nomination process.”

“It’s structural racism masquerading as tradition,” Dickinson said.

Nate Silver of the left-leaning website FiveThirtyEight wrote, “If the Democratic Party wants a field that’s representative of its members and its voters, it probably shouldn’t have two states as white as Iowa and New Hampshire vote first every year.”

“Having two super white states go first is a big disadvantage to nonwhite candidates,” Silver added.

Defenders of the New Hampshire #FITN primary are used to hearing the “too white” complaint. “You go to New Hampshire. There are not any minorities there. Nobody lives there,” then-Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told the Washington Post back in 2015.

What’s new is the more overt suggestion that white New Hampshire Democrats are rejecting candidates of color out of bigotry. That they’re participants in the “structural racism.”

“I’ve seen the bile, the anger, from my family members, to people in the Congressional Black Caucus, to leaders of color across this country who just don’t understand how we’ve gotten to a point now where there’s more billionaires in the 2020 race than there are black people,” Sen. Cory Booker said in response to Harris dropping out of the race.

Progressive writer Lauren Duca was more direct, telling her nearly 500,000 Twitter followers:

“Kamala Harris officially ended her campaign today, which means that all of the candidates who currently qualify for the December Democratic debate are white. White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks.”

So is it a New Hampshire Democratic Party problem?

“I have heard all the arguments and don’t buy any of them,” former Democratic National Committeeman and longtime New Hampshire strategist Terry Shumaker told NHJournal. “They certainly don’t explain Govs. Inslee, Hickenlooper and Bullock dropping out — as well as Beto and others dropping out even earlier — they are all white.”

Shumaker notes that “an African American has won our primary, as has a woman and a Mormon.  Jesse Jackson ran competitively here in the 1980s. He didn’t blame not winning on the voters.”

True, but progressives are. Their argument isn’t just that “New Hampshire voters are too white,” but rather this whiteness prevents them from supporting candidates of color. Call it “racism,” “bigotry” or “lack of wokeness”–it’s a commentary on New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.

“I don’t agree that they are saying Iowa and New Hampshire are racist,” New Hampshire Democratic Committeewoman Kathy Sullivan told NHJournal. “They are saying that having more diversity among voters would better reflect the Democratic electorate. I think the DNC addressed that by having Nevada and South Carolina added to the calendar.”

“I would also add that Barack Obama came very close to winning the New Hampshire primary in ’08, and he won the general election here twice.”

Then there are the New Hampshire polling averages for Castro, Booker and Harris, which are similar to their numbers nationally. Yes, when she dropped out Harris’s RealClearPolitics average was about half a point lower in the Granite State (2.7 percent) compared to her national numbers (3.4 percent), but both Booker and Castro are actually outperforming their nationwide average in New Hampshire.

Even in her racially-diverse home state of California, Harris had been stuck in single digits and well out of the top tier. Are white voters to blame?

And yet it remains the case that the top six Republican frontrunners in 2016 were more racially diverse (one African American and two Hispanic candidates) than the Democrats today. And many on the left see bias at work.

“Women are held to a different standard,” Rev. Al Sharpton said on Tuesday, “and black women especially.”

Former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, whose 2020 POTUS candidacy has rarely cleared the 5 percent support mark, has long argued that New Hampshire’s demographics were a problem for Democrats, going so far as to compare it to what he deems Republican voter suppression.

Is your cheeseburger an endangered species?

Reports of the death of America’s beef and dairy industries at the hands of the Green New Deal (GND) may be exaggerated, but both farmers and their Philly steak ‘n cheese eating fans have reason to be concerned about policies embraced by progressive Democrats.

Claims by some opponents of the #GreenNewDeal that it would mean an end of the cattle industry in America are inaccurate—for the simple reason that the GND doesn’t offer any specific policies. The legislation actually filed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is merely a resolution declaring general goals and directions, not specific laws and regulations. On this issue the resolution  merely calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

However, the FAQ handout from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that originally accompanied the proposal was much more aggressive and, many farmers fear, far more accurate about the GND’s goals.

It demands a “a greenhouse gas free food system,” and bemoans the fact that GND doesn’t call for an end to all GHG emissions because “we aren’t sure we can get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Supporters of AOC, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is known, argue that this FAQ document was mistakenly released, a work in progress, and doesn’t reflect the immediate goals of the Green New Deal effort. However, what’s undeniable is that cows—and their gaseous emissions—are in the crosshairs of the climate change activists’ agenda.  They have to be.

If advocates of the Green New Deal are serious about getting close to zero emissions, or even a net-zero target using offsets, they have to confront the amount of greenhouse gases coming from livestock. In the US, agriculture is responsible for about 9 percent of our emissions. But according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock worldwide account for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gases. That’s more than the entire transportation sector (14 percent).  Plus, climate activists argue that methane—the gas emitted by cows—is more dangerous than carbon dioxide, trapping up to 28 times more heat.

It’s simply impossible to move forward on the GND agenda without a drastic impact on cattle-intensive industries like beef and dairy.

And so Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) has legislation targeting concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for the alleged damage they are doing to the climate.  “I want to talk about the impact that CAFOs have on the environment and what we can do to mitigate it,” said Blumenauer. “We shouldn’t be incentivizing them through programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; we should be forcing them to pay for the damage they cause to the environment and public health.”

Eric Holt-Gimenez says the problem is “industrial overproduction of food—the root cause of agricultural pollution, food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.”  To discourage over-production, he suggests a “guaranteed minimum price for farmers,” essentially an agricultural minimum wage paid by consumers to prop up inefficient, smaller farming operations.

And New Jersey Senator Cory Booker—a #GreenNewDeal supporter and candidate for president– stated flatly that the “devastating impact” of emissions from the meat industry must end.

“The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” Booker, a vegan, told VegNews magazine. “It’s just not possible.”

The media are downplaying the potential impact on the agricultural sector from the Democrats’ newest policy initiative, accusing Republicans of exaggerating the case or conflating idealistic goals with realistic policies. But ranchers and farmers have gotten the message.

“You may think the #GreenNewDeal is some far out nutcase dream, but if you’re involved in agriculture you’d better view it as a threat to your entire way of life,” Texas rancher Casey Kimbrell tweeted.

Sara Place of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association says the Green New Deal “highlights the large divide between people that are interacting with the environment and growing food every day, and those that are concerned about environmental issues, but ignorant.”

And Kansas cattle rancher Brandi Buzzard Frobose has written an open letter to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez explaining that American ranches  “are producing beef in the United States more sustainably and efficiently than ever before – did you know that the U.S. produces nearly 20% of the world’s beef with only 9% of the world’s cattle?

“I beseech you to please have a conversation with your constituents and colleagues that have an agriculture background,” Frobose writes. “Cows are not the problem.”

But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents Queens, New York, doesn’t have a lot of “constituents with an agricultural background.” Neither do many of the congressional co-sponsors of the GND who are from urban districts, like Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Ted Lieu of Los Angeles.  Ag jobs just aren’t a key part of their constituency.

For the Democrats running for president, however, the math is very different.  Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina all have significant agricultural interests.  According to Katie Olthoff of the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, Iowa has the seventh largest inventory of cattle in the U.S. and “more feed yards than any other state.”

“We have a lot of relatively small ‘feeder farmers,’ as we call them,” Olthoff says, as opposed to the larger operations environmentalists tend to focus on.

At the Iowa State Dairy Association website, board president Larry Shover quotes a study reporting that Iowa’s 1,200 dairies – and 213,000 dairy cows—have an economic impact of over $4 billion dollars per year.

In New Hampshire, dairy products are a $50 million market and the single largest agricultural commodity in the state.  The dairy tradition is such an embedded part of the Granite State’s story that the industry promotes the “Ice Cream Trail” featuring local dairies and shops from Nashua up to the Great North Woods.

And the official state beverage of South Carolina?  Milk.

Still, virtually every nationally-known 2020 Democratic candidate has endorsed the #GreenNewDeal.  That’s going to present some interesting political calculations for Democrats in a 10-way  (or 15 or even 20-way?) race for their party’s nomination.

Even if the number of farmers in these early states is relatively small (fewer than 2 percent of Americans actually work on a farm), their effects on the economy are felt much more broadly. In addition, as support for the ethanol subsidy in Iowa over the decades shows, many voters have an emotional connection with their state’s farmers that gives their issues an outsized political impact.

“Iowa’s farms are family farms,  and so when Washington talks about America ‘getting out of the cattle business,’ it’s not just a job. It’s a family,” Olthoff told InsideSources.

“About 10 years ago, my husband and I made a huge investment in order to farm years ago. Our dream was to be able to raise our kids on a farm, to live in rural Iowa, to live this lifestyle. When I hear about proposals and regulations that threaten us, I do get emotional,” Olthoff said.

“This isn’t about shutting down an industry. It’s about a way of life.”

Is your cheeseburger an endangered species?

Reports of the death of America’s beef and dairy industries at the hands of the Green New Deal (GND) may be exaggerated, but both farmers and their Philly steak ‘n cheese eating fans have reason to be concerned about policies embraced by progressive Democrats.

Claims by some opponents of the #GreenNewDeal that it would mean an end of the cattle industry in America are inaccurate — for the simple reason that the GND doesn’t offer any specific policies. The legislation actually filed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is merely a resolution declaring general goals and directions, not specific laws and regulations. On this issue the resolution  merely calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

However, the FAQ handout from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that originally accompanied the proposal was much more aggressive and, many farmers fear, far more accurate about the GND’s goals.

It demands a “a greenhouse gas free food system,” and bemoans the fact that GND doesn’t call for an end to all GHG emissions because “we aren’t sure we can get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Supporters of AOC, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is known, argue that this FAQ document was mistakenly released, a work in progress, and doesn’t reflect the immediate goals of the Green New Deal effort. However, what’s undeniable is that cows—and their gaseous emissions—are in the crosshairs of the climate change activists’ agenda.  They have to be.

If advocates of the Green New Deal are serious about getting close to zero emissions, or even a net-zero target using offsets, they have to confront the amount of greenhouse gases coming from livestock. In the US, agriculture is responsible for about 9 percent of our emissions. But according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock worldwide account for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gases. That’s more than the entire transportation sector (14 percent).  Plus, climate activists argue that methane—the gas emitted by cows—is more dangerous than carbon dioxide, trapping up to 28 times more heat.

It’s simply impossible to move forward on the GND agenda without a drastic impact on cattle-intensive industries like beef and dairy.

And so Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) has legislation targeting concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for the alleged damage they are doing to the climate.  “I want to talk about the impact that CAFOs have on the environment and what we can do to mitigate it,” said Blumenauer. “We shouldn’t be incentivizing them through programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; we should be forcing them to pay for the damage they cause to the environment and public health.”

Eric Holt-Gimenez says the problem is “industrial overproduction of food—the root cause of agricultural pollution, food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.”  To discourage over-production, he suggests a “guaranteed minimum price for farmers,” essentially an agricultural minimum wage paid by consumers to prop up inefficient, smaller farming operations.

And New Jersey Senator Cory Booker—a #GreenNewDeal supporter and candidate for president– stated flatly that the “devastating impact” of emissions from the meat industry must end.

“The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” Booker, a vegan, told VegNews magazine. “It’s just not possible.”

The media are downplaying the potential impact on the agricultural sector from the Democrats’ newest policy initiative, accusing Republicans of exaggerating the case or conflating idealistic goals with realistic policies. But ranchers and farmers have gotten the message.

“You may think the #GreenNewDeal is some far out nutcase dream, but if you’re involved in agriculture you’d better view it as a threat to your entire way of life,” Texas rancher Casey Kimbrell tweeted.

Sara Place of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association says the Green New Deal “highlights the large divide between people that are interacting with the environment and growing food every day, and those that are concerned about environmental issues, but ignorant.”

And Kansas cattle rancher Brandi Buzzard Frobose has written an open letter to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez explaining that American ranches  “are producing beef in the United States more sustainably and efficiently than ever before – did you know that the U.S. produces nearly 20% of the world’s beef with only 9% of the world’s cattle?

“I beseech you to please have a conversation with your constituents and colleagues that have an agriculture background,” Frobose writes. “Cows are not the problem.”

But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents Queens, New York, doesn’t have a lot of “constituents with an agricultural background.” Neither do many of the congressional co-sponsors of the GND who are from urban districts, like Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Ted Lieu of Los Angeles.  Ag jobs just aren’t a key part of their constituency.

For the Democrats running for president, however, the math is very different.  Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina all have significant agricultural interests.  According to Katie Olthoff of the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, Iowa has the seventh largest inventory of cattle in the U.S. and “more feed yards than any other state.”

“We have a lot of relatively small ‘feeder farmers,’ as we call them,” Olthoff says, as opposed to the larger operations environmentalists tend to focus on.

At the Iowa State Dairy Association website, board president Larry Shover quotes a study reporting that Iowa’s 1,200 dairies – and 213,000 dairy cows—have an economic impact of over $4 billion dollars per year.

In New Hampshire, dairy products are a $50 million market and the single largest agricultural commodity in the state.  The dairy tradition is such an embedded part of the Granite State’s story that the industry promotes the “Ice Cream Trail” featuring local dairies and shops from Nashua up to the Great North Woods.

And the official state beverage of South Carolina?  Milk.

Still, virtually every nationally-known 2020 Democratic candidate has endorsed the #GreenNewDeal.  That’s going to present some interesting political calculations for Democrats in a 10-way  (or 15 or even 20-way?) race for their party’s nomination.

Even if the number of farmers in these early states is relatively small (fewer than 2 percent of Americans actually work on a farm), their effects on the economy are felt much more broadly. In addition, as support for the ethanol subsidy in Iowa over the decades shows, many voters have an emotional connection with their state’s farmers that gives their issues an outsized political impact.

“Iowa’s farms are family farms,  and so when Washington talks about America ‘getting out of the cattle business,’ it’s not just a job. It’s a family,” Olthoff told InsideSources.

“About 10 years ago, my husband and I made a huge investment in order to farm years ago. Our dream was to be able to raise our kids on a farm, to live in rural Iowa, to live this lifestyle. When I hear about proposals and regulations that threaten us, I do get emotional,” Olthoff said.

“This isn’t about shutting down an industry. It’s about a way of life.”

Despite the fact that she’s repeatedly referred to as “the female Obama,”  and that she formally announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, could it be that the most apt description of Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris in the 2020 POTUS race is… Hillary Rodham Clinton?

The comparison comes from the fact that the 54-year-old former California Attorney General appears to be running on a Clinton-esque combination of identity politics and moderate Democratic policy.

“The way Harris is likely to position herself on policy issues during the campaign — liberal as any candidate on noneconomic issues but not as liberal on economic issues as, say, Bernie Sanders — echoes Hillary Clinton’s platform in 2016,” writes Perry Bacon, Jr. at the FiveThirtyEight website.   At the same time, Sen. Harris’s embrace of identity politics is unabashed and beyond dispute.

Harris talks extensively about her biography– she would be the first woman, the first black woman and first person of Asian descent to serve as POTUS–and she openly defends identity politics as part of Democratic Party ideology, suggesting the phrase itself is a divisive slur.  And like Hillary Clinton, Sen. Harris highlights what she claims will be the unique challenges of attempting to break the glass ceiling as a woman of color running for the White House.

“Let’s be honest. It’s going to be ugly,” Harris told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski in December. “When you break things, it is painful. And you get cut. And you bleed.”

But will the Democratic POTUS primary really be a “bloody” battle for the four women (Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren) already in the race? According to a Suffolk poll in September, while most voters still claim to be gender-neutral at the ballot box, the percentage of voters who would prefer to vote for a woman is twice as high as the number who would prefer a male candidate. That sentiment is highest among the most liberal voters–more than a third of whom say they want to vote for a woman. Those voters will have a disproportionate impact on the primary.

Add in the historical pattern of black voters strongly supporting black candidates, and it’s no surprise that many political prognosticators have labeled Harris the Democrats’ front-runner.

So playing the identity card as hard as Hillary #ImWithHer Clinton did in 2016 looks like a winner. But what about the Clinton centrism?

Admittedly the word “centrist” is problematic. To most Republicans, and probably many more Americans, the idea that Hillary Clinton was a centrist or moderate candidate seems counter-intuitive. And not long ago, it would have been. But for Democratic primary voters–particularly in the age of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez politics–Mrs. Clinton is a relative moderate. Is Kamala Harris, too?

“I don’t know any progressives who would support her, largely due to her record as district attorney and attorney general in California,” longtime progressive activist Ted Bosen of New Hampshire told Inside Sources.  “Next to Biden, I believe she is the least favorite prospect among us. But she has support among Hillary Clinton supporters.”

And a recent Vanity Fair profile of Sen. Harris included this nugget: “Have you seen her speak?” a (male) Democratic strategist says of Harris. “It feels very Hillary-like.”

As the liberal journal Jacobin reports: “Harris’s rise has produced a fiery debate among liberals and the Left. Leftists and progressives have come out in strong opposition to Harris’s candidacy, with some declaring #NeverKamala and some high-profile Bernie Sanders supporters, such as National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, making clear their lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy.”

“I expect Harris to struggle with The Left,” Bacon writes in his analysis for FiveThirtyEight. “Harris’ professional life has been as a prosecutor and some on the left already are highlighting what they view as flaws in her record — being too hard on low-level offenders of crimes like truancy but not aggressive enough in taking on those accused of white-collar offenses, for example.”

In a press conference on Monday, Harris said she rejected the notion “that you either have to be tough on crime or soft on crime. We should be smart on crime.” However, some critics suggest she tried to burnish her “not-soft-on-crime” credentials by defending police and prosecutors in cases when they didn’t deserve it.   She also bragged in the past about increasing her conviction rates and sending more people to prison, while also promoting liberal social issues like same-sex marriage popular on the California Left. This style of “third-way” politics is straight from the Clinton playbook.

Not everyone agrees with the Clinton/Kamala comparison.

“Their profiles as candidates couldn’t more different,” DC Democratic consultant Joel Payne told InsideSources. “Sen. Harris is a fresh face with relatively low name ID and a lot of room to define herself to voters. Hillary Clinton had been a household name for 15 years before her runs for the White House.”

Payne, who advised the 2016 Clinton campaign says the Democrats he talks to “believe that black voters and, in particular, black women are the key voting bloc in 2020 and Kamala Harris is very well positioned to appeal to those voters.”

But the comparisons are likely to continue, in part because of the campaign team Harris has assembled. Her campaign chair is her sister–and former Clinton senior advisor– Maya Harris. Her general counsel is Hillary’s former campaign attorney Marc Elias, who made headlines when it was discovered his firm was the funnel for Clinton’s campaign to pay oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS, at the center of the “Russia dossier” story.

Other top Kamala Harris staffers include Hillary’s deputy national finance director Angelique Cannon; and David Huynh, the Clinton campaign’s director of delegate operations and ballot access whose job at the Democratic convention in 2016 was to keep protesting Bernie Sanders’ supporters off TV.

Nobody is going to mistake Kamala Harris for Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. By historical standards, she’s one of the most liberal candidates to ever seek the presidency, as her announcement statement makes clear.  But in the #NeedToImpeach/#Medicare4All world of Democratic primary voters of today, virtually every candidate is (at least) as progressive as Harris, and without the “third-way” politics baggage or a staff straight off Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus.

It’s very possible that Kamala Harris’s identity politics can overcome the perception that she’s not progressive enough. But with so many strong progressive candidates in the field, maybe not.