Most Americans Don't Like Either Party... Bernie Has A Suggestion That Will Change That Quickly

We Need A National Debate: Should The Top Marginal Rate Be 93% or 99%?

Neither Gavin Newsom nor Kamala Harris dared show up at the California Democratic Party’s convention over the weekend. Instead of booing them, delegates got to cheer Tim Walz's message! “We’ve got to find some goddamn guts to fight for working people,” told the appreciative activists. The party of the working class lost a big chunk of the working class. That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts. Some of it is our own doing.” Dorothy Reik, an L.A. delegate, told us that “Many Democrats used words we never heard in public speeches— the "f" word and more. Schiff's speech was full of them, but he was not alone.”  She told us that Newsom’s “budget cuts and Republican-lite talking points enraged Democrats. The only place you could see him was his name on the lanyards we hung our credentials on.  Some fortunate folks had Working Peoples Party lanyards.”

And that was just in time for a release of a new CNN poll that shows the public is firmly behind Democratic Party issues but not Democratic Party leadership. “While neither political party is viewed as especially strong or effective, skepticism weighs particularly heavily on the Democratic Party. Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders: 40% say this descriptor applies more to the GOP, with just 16% saying it applies to the Democrats. They’re also more likely to call Republicans the party that can get things done by 36% to 19%, and the party of change, by 32% to 25%. That’s in large part because of relatively anemic support for Democrats among their own partisans. GOP-aligned adults are 50 points likelier than Democratic-aligned adults to say their own party has strong leaders, and 36 points likelier to view their party as able to get things done. True independents, those who don’t lean toward either party, are particularly grim in their views of the parties on these issues: 76% say neither party has strong leaders or can get things done, and 72% that they view neither as the party of change. While the public as a whole sees the GOP as relatively effective, they also say, 41% to 30%, that it’s better described as the party of extremism, the only attribute tested that fewer than 30% said applied to neither party. Roughly one-sixth of Republican-aligned adults say they view the GOP as representing extremism, compared with roughly one-tenth of Democratic-aligned adults who say the same of their own party.”

The pollsters also noted that “Amid internal Democratic arguments over the party’s messaging on issues surrounding race and gender, the poll finds that Americans side with the Democratic Party over the Republican Party on the way society deals with LGBTQ issues by an 8-point margin and with racial issues and education by a 7-point margin each. By a wide margin, 72% to 27%, most Americans say that growing racial diversity does more to enrich than threaten American culture. That’s slightly broader agreement than last fall, though it still falls short of the more than 8 in 10 who called diversity enriching during Trump’s first term. The sense of diversity as a threat is largely concentrated among the GOP, particularly among Republican-aligned men. Currently, 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents call diversity a threat, up from just 20% who said the same in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office. Democratic opinion has moved little in that time. Democrats held their widest advantage in the poll, 14 points, on handling climate change. A 58% majority of adults say they’re at least somewhat worried about the risks of climate change in their community, down slightly from the 63% who said they were at least somewhat worried in the fall of 2023. About one-quarter in each poll said they were very worried. By a 5-point margin, Americans say their view of how to protect U.S. democracy aligns more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.”

Bernie has a good suggestion for the Democratic Party establishment— one the current party leaders (from Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and Kamala Harris) will never follow. His oft repeated and very popular premise is that Democrats will win more elections if they pledge to tax billionaires into extinction. Charlie Herbert reported that Bernie, in London, said that “poverty can be ‘abolished’ through higher taxation on billionaires, who he argues should not exist… Mentioning Trump’s ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk in particular, Sanders said it was “insane” for someone like the Tesla CEO to have so much wealth when many Americans can’t afford basic needs like healthcare and childcare. He called for a ‘democratisation of society’ in order to ‘create an economy that works for all of us. We can literally abolish poverty right now,’ the independent senator said. ‘If we have the courage to make sure that this new technology, the creation of wealth, goes to all people, not just the people on top.’ When asked if he was calling for redistributive taxation in the form of a wealth tax on the super rich, Sanders said we should go further as a society, and tax billionaires into extinction. He explained: ‘We should be saying right now, in a world in which globally the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 95%, and in nation after nation you’re seeing more and more income and wealth inequality, I would say that in the United States we should not have billionaires.’”