From a polling standpoint, Kamala was the overall winner of the first Democratic debate

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author of this blog post is a supporter of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, but is not officially involved with the Warren campaign.

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The pollster Morning Consult and Nate Silver’s predominantly election analysis and sports analysis-centric website FiveThirtyEight teamed up over the course of the two-night first Democratic presidential debate, held two days ago and yesterday, to poll likely Democratic primary or caucus participants in three waves: before the first night of the debate, between nights of the debate, and after the second night of the debate. Here’s the polling methodology information for each wave polled:

…The first wave of the poll was in the field from June 19 to June 26 among 7,150 registered voters who say they are likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus. It has a margin of error of +/- 1 percentage point using the 2016 Democratic primary electorate as the true population.

The second wave of the poll was conducted from June 26 to June 27 among 2,041 respondents who previously responded to the first wave; it has a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points. Of those respondents, 1,134 watched the first debate.

The third wave of the poll was conducted from June 27 to June 28 among 1,399 respondents who previously responded to the first wave, including 428 who responded to both the first and second waves; it has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points. Of those respondents, 97 watched the first debate, 89 watched the second debate and 757 watched both debates.

Source

Of the 25 candidates currently seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, 20 of them participated on one of the two nights of the debate. The left-most two columns below denote which candidates qualified for the debate and which candidates participated on which night, while the right-most column below denotes the candidates who failed to qualify for the debate and, thus, were not allowed to appear on either night.

First night (6/26)

• Cory Booker
• Julian Castro
• Bill de Blasio
• John Delaney
• Tulsi Gabbard
• Jay Inslee
• Amy Klobuchar
• Beto O’Rourke
• Tim Ryan
• Elizabeth Warren

Second night (6/27)

• Michael Bennet
• Joe Biden
• Pete Buttigieg
• Kirsten Gillibrand
• Kamala Harris
• John Hickenlooper
• Bernie Sanders
• Eric Swalwell
• Marianne Williamson
• Andrew Yang

Both nights of the debate were televised in English on most, if not all, NBC affiliates and on MSNBC, and in Spanish on Telemundo.

Did not qualify

• Steve Bullock
• Mike Gravel
• Wayne Messam
• Seth Moulton
• Joe Sestak

Based on the polling data, there was a clear overall winner of the first debate: Kamala Harris, who participated in the second night of the debate. Kamala more than doubled her support as a result of her debate performance: 16.6% of respondents to the third wave of the poll stated that they support Kamala, representing a 10.3% increase from the second wave of the poll and an 8.7% net increase from the first wave of the poll. Based on the third wave of the poll, Kamala is now within the polling margin of error for second place with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Kamala’s debate performance included a memorable debate over segregation and school busing-related issues against Joe Biden, who also participated in the second night of the debate.

Joe Biden was, at least arguably, the overall loser of the first debate, although he remains the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, at least for now. Biden lost nearly a quarter of his support as a result of the debate, falling from 41.5% before the first night to 35.4% between nights to 31.5% after the second night. Out of the 20 candidates who participated in the debate, only Biden saw a drop in his favorable rating, with Biden’s favorable rating falling from 76.5% to 75.6%, representing a drop in favorability of 0.9%.

Only two candidates saw a drop in their unfavorable rating: Bernie Sanders, who participated in the second night of the debate, and Elizabeth Warren, who participated in the first night of the debate. Warren saw the largest drop in her unfavorable rating, with her unfavorable rating falling 1.0% from 13.5% to 12.5%. Bernie saw a nominal drop in his unfavorable rating, with his unfavorable rating falling 0.1% from 17.6% to 17.5%.

Most candidates saw both their favorable rating and their unfavorable rating rise as Democratic voters got to learn about them and learn more about them. Candidates that saw a much larger increase in their favorable rating than their unfavorable rating include Julian Castro and Cory Booker, who participated in the first night of the debate, as well as Kamala, who participated in the second night of the debate. Candidates that saw a much larger increase in their unfavorable rating than their favorable rating include Beto O’Rourke, who participated in the first night of the debate, and Marianne Williamson, who participated in the second night of the debate.

Trump’s Kristallnacht moment

Last night, Donald Trump, in a move not associated with traditional federal law enforcement practices, publicly announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was going to “begin the process of removing” millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States:

Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

This was strongly criticized by multiple candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in next year’s presidential election (this is not an endorsement of any of the candidates whose tweets are posted below):

Militarizing and raiding our communities makes us less, not more, safe.

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) June 18, 2019

We will not let him use cruel threats to divide us. https://t.co/arzW4v8kDS

— Steve Bullock (@GovernorBullock) June 18, 2019

So @realDonaldTrump, who will be left to do all of that "side work" at your country club? https://t.co/FpCiDO5AVO https://t.co/racszGm7I5

— Bill de Blasio (@BilldeBlasio) June 18, 2019

Let me begin by stating that it is not normal practice in the United States for a planned, large-scale law enforcement raid of any kind to be publicly announced by the President before it happens. Although I am not a law enforcement official of any kind, and I do not claim to be a law enforcement official of any kind, in a typical law enforcement raid planned well in advance, it’s not typical to publicly announce the planned raid to the public, since that would give the suspects more than enough time to flee law enforcement and any threat of arrest. However, Trump’s planned undocumented immigrant roundup is not a typical law enforcement raid and is a lot more political in nature.

As I type this blog post, the hashtag #Kristallnacht is trending on Twitter. That’s a reference to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany in which the Nazis destroyed synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses and buildings. Kristallnacht foreshadowed the horrific genocide known as the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were killed en masse by the Nazi regime.

What Trump has announced is, for all intents and purposes, his Kristallnacht moment. While Trump claims that he’s going to remove undocumented immigrants from this country, if no country takes the people that he’s removing, who will? I fear that this policy will inevitably lead to a very large number of people placed into concentration camps. I know that the corporate media, which has enabled Trump’s entire political career, is going to avoid using the term “concentration camp” to describe the facilities that the undocumented immigrants will likely be placed (they’ll use terms like “detention center”), but they’re concentration camps. Also, I don’t compare the behavior of politicians in my own country to the acts of the German Third Reich unless there is a proper historical comparison, so for me to compare Trump’s planned undocumented immigrant raid to Kristallnacht is not a comparison I take lightly.

Furthermore, Trump’s planned undocumented immigrant raid is fundamentally against American values. NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who was repeatedly voted the most popular driver of NASCAR’s top division and won its single most prestigious race, the Daytona 500, twice, once said that “America is created by immigrants.”. To a significant extent, he’s right. In fact, the earliest colonizers of what is now the United States of America were undocumented immigrants. After all, they didn’t provide immigration papers to the Native Americans who lived in what is now the United States of America long before any non-indigenous people did. America has a long history of its government committing horrific human rights abuses, including, but not limited to, the Trail of Tears and World War II-era internment of Japanese-Americans. However, human rights abuse should never be a core American value and is not something that the American people should celebrate. We, the American people, must speak up against Trump’s proposed raid against undocumented immigrants before it’s too late.

For your convenience, I’ve created a Twitter list of every major 2020 Democratic POTUS candidate

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post was originally written at DailyKos by the administrator of this blog. The original version of this blog post can be found here.

Earlier today, I created a Twitter list of every major candidate who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. I’m defining “major candidate” as being eligible for being listed on Wikipedia’s table of 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates, so, as a result, I’m not going to list every single person who has filed Federal Elections Commission paperwork to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, which is over 200 individuals, most of them are virtually unknown, even to high-info Democratic voters. However, there are currently 19 major candidates, and I’ve included the primary campaign Twitter account of each candidate in the list. I’ve also included the expected campaign Twitter accounts of Joe Biden and Seth Moulton, both of which are expected to launch presidential bids sometime in the near future, so the list actually includes 21 individuals.

You can find the Twitter list of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates here. Feel free to subscribe, no matter which Democratic candidate you support!

Call fascism what it is

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post is not an endorsement of any presidential candidate by the author of this blog post.

At an event in Iowa, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke compared Donald Trump’s rhetoric degrading immigrants to this country to the rhetoric used by infamous former German dictator Adolf Hitler to degrade Jewish people and others despised by Hitler:

I have absolutely no problem with the idea of Democratic presidential candidates making valid comparisons between Trump and other fascist dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, etc.. In fact, I think that it’s absolutely vital that Democrats call fascism what it is and actively oppose all 14 points of fascism.