Who will the Democrats run against in 2020?

Michael Moore recently said he believes that Trump will not last through his first term in office.

trumpwalksAmerican University professor Allan Lichtman, an individual with whom I have great respect (and predicted a Trump win), has also stated that Congress will remove Trump before his first term is over.  Lichtman, author of the “13 keys” system of Presidential predictions, has correctly predicted every winning President since 1984. 

Here’s a link to an interview with Lichtman: http://www.aol.com/article/2016/11/11/a-professor-who-called-trumps-presidency-now-says-it-wont-last/21604240/

Since Congress will be unable to control the Donald, and since the constitution does not indicate that an impeachable offense must take place while a President is in office, and given the fact that Trump is facing numerous court actions in regards to his business(es) – do you think Trump will last through his first term, or will the Democrats be running against President Pence in 2020?

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63 thoughts on “Who will the Democrats run against in 2020?”

  2. patd, amen 😉

    dvitale, Thank You for the Post.

    I’d be more concerned being the Mike Pence character in this very odd couple. Ever watch I,Claudius? Mike, don’t eat the mushrooms. The President Elect isn’t a man of deep thought, only deep wounds, or whatever constitutes a wound or a diss or a sideways glance thrown his way. No such thing as a bloodless coup in Trump World Inc.

  3. sjwny, yep, just ask the guy who ate jersey.  altho’ I don’t think drumpf has seen the last of the gov… troubled waters not likely to be bridged over.  more abridged.

  4. Will Mitt Romney’s meeting with the President Elect be the most important move in “normalizing” this election? Or a crass sell out? Dangling carrots vs eternal soul ….

     

  7. sjwny, fun to imagine this little ditty [from musical “The Book Of Mormon” – You & Me (But Mostly Me) Lyrics] being sung during that interview with mitt:

    Now it’s our time to go out
    (My best friend)
    And set the world’s people free
    And we can do it together, you and me
    But mostly me

    You and me, but mostly me
    Are gonna change the world forever
    ‘Cause I can do most everything
    (And I can stand next to you and watch)

    Every hero needs a sidekick
    Every captain needs a mate
    (Aye, aye)
    Every dinner needs a side dish
    (On a slightly smaller plate)

    And now we’re seeing eye to eye
    It’s so great, we can agree
    That Heavenly Father has chosen you and me
    Just mostly me

     

     

  8. Divitale –Even though Republicans control Congress most would rather see Pence in the White House anyway, so impeachment not that far fetched. But to answer your question, I don’t see a very strong Democratic bench out there. Gonna have to research some of the governors (what few Dems there are). They need a new Bill Clinton.

  9. Picking Sessions for AG will resurface claims he made racist remarks decades ago. And this was supposed to step on the Bannon story?

  10. In 1986, while Sessions was serving as the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Alabama, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be a U.S. District Court judge. During confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, four different lawyers who had worked with Sessions in the past testified about Sessions making racist comments. They said he had described the Ku Klux Klan as “OK until I found out they smoked pot”; that a white lawyer who had black clients was “a disgrace to his race”; that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was “un-American” and “forced civil rights down the throats of people”; and that the Voting Rights Act — hugely important in the fight for civil rights — was a “piece of intrusive legislation.” A black prosecutor said that Sessions had called him “boy” and told him to “be careful what you say to white folks,” which Sessions denied (he did not deny making the other statements). Sessions’s nomination was rejected — an extremely rare occurrence. He has had to assert repeatedly since then that he is not a racist, supporting his claim by saying, according to Sarah Wildman in The New Republic, that “his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.” Cosmopolitan

  11. More from that article: As U.S. Attorney one of Sessions’s most notorious cases was against the activists Albert Turner, his wife Evelyn Turner, and Spencer Hogue, who worked to give African Americans more political control after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Sessions brought so many charges against them that they were facing 100 years in prison. “They called them voter fraud cases, and we called them voter persecution cases,” said Hank Sanders, a defense lawyer for the activists. A jury found them not guilty on all counts.

  12. the only bright note would be that he’s no longer in the senate.  can’t imagine anyone appointed to his place being worse and there’s also the opportunity to trade up in the next election.

    ever the optimist.

  13. perhaps drumpf & co are hoping the senate will not confirm some of the more outrageous picks which will let him off the hook yet show he rewards loyalty.  too bad bannon’s position doesn’t need confirmation.

  14. and add a gong show gong and a groucho flying duck…. maybe a clown honk to indicate “fake! untruth! pants afire!”

    wapo:  Fake news on Facebook is a real problem. These college students came up with a fix in 36 hours.

    The social media site has faced criticism since the presidential election for its role in disseminating fake and misleading stories that are indistinguishable from real news. Because Facebook’s algorithm is designed to determine what its individual users want to see, people often see only that which validates their existing beliefs regardless of whether the information being shared is true.

    So when De, an international second-year master’s student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, attended a hackathon at Princeton University this week with a simple prompt to develop a technology project in 36 hours, she suggested to her three teammates that they try to build an algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook.

    And they were able to do it.

    De, with Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University, and Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen, sophomores at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, built a Chrome browser extension that tags links in Facebook feeds as verified or not verified by taking into account factors such as the source’s credibility and cross-checking the content with other news stories. Where a post appears to be false, the plug-in will provide a summary of more credible information on the topic online.

    They’ve called it FiB.

  15. Boss, Sessions as AG – god help us.  He was a law school classmate of my roommate’s brother in law.  He knew him well and said he was an idiot back then. Mexican immigrants are screwed and there won’t be any DoJ inquiries into civil rights violations for deaths of minorities at the hands of police officers.  And I figure at least a few of the senators who voted against him in the 80s have died or retired.  This may be one of the most frightening appointments drumpf could have made.

  16. the rocky mountain collegian:  Is the petition to get the electoral college to vote for Clinton legitamite?

    ….

    There is no law in the U.S. constitution that says that an elector can vote in opposition to the rest of the state. Although, in 1952 the U.S. supreme court decided that states could require electors to vote in accordance with the popular vote of their state, and a fair share of the states have taken this law into effect. Some even put in $5,000-10,000 fines to those electors that deviate.

    However, even if there is a fine in place, electoral voters are still legally allowed to place their vote in whomever they want. This is what Brezenoff is hoping will happen with his petition; to get enough attention to get the electoral college voters to change their decision.

    Although it hasn’t happened much in the past. In history, only 151 electoral voters have ever voted against the state, 71 of which because the state candidate died.

    However, since its creation the petition has started to lose speed. Earlier this week the petition had 4.3 million, and since then has not risen substantially. As of Thursday Nov. 17, the petition has only gained another 100,000 signatures.

  17. big group being considered for sec’y of state

    and most have in common they have said true but terrible things about Trump

    A Team of Haters

  18. Patd, Richard Shelby (douche) is the other AL senator – he was a boll weevil democrat back in the 70s.  My ex sis-in-law, who was a dem party delegate back in those days, was a friend of his until he changed parties –  and they were fairly close, her being a Dem delegate and him being a dem pol. She wsa a kind of campaign manager for him when I went to a fundraiser at her home back then for him when he was running for congress in the Tuscaloosa 7th district  when I was faculty sponsor of the University young democrats (she threw great parties)  Even then he was a DINO (back when only dems were electable in AL) He’s got a layer of slime on him that’s pretty thick.  Never underestimate the lunacy of the Alabama electorate.

  19. dv: I agree that trump won’t make it through his first term but I don’t think Pence will benefit in the long run. I think anyone closely associated with stumpy will go down with him and 2020 will see a whole new set of contenders.

    Nero trump fiddled tweeted while Rome America burned lost it’s prominence in the world. The original may not be true fact but the revision could surely become reality.

    Pat: Love the Book of Mormon ditty, that could be trump’s theme song LOL! And, about the FiB thing…I doubt that it will catch on since those seeking the truth already do research to find it and the rest (GOP & their ilk) won’t bother installing the app or whatever it is.

     

     

  21. apparently there is something besides impeachment — he could be removed for being mentally unstable

    I think that would be wonderful

  22. kgc, don’t hold your breath on that hope.  the kids will make sure we’ll only see not hear/read him if it gets to that point….and  even if he were no longer physically viable, they will prop him up like a stuffed mao and pretend he is  still with us.

  23. Well the kids are no match for a motivated congress they will be too busy trying to save their own asses

  24. Keep going you will get there

     

    Bargaining – The third stage involves the hope that the individual can avoid a cause of grief.

     

    Jack

  25. granny, thank you for our daily ko fix.

    as to the FiB app, I was hoping that facebook/google/twitter would adopt it and folks could opt out if they didn’t want to be reminded that what they’re reading is fiction.   kinda like the idea of horns and gongs blaring and red alert borders flashing when the fake tweet or fake news item appears.

    at least newshour gives us some background. here’s part of the transcript of the whole segment which follows:

    HARI SREENIVASAN: And you found in some of your investigations that some of these are sites that were built in Macedonia for more of a profit motive than a political one.

    CRAIG SILVERMAN: [Founding Editor, BuzzFeed Canada]

    A few weeks ago, we published a story where we had found well over 100 sites focused on U.S. politics being run out of one small town in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

    And when we looked at the content that they were publishing, they were consistently pro-Trump. And we also saw that they were consistently publishing things that weren’t true. In fact, some of their biggest hits before Election Day were things that weren’t true.

    And when we did this calculation of the top 20 fake election hits, we did find two Macedonian sites there.

  26. Hey folks, You’ve got Trump and nobody is going to remove him from office short of death or severe impairment.

    I think that KGC could be right he may have  mental problems associated with aging but that is not going to get him removed from office. It does mean he will be very dependent on people around him.  Some body is going to be the real chief of staff/Presidential surrogate and it ain’t gonna be rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeats job is to keep the monkeys in line.

    The real chief of staff, will be family, some one who can have Trumps back. They can’t trust any of the monkeys. So if KGC and I are right about Trump having early onset, Then the real chief of staff can be no one but  Jared Kushner.

    He may also be the only thing saving this country from the monkeys.

    Jack

  27. “The real chief of staff, will be family, some one who can have Trumps back.”

    jack, you’re right about that. they’ll not only have his back, they’ll prop him up as I mused above about mao.  they might go so far as hiring alec Baldwin to be a double.  we will have a hydra headed prez. who basically is not all there.

  28. Hey…. shouldn’t the title of this blog post be “Who Will the Democrats Run Against in 2020?”…   2016 is already in the books.

    I agree with Jack…. short of Trump dying or having some medical condition that renders him unable to be president…  such as a severe stroke…   or he actually goes out into the streets and shoots somebody….  he will be our next president for 4 yrs.

    I do think we will see a clown show between the establishment and the Trump people.  The establishment will try to control him and Trump will use the bully pulpit to talk directly to his voters to try to squash them.  I think I’ll need to make a shitload of popcorn.

  31. I think The Trump show will be Jimmy Carter joined  the circus. An outsider group, without a clue how Washington works and  from a party with a independent strong rowdy wing willing to cause trouble. Only Trump and his NY posse  isn’t Jimmy Carter and the Georgia Mafia.

    But can we have something besides popcorn?

     

    Jack

  32. But can we have something besides popcorn?

    Jack…  is that a simple request….  or something along the lines of…  “hey woman, me hungry…  make me somethin’ to eat…  and make it somethin’ I like…  uhggg”…    😉

  33. Renee,  good catch on the date of the next presidential election.

    And as crazy and unhinged I think drumpf is, Pense is so RW nutty, I’m not sure I’d prefer that. Were I a woman of childbearing age I know I would not.

  34. Fixed the year on the post, i should have caught that. Question remains unanswered: Who is on the Dem bench for next time?

  35. I think the bench is good but the candidates will emerge as leadership in the fight against Trumpadoodle

    There are some young westerners and one very old one (Jr Brown) why should the dems looks to current office holders

    experience is no longer a requirement …

  36. renee & craig, since the guy hasn’t been officially anointed yet, since there’s still a court case to be heard on nov 28th, since there are any number of things that might hit the fan before the electoral college meets dec 19…. who knows? might just well be 2016 deja vu all over again

  37. I’m assuming Judge Curiel will continue the trial until the summer.

    Poobah, will you have torches and pitchforks available or will we need to get them at the Dupont Circle Mercantile?

  38. grasping at straws looks like in this  alternet story re a call for recounts and audits in wisconsin, michigan and penn.  citing anomalies, faulty voting machines and fake absentee ballots.

  39. pogo, curiel already did drumpf a big favor by postponing it from the original schedule during the election ’til after.  see cnn story yesterday “The judge who saved Trump’s campaign”

    better to hold it now than when he’s too busy being prez.

  42. Proposed Burqa Ban Withdrawn In Georgia
    Too bad. The state’s governor, senators, and state legislature could have been arrested at the next cross burning.

  43. I Dreamt I Attended the Sessions Hearing

    Sessions : “I ain’t a racist. Wha, I once shared a motel room with a n…black lawyah.”

    Senator Hollings : “That’s mighty LIBBRULL of you, Mr sessions. Which one of you boys was on top ?”

  44. Craig – I think the Castro twins are pretty much “it” for Dems.

    So many young voters who would be Dems have fled, based on the failure of the DNC with Bernie.   Dem candidates may need to re-brand themselves if they want the next generation to buy what they’re selling.

    If the EC picks Hillary, will the Hillbots have a hissy when Trump’s supporters protest?  What’s good for the goose…

    San Antonio judge told new citizens that Trump will be their prez & if they don’t like it, they can leave.  He says he meant it as a uniting statement. Huh?

  45. XR: I have to say again that as much as I love Lizzie her time to win would have been 2016. I don’t think we should have any senior citizens in the running for 2020. We have to come up with fresh blood because after the disaster called trump the country will need a lot of vitality at the helm to put it all back together again. I hope the Democrats come up with a clear, young champion sometime in the next year or two. Probably someone we haven’t even considered yet. I’m keeping an eye out!

    As for young blood, I live in a city that voted in the youngest Mayor ever in 2011. He was barely out of college and I didn’t vote for him because he was running against a friend of mine. I was very skeptical but 2 years later when he ran for re-election I voted for him and again in 2015. He’s done a surprisingly good job. He’s done a lot to revitalize our city and bring in new innovative industry and other advances. His latest election came along with and increase in the mayoral term to a 4 year term. Besides being young, he’s also gay and Jewish, certainly not your typical elected official. I’m using this only as an example of thinking outside the box, which is what we need in 2020. We need another Kennedy. I don’t know if we’ve ever felt that hopeful and optimistic about our country since 1960. I’d like to feel that way again!

  50. granny, looking for someone more like 6th youngest senator joe biden who was 30 when elected or a young jerry brown type… who knows, maybe one of the new lady senators.

  52. from above reuters link

    U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has agreed to settle fraud lawsuits relating to his Trump University series of real estate seminars for $25 million, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.

    A settlement would end a dispute that dogged Trump throughout his presidential election campaign and led to one of the more controversial moments of his run when he claimed the judge overseeing two of the cases was biased because he was of Mexican ancestry.

    Lawyers for the president-elect have been arguing against students who claim they were they were lured by false promises into paying up to $35,000 to learn Trump’s real estate investing “secrets” from his “hand-picked” instructors.

    There are three lawsuits relating to Trump University: two class actions suits in California and a case brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. All of the cases would be covered in the possible settlement, the person said.

    The source asked not be identified because the agreement was not yet final.

     

    Schneiderman has said over 5,000 students across the country were defrauded out of about $40 million.

    The $25 million settlement agreement would include roughly $4 million to resolve Schneiderman’s claims, the source said. Lawyers for the students were not planning to seek attorneys fees, but reimbursement for costs.

    Trump’s attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment.

     

    U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over the two California cases, had urged both sides to settle.

    Trump said during his election campaign that Curiel, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents, could not be impartial because of Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to control illegal immigration.

    A trial in one of the cases was scheduled to begin on Nov. 28 in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

     

    “As Attorney General Schneiderman has long said, he has always been open to a settlement that fairly compensates the many victims of Trump University who have been waiting years for a resolution,” Eric Soufer, a spokesman for Schneiderman, said in a statement.

    Trump has said he did not “hand pick” Trump University instructors, but that marketing language used was not to be taken literally. He has said most students gave the classes high ratings.

    A court hearing in the case was set for Friday afternoon in San Diego. 

     

     

     

  53. So I guess Sarah Huckabee was paid in kind  a job for her loser father

    Wonder if they will make him director of public morals and abstinence

    Trump’s picks show the goopers are the ones with no depth
    he is picking nutters, retreads and losers – the best of the
    GOP

  54. Garrison Keillor: Life after the election
    It was gratifying that after Wisconsin voted him into the presidency, the gentleman did not talk about putting Hillary in prison. That was a nice surprise. And when he met with Obama of Kenya, the white sahib was well-behaved, listened to what the African had to say, did not interrupt or call him stupid, and in fact thanked the alien for meeting with him. He did a good impersonation of modesty.

    Say what you will, the man is flexible. The wall on the border, his reliable applause line this past year, has been downgraded to a fence in some places and may eventually turn into a line of orange highway cones. The 11 million deportees are down to two or three. Hillary may be let off with an ankle bracelet.

    [….]

    He will never be my president because he doesn’t read books, can’t write more than a sentence or two at a time, has no strong loyalties beyond himself, is more insular than any New Yorker I ever knew, and because I don’t see anything admirable or honorable about him.

    This sets him apart from other politicians. The disaffected white blue-collar workers elected a Fifth Avenue tycoon to rescue them from the elitists — fine, I get that — but they could’ve chosen a better tycoon. One who served in the military or attends church or reads history, loves opera, sails a boat — something — anything — raises llamas, plays the oboe, runs a 5K race now and then, has close friends from childhood. I look at him and there’s nothing there.

    But politics is not everything. Life goes on. A person has to keep that in mind. The day after the election, my wife and I set out to replace some burnt-out lightbulbs in some interesting fixtures chosen by an elderly interior decorator years ago. We are from Minnesota and we hesitate to impose our taste on others, even when we’re paying the bill. So we have several truly ugly and impractical light fixtures that use odd, rare bulbs not sold at Walmart, Walgreens, Ace Hardware or even at boutiques with names like Let There Be Light Bulbs. Long cylindrical bulbs. Perhaps handmade by Cistercian monks on a mountaintop in Montana.

    I voted for Hillary, so I’m an elitist, but still. We use regular old G.E. lightbulbs

  55. Nikki Haley–I’ve completely changed my opinion of her post Charleston. Although she does not have the experiential qualifications for many jobs, I suspect, with well chosen support, she could do State. That would give Flynn a coronary—a good thing.

  56. Well, applying trump logic he’s guilty of committing fraud and running and collecting charitable donations for an unregistered charity.

  57. I dunno Flatus.  She does that talking through clenched teeth thing. I never trust folks who do that talking through clenched teeth thing.

  58. Pat: Yes, a young Biden or Brown type would work for me too. Like Lizzie, Joe lost his chance by not running this year.

    So stumpy gets a slap on the hand for defrauding young people. They’re still losing $$s on the deal & he walks.

    A bit of humor: Anyone ever read the vanity cards at the end of The Big Bang Theory? I watch TV shows the day after so I can pause etc and I always pause and read those. They are usually amusing. This weeks card was no exception:

    Chuck Lorre Productions #543

    “I’m confused. Are we not supposed to pay taxes anymore? Or is that option just available for smart people? Also, where did we wind up on crotch grabbing? Just for famous people or is it something anyone can do now?”

  59. Renee,

    A couple of years ago we wandered around Maine NH and Vermont without ever seeing any hot spicy food. even Taco Bell only had mild sauce never mind Fire or Diablo. I started to call it the land of the bland. So popcorn is nice but some us need some spice. Just once in a while some flaming hot cheetos? Pretty please?

     

    Jack

  60. KumCho never went anywhere without a bottle of Tabasco sauce in her purse. She would always ask for some when we ordered but we were prepared just in case.

  63. Back when I traveled all the time I carried hot sauces in my briefcase along with other spices.  I do not consider Tabasco a hot sauce.

    Craig – the back bench of the Dems has been a concern for many years.  This last presidential selection circus showed there were no young Dems except O’Malley even ready to take on the R’s.  It is not just our little group of commentariats who have seen the problem, it was pointed out many times, often with pictures of the difference between the leaders of the Dems and the (youthful) R’s.

    What will the fate of the floater be during the next four years?  Not having checked out the odds yet, I am free of that knowledge. I tend to think he has a good chance at treason with impeachment a very good second choice.  Treason for his future life with Putin.  Impeachment for many reasons, including pissing off McCain.  There is also the possibility that movies of him at cocaine and sex parties with him participating in both with enthusiasm will surface.  Or he goes on trial for rape.  Will he make it through four years, I doubt it.

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