Quote from: theymos on February 20, 2020, 06:20:19 PM

Bloomberg was utterly destroyed in the debate, especially over the #MeToo stuff, which Democrats are sensitive about. He looked like a lost Republican who somehow found his way onto a Democratic debate stage. (Which is in fact sort of what happened...)

Now the question is whether Bloomberg is at 16% in the polls mostly due to real support that was only sparked by his spending, or mostly due to throwing boatloads of money at very-low-information voters who won't be affected by this or any debate. If the former, this debate performance will probably sink him, and maybe Biden or Pete will take up the "not Bernie" mantle. (Note that Pete has the most delegates at the moment, even though the media has seemingly forgotten about him.) If the latter, Bloomberg can continue on, but it'll be challenging for him in the general, since a huge segment of his party will hate his guts, and it's looking like Trump will be able to tear him to shreds. On the other hand, if he can buy the Democratic nomination, I'd feel as though he might also be able to buy the presidency. One major thing he'd have in his toolkit would be that he could use his money and market knowledge to make the stock market do whatever he wants -- probably he'd be able to create a huge crash & continuous downward trend starting a few months before November.

Since I want a contested convention, I'm hoping that someone other than Sanders wins Nevada, though I'm not sure who that'd be. Maybe Biden can pull it off? He had a decent debate performance.

Bloomberg was horrible. He did have one or two good hits at Bernie, but everything besides that was a disaster. He truly was unprepared for this, and I'm surprised by that. You'd think his advisers would've keyed him in on literally everything that could've happened in this debate -- as he literally is paying for the best advisers to be around him.

I do think that there is a large segment of the party -- the moderates supporting Pete, Klobuchar, Biden and now Bloomberg would be able to find common ground in one anothers candidates and unite around them. This is the test against far left socialist wing of the party. Nevada is the real test here.