Elizabeth Warren 2020 campaign megathread

[RI]

What about Elizabeth Warren is elitist? This has never made an ounce of sense to me.

She’s from Massachusetts and isn’t characteristic enough to offset said weakness.

Hell, shes even considered elitist in Massachusetts, mostly due to her occupation(Harvard professor), her speaking style, and her the appearance of being "out of touch".

It's funny because UChicago is almost as elite as Harvard, but Obama wasn't considered an "elitist academic" to nearly the same extent as Warren.

There's also the fact that Warren was tenured at Harvard whereas Obama was only ever a non-tenure track lecturer. Warren's was a career whereas Obama's was just something he did for a while.

[RI]

Elizabeth Warren says she would ban private prisons and detention facilities as president

While she can end BOP contracts to private prisons, I don't know that she can truly ban private prisons as most are contracted to state and local governments. I'm unclear on the extent to which the federal government can intervene into or void state/local public contracts.

[RI]

I wish single-payer advocates would at least be honest about the incredible number of people--throughout the healthcare industry--who will lose their jobs by such a switch.

[RI]

As an academic who holds an econ PhD, I'd like to chime in here on a few items:

1) First, regarding economics as a discipline, the field is indeed somewhat more conservative than most other social sciences (more than poli sci and sociology, for example), but not by that much, and this is rapidly changing. I've noticed a marked leftward shift in the types of journal articles which get published in economics just in the time since I started grad school.

This has come through a slightly complicated mechanism: the field of economics is extremely hierarchical by school, field, and journal to the point where only five journals really matter (AER, QJE, JPE, Econometrica, REStud) for tenure cases at noteworthy schools, and many tenure cases can be summed up by counting your publications in these journals. This movement has been caused by increasing ease of quantifying journal articles through Google Scholar and more robust impact factor measures. Your incentive as an econ professor is to pump out as many of these Top 5 articles as possible, and, as it turns out, the easiest route to doing so is publishing empirical papers over theoretical papers. Empirical papers follow where data, "relevance", and econometric "identification" are most available. This emphasis has meant that empirical econometric papers have become more and more trendy (e.g. income inequality, diversity, discrimination, etc.), latching on to flashy results with less and less anchoring in economic theory. As such, the type of professors who are being churned out by top PhD programs and hired by top schools tend to have good statistical skills, an eye for trendy topics, and diminishing skill in economic theory.

At the same time, econ has seen a number of #metoo scandals among the top schools (who have the worst gender norms) which has lurched sentiment toward increasing emphasis on diversity and representation (which ironically does not punish the top, but the lower schools who do not have as bad of gender norms). The end result is that the post-recession "baby Ph.D. boom" has seen a huge rise in the number of left-wing econ professors getting academic positions (especially women and minorities) while more traditionally conservative econ PhDs tend to get pushed into industry/consulting/think tanks. This has moved the point of emphasis in standard Econ 101 classes leftward as well: we're seeing textbooks with increased focus on trendy left-wing topics and emphasis on caveats to right-wing theories whereas caveats to left-wing theories are downplayed (all econ theory has a myriad of caveats, of course).

2) Regarding "liberal indoctrination" at colleges, I think it does exist to an extent, and professors do play a role, but it is an exaggerated one outside a couple fields. The primary cause of liberal lurches by college students are A) lack of rule enforcement away for parental supervision which allows for previously taboo behavior and B) a social environment where "involvement" and "difference-making" is incentivized-- campus activities tend to exhibit network externalities and increasing returns to scale as larger and louder groups see higher returns both during your time on campus and beyond through alumni networking. Thus, if you want to both belong and maximize your future gains, you are incentivized to join groups which reinforce the dominant campus mores and norms, including lax personal morality but a globalizing left-wing social morality through which your "impact on the world" can manifest. Because, after all, virtually all of the notable causes you'll encounter which are endorsed by the in-crowd are of a left-wing bent; while other worthy causes may occasionally find representation in on-campus groups, these groups often receive less funding, less administrative support, are less likely to find a faculty advisor (as most profs are left-leaning), and lower priority in event planning, etc.

And really, more so than faculty political views (which tend to manifest in subtle ways such as topic or example choice outside of the most politicized fields like sociology or gender studies), this feedback loop all goes back to administrator politics. Campus administration has ballooned since the recession, and its mainly ballooned thanks to Obama-era reforms such as expansive Title IX changes. This has meant a boatload of new left-wing administrators who literally have jobs to pander to every possible group except white men (who are ironically far more underrepresented in college student bodies than basically any other group) and Asians, plus loads of new financial resources for every "diverse" group under the sun. College presidents have heard this sea change and have caved to every demand of these new admins who now possess far more power than ever before in on-campus internal politics.

This massive influx of admins due to Obama-era governmental mandates and changing academic social norms has created a ton of new outlays for the college budget, necessitating large tuition hikes (which are inelastically absorbed thanks to student loans) and an ever-increasing focus on bringing in more and more international students who can be charged higher rates than domestic students. This has increased the on-campus advocacy of lax immigration and visa laws, both my administrative fiat and by a larger number of students to advocate for these causes. The timing of this with Trump's more strict immigration advocacy has sharpened the already anti-Republican attitudes nascent on college campuses across students, faculty, and admins.

At the end of the day, if you want to belong and succeed on campus, you follow the trends-- that rule applies to students, faculty, and administration alike-- which is ironic given that many idealize college as a time of free-thinking and self-discovery.

[RI]

Three reasons Warren is totally unelectable.
1 - her senate result she performed terribly in republican areas in Massachusetts. Democrats out performed her in same districts across massachusetts. She will be disaster with uneducated voters. In places she underperformed are the same places a democrat needs to win in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Colorado.
2 - her Massachusetts history is an anchor on any democratic nominee. Nobody that is democratic does well.
3 - Trump will crush her. She will do well with crazy college educated young people but to working people who are doing well won't vote for her.

4- She will not get the minority turnout she needs to win

[RI]

The notion of prescriptive political cycles is utter nonsense.

[RI]

Black women are a decently sized voting bloc who are 98% Democratic. Turning them out is going to be important for any Democrat. I think we would all be better off with less racially polarized politics, yes. But as it is, this group has earned the respect they get from Democratic politicians.

But the marginal black voters, the ones who came out for Obama and maybe even HRC but who are not guaranteed votes in 2020, are mostly younger black men.

Which happens to be the group with abnormally high Trump support.

[RI]

Black women are a decently sized voting bloc who are 98% Democratic. Turning them out is going to be important for any Democrat. I think we would all be better off with less racially polarized politics, yes. But as it is, this group has earned the respect they get from Democratic politicians.

But the marginal black voters, the ones who came out for Obama and maybe even HRC but who are not guaranteed votes in 2020, are mostly younger black men.

Which happens to be the group with abnormally high Trump support.

Ahahhahahah

Laugh all you want. There have been several polls suggesting this, including the recent NYT poll.