2020 Vision: ‘Buttabeep, Buttaboop,’ Buttigieg — Who’s winning the Oprah primary?
Welcome to 2020 Vision, the new Yahoo News column covering the presidential race. Reminder: There are 276 days until the Iowa caucuses and 549 days until the 2020 presidential election.
[Who’s running for president? Click here for Yahoo News’ 2020 tracker]
Like 'Butta'
A presidential primary can be seen as a series of races within a race. You have the fundraising primary led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who raised $18.2 million in the first quarter. (Former Vice President Joe Biden, whose campaign raised $6.3 million in its first 24 hours, is likely to challenge Sanders for fundraising laurels when the next quarter’s reports are in.) You have the policy primary led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who continues to roll out policy proposals at an impressive rate.
And then you have the media primary, which is a little harder to quantify. But buoyed by a string of buzz-building appearances on CNN town halls, talk shows and, this week, the cover of Time magazine, the leader of the media primary has to be South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The buzz surrounding Buttigieg has led to a bump in national polls (he came in fourth behind Biden, Sanders and Warren in three national polls released this week), to $7.1 million in donations in the first quarter and a million Twitter followers. But, perhaps most importantly, it’s earned him notice — and a nickname — from Oprah Winfrey.
“I call him Buttabeep, Buttaboop,” Winfrey told the Hollywood Reporter. “Just the other day, I was at Apple with [Steven] Spielberg and we were in the hallway talking about, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Have you heard of this Butta guy?’ He goes, ‘No, Butta-who?’ I go, ‘Buttabeep, Buttaboop. Look him up.‘”
Buttigieg doesn’t mind the attention.
“Somebody just said that Oprah mentioned me, which is arguably a bigger deal than coming in second in a poll,” Buttigieg said in an interview with WGBH radio in Boston on Tuesday.
“Honestly, this is not the trajectory we were expecting,” he added. “We thought we’d be spending the second quarter of this year mostly just making the case that we belong in this conversation.”
No matter the outcome of @TheDemocrats primary, Mayor @PeteButtigieg has already won for what he’s done for young #LGBTQ people across America. They’re now standing up a little taller and their dreams are a little bigger. #loveislove @TIME pic.twitter.com/9WQzpZ51LN
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) May 2, 2019
Note: Scaramucci, the former White House communications director, later clarified that he will support President Trump “100%” for reelection.
Democrats find unlikely friend in Fox News
The Democratic National Committee is barring Fox News from hosting any of its 12 presidential primary debates this cycle, but that isn’t preventing Democratic candidates from appearing on the network’s town halls.
Sanders already appeared on one, drawing the ire of President Trump. Up next: Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., whose Fox News town hall is on May 8, followed by Buttigieg on May 19 and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., on June 2. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Tex., may soon follow.
Sanders’s Fox News town hall in April drew an estimated 2.5 million viewers, or about double the audience for his CNN town hall.
“I don’t write anybody off in this country for their choice of cable programming.”
— Beto O’Rourke
Speaking of the debates ...
There are now 21 candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination. According to the Democratic National Committee, up to 20 candidates may qualify for the first debate, which will be held over two nights in late June. The New York Times reported on Thursday that 17 candidates have qualified so far. The four who have yet to do so: Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who announced his candidacy Thursday; Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who announced last week; Miramar, Fla., Mayor Wayne Messam and self-help author Marianne Williamson.
DNC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said the committee has no plans to raise the cap in order to accommodate more than 20. So what happens if more than 20 qualify? Per the Times, there are three tiebreakers:
• Meeting both the donor (donations from 65,000 people) and polling (1 percent in three polls) thresholds.
• Highest polling average.
• Largest number of unique donors.
“I think the choice that we face in this country today is the choice between freedom and socialism.”
— Vice President Mike Pence
Klobuchar’s $100 billion fight
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., rolled out an expansive plan to battle opioids Friday, proposing $100 billion to fight an epidemic that kills over 130 Americans per day. Klobuchar discussed the plan in terms of her father, who suffered from alcohol addiction for years.
“He had three DWIs, and what I saw was on the third one, that made him go to treatment,” said Klobuchar when asked on CBS This Morning how her father’s experience shaped the policy. “That was it, because he was facing jail time. When he went to treatment, in his words, he was pursued by grace. ... We’ve got to give them a chance. People in America are saying, ‘How can I get help?’ and that’s why we need more beds for both mental health and addiction, so people have a place to go so they can get that help.”
Among the features of the legislation are a national suicide prevention campaign, expanded funding for mental health treatment at the state and local level and a focus on recruiting health care workers to more rural areas. The plan would also include targeted campaigns to assist veterans, farmers, LGBTQ and tribal communities, which all see higher-than-average suicide rates. The plan would be paid for by a tax on drug sales, paid by the manufacturer or importer, at two cents per milligram of active ingredient. (A patient on long-term opioid therapy might be prescribed as much as 80 milligrams a day of oxycodone, a common pain medication, although that amount could be dangerous for first-time users.) While pharmaceutical companies have contended this would raise the costs for consumers, Klobuchar’s plan would exempt some opioids from the tax, including those used in cancer treatments.
— Christopher Wilson
“100.”
— Percentage of clean energy use in the United States by 2030 under Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s plan to combat climate change
Castro’s immigration plan
While many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have been widely condemned by Democrats, most of the 2020 presidential candidates have held back from presenting specific plans for reform.
In fact, of the 21 candidates currently crowding the 2020 Democratic primary field, just one so far has produced a detailed policy proposal on immigration: Julián Castro. On April 2, the former San Antonio mayor who served as secretary of housing and urban development under President Obama, unveiled his “People First Immigration Policy.”
Castro’s ambitious proposal includes many standard Democratic positions, including a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers,” for refugees with “temporary protected status” because they would be in danger in their homelands, and millions of others living in the U.S. without protection or other options for legal status. He pledged to undo a number of Trump administration policies, including the ban on entry for citizens of majority-Muslim countries and barriers to asylum seekers. He would reverse Trump’s large cuts to refugee quotas and expand the qualifying categories “to account for new global challenges like climate change.”
The proposal also includes bold reforms to the broader immigration system, starting with a repeal of the law that treats crossing the border without authorization as a federal crime rather than a civil violation. This statute, he notes in his proposal, “has allowed for separation of children and families at our border, the large-scale detention of tens of thousands of families, and has deterred migrants from turning themselves in to an immigration official within our borders.”
He also seeks to eliminate the private immigration detention and prison industry, and drastically reduce the population of detainees.
— Caitlin Dickson
“46.”
— Percentage of Americans who feel Trump’s use of Twitter will cost him reelection
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