The 2020 Primary's Getting Ugly Even Before It Really Begins - Michael Tomasky

Trump should be eminently beatable—so long as Democrats don’t beat themselves. I’m worried.

Michael Tomasky
01.03.19 5:07 AM ET

Oh God, here we go again. Another Democratic primary. And this one’s going to last 18 months.

I hate them. I hate everyone involved in them. I hate myself for being tangentially involved in them.

We have a madman president. Every day, a new screw comes loose. He’s at 40 percent in the polls and is probably going lower. Most of the country thinks he’s a disaster. He ought to be eminently beatable in 2020. But I can’t shake the feeling that the Democrats are going to fuck it up. People are already going a little nuts.

Remember the wake of the 2016 battle? I do. I think. I seem to remember everyone agreeing that the one thing Democrats can’t afford is a repeat of the 2016 bitterness. And I’m pretty sure I recall being reassured, in columns and on social media and what not, that I shouldn’t worry, Democrats won’t let that happen again.

Right. It’s already happening. Have you followed the process over the last couple months by which Beto O’Rourke has suddenly become a centrist hack stooge of capital? Lord, that was fast! Just two months ago, David Sirota, the Bernie Sanders partisan, was tweeting that O’Rourke should be the next speaker of the House. But more recently, Sirota has torn into O’Rourke, and others have followed suit, and O’Rourke’s defenders took to Twitter, and that feud has already convinced a lot of us that our worst nightmare is all but inevitable.

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