Who would be a better candidate for the Democrats between these two?

[Crumpets]

Two candidates who occupy a very similar wing of the party, and two of my top choices for 2020 at least for now.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing and the Midwestern background.

But Gillibrand has the fundraising connections and personality.


I'm gonna go with Klobuchar but either one would be good albeit for completely different reasons.

[Mr. Morden]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

[Mr. Morden]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

The two are pretty much in the same place on domestic policy, and Klobuchar is to Gillibrand's right on foreign policy.  (In fact, if you exclude the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Klobuchar has probably shown more hawkish tendencies than any of the likely 2020 Dem. candidates.  She is following Hillary Clinton's 2000s playbook on that score.)  Not sure by what standard Klobuchar would ever stand out as the "true progressive" in the race, unless she's only running against Andrew Cuomo (or against Cory Booker, and the main issue being debated is drug imports from Canada ).

The main Sanders-ista complaints against Gillibrand I've heard are not actually about policy, but about the fact that Wall Street gives her too much money, and that she attacked Sanders (from the left!) on guns in last year's presidential primary.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

The two are pretty much in the same place on domestic policy, and Klobuchar is to Gillibrand's right on foreign policy.  (In fact, if you exclude the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Klobuchar has probably shown more hawkish tendencies than any of the likely 2020 Dem. candidates.  She is following Hillary Clinton's 2000s playbook on that score.)  Not sure by what standard Klobuchar would ever stand out as the "progressive" in the race, unless she's only running against Andrew Cuomo (or against Cory Booker, and the main issue being debated is drug imports from Canada ).

The main Sanders-ista complaints against Gillibrand I've heard are not actually about policy, but about the fact that Wall Street gives her too much money, and that she attacked Sanders (from the left!) on guns in last year's presidential primary.

Exactly. The Wall Street big money issue and attacking Sanders are far more important to them then if Klobuchar is slightly more hawkish on foreign Policy. They'll take Klobuchar any day over Gillibrand. Bernie's record also showed that he had hawkish tendencies.

The most important issues to them are: 1. Domestic policy 2. Big money in politics 3. Did you attack Sanders to defend Clinton?

Gillibrand breaks all 3 of those rules. Klobuchar only breaks the first one but she has plenty of time to redefine herself on that front. All of the left wing new media outlets I've seen have all gone after Gillibrand but not one has mentioned Klobuchar.

[Del Tachi]

Gillibrand would probably have an easier path to the nomination, and generally seems more charismatic.  I think she would positively benefit from an NY fundraising base as well.

[Senator-elect Spark]

Klobuchar

[American2020]

Klobuchar

[GoTfan]

Amy Klobuchar. Less big money connections.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

No, the Bernie wing would vote for someone else or stay home. And while I'm certainly not a Gillibrand fan, she does have a more liberal voting record.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

No, the Bernie wing would vote for someone else or stay home. And while I'm certainly not a Gillibrand fan, she does have a more liberal voting record.

Let's be honest. If the primary ended up being a contest between Klobuchar and Gillibrand to begin with, then it would clearly signal to everyone that either Klobuchar won over the Bernie wing, or that the Bernie wing was utterly clueless at fielding a candidate to begin with.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

No, the Bernie wing would vote for someone else or stay home. And while I'm certainly not a Gillibrand fan, she does have a more liberal voting record.

Let's be honest. If the primary ended up being a contest between Klobuchar and Gillibrand to begin with, then it would clearly signal to everyone that either Klobuchar won over the Bernie wing, or that the Bernie wing was utterly clueless at fielding a candidate to begin with.

Most of the candidates mentioned as running are not from the Bernie wing. Warren is Bernie-lite, and pretty much all of the others are non progressives who endorsed Hillary in the primary.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

No, the Bernie wing would vote for someone else or stay home. And while I'm certainly not a Gillibrand fan, she does have a more liberal voting record.

Let's be honest. If the primary ended up being a contest between Klobuchar and Gillibrand to begin with, then it would clearly signal to everyone that either Klobuchar won over the Bernie wing, or that the Bernie wing was utterly clueless at fielding a candidate to begin with.

Most of the candidates mentioned as running are not from the Bernie wing. Warren is Bernie-lite, and pretty much all of the others are non progressives who endorsed Hillary in the primary.

How would define the progressive wing of the Party? And who besides Sanders, Gabbard, and Warren are part of it?

[MAINEiac4434]

Klobuchar can seem so boring in interviews, and I feel like her thick Minnesota accent will also be a detriment.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

Klobochar isn't remotely a progressive. Her voting record is barely to the left of Dianne Feinstein.

That wasn't my argument. In a contest between herself and Gillibrand, she would win over the Bernie wing.

No, the Bernie wing would vote for someone else or stay home. And while I'm certainly not a Gillibrand fan, she does have a more liberal voting record.

Let's be honest. If the primary ended up being a contest between Klobuchar and Gillibrand to begin with, then it would clearly signal to everyone that either Klobuchar won over the Bernie wing, or that the Bernie wing was utterly clueless at fielding a candidate to begin with.

Most of the candidates mentioned as running are not from the Bernie wing. Warren is Bernie-lite, and pretty much all of the others are non progressives who endorsed Hillary in the primary.

How would define the progressive wing of the Party? And who besides Sanders, Gabbard, and Warren are part of it?

Well, some people are more progressive than others, such as Bernie being more progressive than Warren. The primary last year showed there were a lot fewer progressives than I thought, but there's more to it than who they endorsed in the primary; Sherrod Brown is a progressive and Dan Lipinski is not.

[Del Tachi]

SOPA/PIPA would probably kill Klobuchar with the r/BernieBro crowd

Agree with jfern that Klobuchar is not a progressive at all, and probably would not excite the Bernie crowd

[MAINEiac4434]

SOPA/PIPA would probably kill Klobuchar with the r/BernieBro crowd

Agree with jfern that Klobuchar is not a progressive at all, and probably would not excite the Bernie crowd

Ooh, forgot about that. Kirsten could probably parlay herself into the more progressive candidate by pointing to her record on Trump's appointments.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

Easy Gillibrand. I mean, this isn't even debatable. More liberal on domestic policy and better overall on foreign policy.

Klobuchar would NOT win over the Bernie wing. I mean, why would she? Just because she's from a state Bernie won in the primary? Well, so's Heitkamp! So's Donnelly!

[Mr. Morden]

Klobuchar has the support of the Bernie wing....

Huh?  Since when?

Well not now but she would if she ran and there were no other progressives in the race.

Generally speaking they don't like Gillibrand.

The two are pretty much in the same place on domestic policy, and Klobuchar is to Gillibrand's right on foreign policy.  (In fact, if you exclude the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Klobuchar has probably shown more hawkish tendencies than any of the likely 2020 Dem. candidates.  She is following Hillary Clinton's 2000s playbook on that score.)  Not sure by what standard Klobuchar would ever stand out as the "progressive" in the race, unless she's only running against Andrew Cuomo (or against Cory Booker, and the main issue being debated is drug imports from Canada ).

The main Sanders-ista complaints against Gillibrand I've heard are not actually about policy, but about the fact that Wall Street gives her too much money, and that she attacked Sanders (from the left!) on guns in last year's presidential primary.

Exactly. The Wall Street big money issue and attacking Sanders are far more important to them then if Klobuchar is slightly more hawkish on foreign Policy. They'll take Klobuchar any day over Gillibrand. Bernie's record also showed that he had hawkish tendencies.

The most important issues to them are: 1. Domestic policy 2. Big money in politics 3. Did you attack Sanders to defend Clinton?

Gillibrand breaks all 3 of those rules. Klobuchar only breaks the first one but she has plenty of time to redefine herself on that front. All of the left wing new media outlets I've seen have all gone after Gillibrand but not one has mentioned Klobuchar.

I think Gillibrand gets more attention largely because she’s better known, and also because she’s done a few things that hint at presidential ambition since the election in November.  Klobuchar’s hinted at presidential ambition too, but most of her hints came pre-November, when people weren’t paying attention to this stuff like they are now.

On the criticizing Sanders point, I think this is kind of fighting the last war.  Really, neither Gillibrand nor Klobuchar have received the kind of attention from even close political observers that they would get if they ran a presidential campaign.  So most observers only know a few things about them, and latch onto those few things as their defining characteristics.  (Which is partly why so many think of Gillibrand as Clinton 2.0, since Gillibrand is a woman who took Clinton’s Senate seat and they’re both “establishment"….which ignores the fact that Gillibrand’s presidential strategy is very different from Clinton’s….though still not one that the Sanders crowd would likely get excited about.)

Anyway, I say it’s fighting the last war because it’s something recent.  Gillibrand criticizing Sanders was one of the few times in the past year that Gillibrand would have penetrated the national radar, so people make it out to be very important right now, though if Gillibrand were to actually run for president ~2-2.5 years from now, that event would have been years in the past, and who Gillibrand attacks in *that* presidential campaign, or how she conducts herself or what she campaigns on…that would overshadow whatever she was doing in 2016.  Not that I expect her to win over many Sanders fans with her 2020 campaign, but I don’t expect that of Klobuchar either.

On the topic of getting campaign contributions from Wall Street….well, this is related to this thread about the Sanders worldview, and how he seems to suggest that anyone advocating positions to the right of him must be motivated by corruption (in other words, they’re getting paid off by campaign contributions).  I suppose if the Sandersistas all believe that, then simply receiving contributions from Wall Street is some kind of cardinal sin, though it would be nice if these folks would walk me through what specific policies they think Wall Street is buying from Gillibrand and others in her corner of the ideological spectrum, because all I ever hear them say is that there are these campaign contributions, so that alone is disqualifying.

As far as what policies on financial regulation Gillibrand is friendly to Wall Street on….all I could find from minimal searching are these examples….

In 2011, she joined with other New York state lawmakers that complained about how financial regulators were applying Dodd-Frank rules to derivatives:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43098418?_source=thestreet&par=thestreet

Also in 2011, she voted for an amendment on debit card swipe fees that was mostly supported by Republicans:

link

Is there more to it than that?  Or is it really just the fact that Wall Street donates money to her, independent of the actual policies she advocates?  I concede that I haven't paid close attention to Gillibrand's stands on financial regulation issues, so if anyone has specific examples they want to cite, please list them.

[Lord Halifax]

Klobuchar, for exactly the reasons why everyone here seems to believe that Gillibrand would have the advantage.

Huh? Do you actually consider her to have more charisma?

[Fuzzy Bear]

I do think that the two of them on the ticket together might prove daunting for Trump.

[Confused Democrat]

Here's a novel thought:

They're both terrible choices!