Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg's campaign was mocked Friday for editing a clip from a CNN town hall that included inserting fake applause after a remark made by the 38-year-old presidential candidate.

"To me, that is not just a concern for our generation, it's a concern that calls on us to build an alliance among generations to try to make sure that the future really is better than the past," Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said in answering a question from an audience member in New Hampshire.

In the live CNN event on Thursday night, Buttigieg's answer did not compel the audience at Saint Anselm College to break into applause.

But in a clip shared by the campaign on social media, applause was added.
The audio edit was flagged by the Center for Democracy Action, a group that supports Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The politically powerful Culinary Union hasn’t yet endorsed in the Democratic presidential primary, but it is making clear which candidates it won’t be supporting.

A one-pager from the union, the kind of document usually distributed in employee dining rooms and break areas, obtained by The Nevada Independent obliquely accuses Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren of wanting to take away union members’ hard-fought and much beloved health plans and warns that electing either candidate will lead to four more years of a Donald Trump presidency.

The union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their family members through a special trust fund, strongly opposes the Medicare-for-all plans the two candidates support, which would eliminate the union’s health plan by design.
However, until now, union leaders have directed their ire more generally at the policy than the candidates who back it.

“Trump and his Republicans are actively trying to destroy healthcare for working families, but presidential candidates suggesting forcing millions of hard working people to give up their healthcare creates unnecessary division between workers, and will give us four more years of Trump,” the flyer says.

Though the handout does not mention either candidate by name, Sanders and Warren are the only two remaining candidates in the Democratic presidential race who back Medicare for all.

Twitter is demanding that Rep. Devin Nunes’ lawyer pay its legal fees in a new court filing responding to one of the Republican congressman’s attempts to identify anonymous people who heckle him online.

Nunes is suing Twitter in a Virginia court, but the new filing is part of a lawsuit that is not related to the California lawmaker.
Nunes’ attorney, Steven S. Biss, also represents former public relations executive Trevor Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon is suing a former colleague who accused him of sexual assault, Jesselyn Radack.

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article240046358.html#storylink=cpy

In an indication that Republicans would most like to run against Bernie Sanders in the November general election, Trump-supporting leaders in South Carolina are urging GOP voters to support the Vermont senator in the state’s primary on Feb. 29.

It’s a clear effort to damage Joe Biden’s candidacy further as the former VP will be relying even more on South Carolina following his lackluster performance in the chaotic Iowa caucus.

According to The Hill, “The plan – orchestrated by Greenville GOP chairman Nate Leupp and several other prominent Republican Party leaders – revolves around GOP leadership’s belief that Sanders poses the least amount of challenge to President Trump in November’s general election and its goal of getting the Palmetto State’s Democratic lawmakers to agree to close the state’s primaries.”

Independent Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders saw his support among black voters crater by more than half in a national poll amid a roiling controversy over his decision to brag about an endorsement by comic Joe Rogan, and stand by it after the comic’s history of bigoted remarks emerged.

Sanders was enjoying a bit of a surge with black voters in the weekly Economist/YouGov poll, going from 12 percent three weeks ago to 17 percent the following week in a poll that was taken two days after Sanders tweeted a video of Rogan praising the candidate’s consistency and saying he would “probably” vote for Sanders.

But in the most recent poll, taken Sunday through Tuesday of this week, Sanders’ support among black voters has plunged to eight percent.

There’s no way of telling exactly what caused the swing, but the Rogan controversy began to erupt just before last week’s poll was taken, as past comments by Rogan — including a clip in which he compared a black neighborhood to the fictional Planet of the Apes — began circulating, and the Sanders campaign responded by standing by their embrace of the endorsement in spite of those comments.....

Elsewhere in the same poll, former Vice President Joe Biden maintained a massive lead among black voters, but his support did slip slightly, from 46 to 43 percent, while former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg — who has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on ads so far — surged from three to 11 percent, and Mayor Pete ticked up three points with black voters — from one percent to four. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was the only other candidate in double digits with black voters, maintaining 14 percent in both polls.

As Democrats select their 2020 presidential nominee, a constellation of left-leaning groups is looking ahead, laying groundwork for huge voter turnout in November by filing an avalanche of voting-rights lawsuits against state laws they say suppress participation in elections.
The groups, including state and national party committees as well as outside nonprofits, are spending millions of dollars to fight voter-registration purges, ID requirements and rules regarding signature-matching and ballot order, and they are also hiring voter protection staffers and recruiting and training volunteers in key states.

Democratic donors are flooding the wide-reaching legal effort with millions of dollars not only to help defeat President Donald Trump in 2020 but to affect elections all the way down the ballot — from the Senate and the House to the governorships and state legislative races that will shape redistricting and the next 10 years of state political maps.

“The next decade is really on the line here,” said Patrick Rodenbush, communications director for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “No matter who we nominate to be president, no matter who wins in the fall, if we don’t get redistricting right, that next president is gonna be hobbled by a gerrymandered House of Representatives and state legislatures around the country to try to block their agenda.”

Republicans capitalized at the state level in the last census-year election, a midterm election bookended by the election and reelection of Barack Obama. In interviews, Democrats cited Obama’s 2008 election as the impetus for a Republican push to enact new restrictions and regulations on voting — ones that often affect Democratic constituencies.

“From 1965 up until 2009, it became relatively easier to vote in the United States,” said Aneesa McMillan, Priorities USA’s strategic communications and voting rights director. “What you saw after the election of Barack Obama were these laws essentially targeting the folks who made up the Obama coalition.

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton furthered her comments discrediting Sen. Bernie Sanders as a viable presidential candidate on Thursday, insinuating that his potential failure to "deliver the moon" would detract from efforts to rebuild public trust.

When asked by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres if she wanted to address her prior remarks about the Vermont independent, Clinton noted that while she originally made them about a year and a half ago, "I have a pretty clear perspective about what it's going to take to win, and as I said earlier, that's what I think the key calculation for any voter has to be."

"You've got to be responsible for what you say, and what you say you're going to do," Clinton added. "We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can't deliver the moon, then that's going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can't trust each other."

Sanders' campaign declined to comment Thursday. When Clinton's previous remarks surfaced last month, Sanders said in a statement that his focus was President Donald Trump: "Together, we are going to go forward and defeat the most dangerous president in American history."

Clinton's comments Thursday come as Sanders is in a near-tie with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses. As of Thursday afternoon, with 97% of precincts reporting, Buttigieg remained the leader of the race, with 26.2% of state delegates, while Sanders closely trailed with 26.1%.

Clinton's prior comments about Sanders, her 2016 opponent in the Democratic primary, were aimed directly at his core campaign appeal -- that he's a political outsider pitching revolutionary change.