NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president, a move that puts de Blasio in a position to become a leading voice in opposition to Sanders’ newest rival, Mike Bloomberg, his predecessor in leading the nation’s largest city. De Blasio, an unabashed liberal who was elected in 2013, will campaign for Sanders in Nevada this weekend, the Sanders campaign said Friday in a news release. De Blasio hopes to be a significant surrogate for Sanders four years after he dithered about his presidential endorsement and, late in the primary process, backed Hillary Clinton instead of the Vermont senator, who shared far more of his ideology. “I am standing with Bernie because he stands with working families, and always has,” de Blasio said in the news release. “New Yorkers know all too well the damage caused by Donald Trump’s xenophobia, bigotry and recklessness, and Bernie is the candidate to take him on and take him down De Blasio, whose own 2020 presidential bid ended with a whimper months before any votes were cast, could play an important role for Sanders, who now sits atop the progressive portion of the Democratic field, as the senator squares off against several more moderate choices, including Bloomberg, who led New York for the 12 years before de Blasio. De Blasio’s 2013 campaign was styled as a rebuke to Bloomberg, who oversaw a city that rebuilt itself after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to become the nation’s safest biggest city and leading tourist destination. But Bloomberg’s tenure also saw a sharp rise in income inequality and concern about police tactics like stop and frisk, which disproportionately affected communities of color. De Blasio, who has frosty relations with his predecessor, has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the billionaire’s late presidential bid. “This is a Democratic Party today that’s getting more progressive, that wants to address the concerns of working people, that does not accept the status quo,” de Blasio said after Bloomberg announced his candidacy. “There’s no way in the world we should nominate a billionaire who epitomizes the status quo.” The Bloomberg campaign declined to comment Friday on the endorsement. Additionally, the strongest piece of de Blasio’s political base at home has been African American voters drawn to his promises of police reform, combating income inequality and his biracial family. And the mayor aims to stress those bona fides just as the Democratic nominating process heads to far more diverse states like Nevada and South Carolina. De Blasio has long sought to play an outsize role on the national stage trumpeting progressive ideas but has struggled to raise his profile much beyond New York City. A presidential forum he sponsored ahead of the 2016 election was canceled because of a lack of interest from candidates, and his own advisers have expressed regret as to how he handled his endorsement for that campaign. Although de Blasio was far more aligned with Sanders, he also had a debt of loyalty to the Clintons; he was the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate run in New York, and the former first couple presided over the mayor’s inauguration in 2013. But de Blasio sat on his choice for months, and his eventual lukewarm endorsement for Clinton led to him being banished to a secondary role at the Democratic convention and on the campaign trail.Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

“New York values” aren’t for everyone, or at least not enough voters in the Democratic primary seemed to like the New York values of the Big Apple’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. He is out of the 2020 race. “I feel like I’ve contributed all I can to this primary campaign, and it’s clearly not my time,” de Blasio said Friday in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’m going to end my presidential campaign, continue my work as mayor of New York City, and I’m going to keep speaking up for working people.” Many in the town he’s run since 2014 breathed a sigh of relief. They never wanted him to run anyway. Before de Blasio even entered the race, New Yorkers were urging him not to, according to polling by Quinnipiac University. In April, a month before he declared his intentions, 76% of voters in that metropolis thought that their mayor would do more harm than good on the national stage. And just to emphasize their point, Quinnipiac pollsters noted that “every listed party, gender, racial, borough and age group agrees that the mayor should not hit the campaign trail.” A national electorate felt the same way, and de Blasio remained in the polling basement, though he did qualify for the first and second primary debates by topping the 1% support threshold. On the first stage in Miami, de Blasio fared well enough. Then he decided to quote Che Guevara while rallying with striking workers the next day. It didn’t go over well with the anti-communist communities in the Sunshine State. De Blasio apologized. On the next debate stage in Detroit, he offered no further apologies. He just attacked other, better-known candidates as insufficiently progressive. De Blasio went after South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg over policing in that Indiana town, assailed Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet for “fearmongering about universal health care,” and attacked the front-runners for being too beholden to the moneyed elite. “Joe Biden told wealthy donors that nothing fundamentally would change if he were president,” de Blasio argued. “Kamala Harris said she's not trying to restructure society. Well, I am.” It didn’t work. And a sense of desperation set in as the campaign continued. De Blasio agreed to an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity where the two New Yorkers shouted at each other about municipal as much as national matters for the better part of an hour. He was the first candidate to go on the top-rated prime-time talk show. He weathered attacks about his views on increasing the minimum wage, his record on policing, and his habit of driving “to Brooklyn eight miles away to do your stupid workout” -- a Hannity reference to the mayor’s populist effort to connect with local people by exercising at an outer-borough YMCA. Either Democratic voters weren’t watching those exchanges or they weren’t impressed. De Blasio didn’t make the stage for the third debate in Houston, and by dropping out he provides a tacit admission that he never had a shot at qualifying for the fourth contest next month in Ohio. Now an also-ran, de Blasio pledges to do his best by offering support and advice: “Whoever our nominee is, let's make sure we're speaking to the hearts of working people and they know we're on their side. And if we do that, we're going to win. If we don't, this is an election that could go the other way.” It is not clear whether any candidate would turn to the mayor for counsel. If anything, they are more likely to look to Buttigieg, the mayor of a Midwestern city with a fraction of New York’s population. Where Buttigieg offered new insights and new energy, de Blasio provided stagnation and an unwelcome distraction. His dropout was a delight to Republicans, and a source of sarcastic glee at the White House on Friday morning. “Oh no, really big political news, perhaps the biggest story in years! Part time Mayor of New York City, @BilldeBlasio, who was polling at a solid ZERO but had tremendous room for growth, has shocking dropped out of the Presidential race,” President Trump tweeted. “NYC is devastated, he’s coming home!” he concluded. Hardly a hometown hero in the liberal metropolis, Trump nonetheless may have struck a chord with New Yorkers. According to polling, de Blasio has a job approval rating of 42% approve/44% disapprove. Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Joe Biden reclaimed his spot two weeks ago as the most-covered 2020 Democratic presidential candidate across both television and online news. He continued that trend this past week, but a closer look at coverage across CNN, MSNBC and Fox News shows some interesting differences in how the three news channels are covering the 2020 field. The bar chart below shows the number of mentions for each candidate from Sept. 2-7 on CNN, MSNBC and Fox using data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive as processed by the GDELT Project. (More detail on the search terms used for each candidate is available here.) For a larger view, click on the chart. Biden clearly has a commanding lead over his rivals, yet a closer look is instructive. The bar chart below limits the graph above to just candidate mentions on CNN and ranks the candidates according to that metric. Here the ordering at the top is roughly identical, though Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker received the exact same number of mentions, whereas in the graph above Booker had just half the mentions of Warren.  Biden has 1.77 times as much coverage as Bernie Sanders. Looking at mentions on Fox News, the top three of Biden, Sanders and Warren holds, but Bill de Blasio rockets to fourth position, up from 14th on CNN. On Fox News, Biden received 2.5 times as many mentions as second-place Sanders. Turning to MSNBC, Biden has 2.3 times the mentions of the next candidate, but this time it is Warren in second place, rather than Sanders. As on CNN, Booker moves into fourth place.   Perhaps the most interesting graph is the one below, showing the combined number of mentions of the 2020 field across the three channels. It seems Fox News paid the most attention to the race last week, covering the candidates 1.17 times more than MSNBC and 2.36 times more than CNN.     The same graph, but showing all mentions of the candidates since Jan. 1, 2019, can be seen below. Here MSNBC is in the lead, but Fox News is second with CNN third. It seems that even when looking across the entire past year, CNN has paid slightly less attention to the 2020 race than its peers.   In the end, Biden, Warren and Sanders make up the top three no matter what cable news channel you look at, but MSNBC has slightly favored Warren (behind Biden) in terms of mentions, whereas Sanders takes the number two slot on CNN and Fox News. The rest of the field varies across all three outlets, reminding us that the image we see of the 2020 race depends on where we look.RealClear Media Fellow Kalev Leetaru is a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. His past roles include fellow in residence at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/