Salena Zito writes from Westby:

Spend any time with people who supported presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 and you quickly find out that the reasons they voted for Trump had very little to do with him.

It is likely one of the most misunderstood threads among this new conservative populist coalition. To get the real reasons for their support for Trump, you have to be where they are, have no preconceived ideas about who they are and have no prejudice for what you think their motivations are.

Tom Schaub, Ralph Petersheim, Donna Leum, Kris Amundson, and Ben Klinkner are all sitting around a large conference table at the Westby Cooperative Creamery in this Vernon County town. There is a pot of coffee and an oversized box of doughnuts. The aroma that only bakery-fresh doughnuts can provide radiates throughout the room.

All four are dairy farmers. Schaub is president of the co-op. Petersheim has been recognized for his water and land conservation efforts by the county, earning him the Outstanding Conservation Farmer Award for his impeccable land efforts. Leum’s family owns a 53-cow dairy, and both of her adult children are in different aspects of the dairy agriculture industry. Amundson’s family produces 17,200 pounds of milk per cow each year for the cooperative. Klinkner is a sixth-generation farmer on his family’s organic dairy farm.

They are all board members of a co-op that was formed more than 117 years ago by local dairy farm families searching for a way to develop a sustainable market for their milk and dairy products in their creamery.

Individually, they are superhumans. Not only do they work the dawn-to-dusk hours required to bring you cheese, yogurt, milk, sour cream, and any other dairy delight that fills refrigerators (cows are milked twice a day every day of the year), they are devoted conservationists of the soil and water, and are tireless volunteers dedicating countless hours to the 4-H club, local schools, their churches, and the co-op board.

They all said their vote for Trump wasn’t for him but rather for their communities.

It was an abstract and complicated decision that rarely makes sense to people who don’t walk in their shoes, live in their ZIP code, or understand how long establishments within both parties have let them down, their parents down, their grandparents down, and their children down.

“People who don’t know farmers or live near or in a farm community have little idea of why we feel so connected to our place,” said Leum. “But they do seem to have strong opinions about who we are, and when they find out we supported Trump, they look at us as that dumb farmer who doesn’t know any better.”

“Well those dumb farmers, they’re an electrician. They’re a plumber. They are mechanics, scientists, conservationists. They take care of the crops that fill their cupboards, [who] love and care for the animals who provide dairy and meat for their feasts. They are also vets and engineers,” she says with pride and a broad smile. “I mean, we have all these skills because you cannot keep calling repair people, so you do it yourself. So actually, I think we are pretty darn smart.”

Overall, there are 68,700 farms in Wisconsin covering 14.4 million acres of land. They provide nearly $90 billion for the state economy every year and employ more than 400,000 people statewide.

There are nearly 8,500 dairy farms in Wisconsin. Hundreds of them shuttered in 2019, continuing a 10-year trend the co-op board members said is largely based on a complex pricing system and fixed costs being spread over a wide swath of production.

“On the co-op level, we’re given an advance price of what the milk is supposed to be for the month, so we base all of our prices on the products that we’re making and selling,” explained Schaub. “And then when the final price comes in, it can be a $2 difference.”

“Well, that $2 difference. … There’s no way to make that up, so, then you have a loss for that month. Then, you string too many months like that in a row, and that’s when things get rough,” he said, adding that the eventual result could be bankruptcy.

All five farmers like Trump’s policies. His demeanor? Not so much. But they knew Trump would come through with better trade deals, which he did with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Vernon County is one of the 23 counties that voted for then-President Barack Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump in 2016.

While many national outlets have parachuted into the Vernon Counties of the last presidential race to ask voters about Trump when the trade deal dragged on, when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released and when Trump was impeached (and acquitted), few journalists ask voters how they got here in the first place. Furthermore, few members of the Republican and Democratic establishments who mock farmers behind closed doors (or openly on social media) have reflected meaningfully about why farmers picked Trump over their establishment candidates.

Despite moans from the chattering class saying there have been too many stories on Trump voters, farmers such as these have a story to tell about lives focused on faith, family, and farming. Few who actually know them could argue they’re not creating a profound benefit for the entire country.

Jonah Goldberg:

The Bloomberg and Bernie battle is almost like a comic book come to life. The two combatants cover almost every cliché on the right-wing scorecard.

The right couldn’t have invented a better candidate than Bernie Sanders. In 1971, he was kicked out of a commune for talking too much. In 1987(!) he recorded a folk album. The following year he got married and left the next day for a combination fact-finding delegation and honeymoon in the Soviet Union. When he returned, he sounded a bit like Lincoln Steffens, the famous journalist who had said of the USSR, “I have seen the future and it works.” In Steffens’ defense, he visited in 1919, two years after its founding and before most of the inconvenient mass murder and starvation. Sanders thought the Soviet Union was the future three years before it collapsed.

Of course, this isn’t why most of his fans like him. He was on the right side of the civil rights movement when it really mattered. He’s been a consistent advocate of what he calls democratic socialism here at home all his life. And, he’s an unreconstructed enemy of the economic elites, particularly the hated “billionaire class.”

Which brings us to Michael R. Bloomberg, who sits atop the 1% of the 1%. Bloomberg is a perfect stand-in for a completely different kind of liberalism, one that doesn’t even like to call itself liberal. He headlined the launch of No Labels, an organization dedicated to getting ideology out of politics. A lifelong Democrat, he switched labels to become a Republican to run for mayor in 2001. By his third term he was an independent. Now he’s a Democrat because he’s running for president.

As mayor of New York, he was a poster boy for a kind of arrogant progressive-post-partisan technocratic government that prizes data over feelings. The data showed that obesity cost the healthcare system money, sugary sodas contributed to obesity, so Bloomberg said let’s clamp down on them. The data showed that young black men committed most of the gun homicides, so Bloomberg said, let’s clamp down on them with stop and frisk. “Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” he explained in 2015.

In a new video going around, Bloomberg offers a quasi-endorsement of “death panels.” “If you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, [we] should say go and enjoy, you’ve lived a long life, there’s no cure. We can’t do anything,” Bloomberg says. “If you’re a young person, we should do something about it. Society’s not willing to do that, yet.”

This isn’t why his fans like him. For a long time he was an icon of the credentialed upper class who saw ideological culture war fights as so much boob-bait. More recently, he’s become the liberal’s “Chicago way” response to Trump. If the right comes at you with a billionaire would-be Putin, you come back with a bigger billionaire and would-be Lee Kuan Yew.

Both men represent two strands of liberalism with very long pedigrees. Sanders can trace his lineage back to antiwar socialists and populists like William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Debs, as well as to reformers like Jane Addams. Bloomberg’s antecedents can be found in the democracy-skeptical “disinterested” progressive pragmatists like Walter Lippmann, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Wisconsin school economists. Usually these two strands intertwine and overlap, (Barack Obama had a foot in both camps. He was both the anointed leader of a mass movement and the overseer of the Affordable Care Act, with all of its data driven rationing). But when stripped to their purest elements, one camp is all about solidarity and people power and the other is about technocratic expertise.

Like Trump, both men are beneficiaries of our hollowed-out political parties, which are incapable of performing the gatekeeper function of the nomination process.

And that raises the stakes of their contest. Trump has transformed much of the GOP in his image. Too weak to protect their own brand, the Republicans have adopted his.

If either Sanders or Bloomberg wins the nomination, it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to Democrats. If it’s Sanders, will they become a populist party of Social Democrats? Or if it’s Bloomberg, will the Democrats become the party of bureaucratic authoritarianism?

Again, normally Democratic politicians straddle these two tendencies. There are, of course, still other options for primary voters. But the choice between these two is zero-sum, and if either man wins, the Democratic Party could end up making a choice that will define it as much as Trump has come to define the GOP.

Timothy P. Carney:

Mike Bloomberg once pointed to the in utero child of an employee and said “kill it, kill it,” according to two witnesses.

According to another female employee, he would say of attractive women, “I’d like to do that piece of meat.”

“It’s a f—ing baby,” Bloomberg reportedly yelled at another female employee when she was scrambling to find a nanny for her child. “All it does is eat and shit! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn’t even have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building!”

It’s easy to assume that Bloomberg, like the man he wants to replace in the White House, is simply selfish, crude, and misogynistic. It’s tempting to see Bloomberg’s cutthroat capitalism as unrelated to, or even at odds with, his social liberalism. But there’s a bigger story here, a pattern that becomes clear when you consider Mike Bloomberg in full.

Bloomberg’s odd apology for China’s authoritarian communist regime is not some weird blind spot. His embrace of stop-and-frisk policing was not just some New York City thing. And his nanny-statism on sodas, cigarettes, and trans fats is not merely an over-enthusiasm for clean living.

Nor is Bloomberg an inconsistent thinker or some nonideological independent. He has a very clear view of the world that underlies his economic policies, his social policies, his personal life, and his behavior. Bloomberg’s ideology is neither left nor right. Instead, his worldview is supremely materialistic, and ultimately inhuman.

In Bloomberg’s eyes, any talk of the dignity of the human person is mawkish sentimentality. Mike Bloomberg doesn’t see people as ends in themselves, but instead as means to ends.

Begin with Bloomberg’s disturbing warmth toward China’s regime. Bloomberg News has, according to insiders, spiked stories that were critical of the regime. Bloomberg also kicked off his current presidential run by praising China’s environmental record and lauding the way the government holds power, in addition to rejecting the idea that Xi Jinping is a dictator, suggesting that a majority of the population approves of his rule.

At best, Bloomberg is saying that individual liberty and free expression can be suppressed, so long as the guy suppressing them could, in theory, find public support for it — and by “support,” he’s not necessarily referring to a free election. That’s unnerving, coming from a guy running to become president.

In this context, consider his Big Gulp bans, his smoking bans, his trans-fat bans, and his tireless campaign to outlaw guns. Bloomberg clearly rejects the notion that ordinary people should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Treating adults as adults and respecting their self-determination is not something Bloomberg believes in.

So, how then to understand his massive support for Planned Parenthood, his 100% pro-choice record on abortion, and his call to deregulate abortion clinics? Just go back to his workplace conduct.

Telling an expectant mother to kill her baby, mocking a new mother’s desire for quality child care, cursing whenever a female employee gets pregnant, and publicly denigrating marriage among professional women all reflect a clear and consistent mindset: The women who worked for him were worker bees. Their humanity, their fertility, their love, and their human attachments were all impediments to productivity. He saw these women as means to his ends of profit.

Hence the misogyny, the keeping of a girlfriend in every city (and bragging about it), the jokes that some employees’ value was in providing sexual favors — that all fits in, too.

Once you see Bloomberg as someone who rejects the dignity of the individual, his attitude toward policing makes sense. The virtue of his “stop-and-frisk” practice, Bloomberg once explained to a crowd of elites, was that officers would stop black and Hispanic children without probable cause and “throw them up against the wall and frisk them,” so as to scare them straight.

That may seem to you to be inhumane and demeaning. Bloomberg sees that as being realistic. The former mayor tellingly described criminals and crime victims in New York as all being the same: “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops.”

Human beings, to Bloomberg, are not unique creatures, all deserving freedom, respect, and dignity. They are not ends in themselves, in Bloomberg’s eyes. People are either inconveniences to be ignored or terminated (babies), threats to be neutralized and intimidated (minority males), corporate machine parts to be exploited for profit (employees), or tools for sexual gratification (women).

It may look like Bloomberg’s views and policies are all over the place, until you see people the way Bloomberg does. And once you’ve seen him for what he is, you can’t unsee it.

Jim Geraghty:

Another cautionary note about Bloomberg that is emerging: His critics on the right and on the left see the same traits that trouble them.

Zaid Jilani: “It’s hardly a surprise that Bloomberg is on record defending the Chinese system of government, insisting that Xi Jinping is “not a dictator”. Bloomberg sees himself as an enlightened autocrat, who uses his money to get around inefficient democratic processes.” …

We probably all know someone in life who is a genius or indisputable runaway success in one area — making money, working out computer problems, cooking, understanding the tax code, being a coach, sorting out engineering problems — but who is not nearly as wise and astute in other areas of life. His relationships are a mess, he freezes up when speaking in public, he’s socially awkward, he micromanages others. Human beings are rarely good at all tasks.

Mike Bloomberg is that kind of personality who believes that because his judgment was proven correct in one area — building a fortune — that his judgment must be inerrant in just about all areas. (You no doubt have noticed that the current president is not exactly a bubbling fountain of humility, modesty, and self-effacement, either.) Colorado Springs and Pueblo are “a part of Colorado where I don’t think there’s roads.” Bloomberg is unconvinced God exists, but believes that if He does, “when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.” He declared, “if you want to have a gun in your house, I think you’re pretty stupid.”

If you disagree, hey, he’s the eighth-richest man in America, and you’re not. What could you possibly know that he doesn’t?

Jim Geraghty:

Assume, for a moment, that the Democratic primary comes down to a choice between Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg. (Some might argue that it already has; yesterday the Bloomberg News organization reported an exclusive that the Bloomberg presidential campaign organization believed that the race already came down to Sanders and the Bloomberg presidential candidate. That strikes me as premature, as well as far too many “Bloomberg” monikers in one sentence.)

That said, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe contends that right now Sanders is on pace to lock up a pledged delegate lead he will not relinquish by Super Tuesday, March 3. The Vermont senator wouldn’t clinch the nomination that day. But he would be so far ahead that he would be virtually guaranteed to go into Milwaukee with an insurmountable lead in delegates. At that point, the party couldn’t afford not to nominate him. He would finish about 20 percentage points ahead of anyone else.

For Democrats, the decision in the coming weeks may come down to a particularly challenging conundrum. If you nominate Sanders, how many anti-Sanders Democrats and independents drift away in the general election? And if you nominate Bloomberg, how many anti-Bloomberg Democrats and independents drift away in the general election?

The Trump campaign and fans of the president shouldn’t fool themselves; the vast majority of people supporting either Sanders or Bloomberg are going to vote for the eventual Democratic nominee. But “vast majority” might mean about 80 to 90 percent, and that might not be enough where it counts when all the votes are tallied on Election Day.

Did Sanders voters cost Hillary Clinton the presidency? Many political scientists have gone through the exit polls and come up with different estimates of just how many Sanders primary voters ended up voting for Trump in the general elections. The low end of estimates is 6 percent, the high end is 12 percent. Political scientist Brian Schaffner put it at 12 percent nationally, and offered a state-level estimate: In Wisconsin, 9 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump, in Michigan, 8 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump, and in Pennsylvania, 16 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump. That comes out to about 51,000 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin of victory was 22,000. That comes out to about 47,000 voters in Michigan, where Trump’s margin of victory was 10,000. That comes out to about 116,000 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin of victory was 44,000. Notice that even if you cut the Sanders-to-Trump estimates in half . . . you still end up with a sum larger than the Trump margin.

In other words . . . yeah, Bernie Sanders voters ended up making Donald Trump president in 2016.

The good news for Democrats is that nominating Sanders brings back at least a chunk of those voters. A “socialist grandpa” candidate doesn’t give off a vibe of urban elitist condescension. The bad news for Democrats is that nominating Sanders probably loses a chunk of Hillary Clinton voters.

Down-ticket Democrats aren’t mincing words: Nominating Sanders puts a lot of them in danger of defeat in November.

“They’re terrified,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., the first House Democrat to endorse Buttigieg, told ABC News of his colleagues’ response to Sanders’ rise. “Very few people see Bernie as electable.”

“It could be challenging in parts of the country that we have to win in order to win the presidency and win a majority in the Senate,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., a centrist who dropped his own White House bid after the New Hampshire primary, said Thursday of a Sanders’ nomination.

Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a New York Democrat fighting for reelection in a district carried by Trump in 2016, wouldn’t commit to supporting Sanders if he becomes the party’s nominee for president.

“He won’t be the party’s nominee,” he said Thursday when repeatedly asked if he’d support Sanders in the general election. “I’ve made it clear that I think we should nominate a more moderate candidate who has the ability to reach across the aisle and get things done.”

A House Democrat in a swing district who did not want to be identified told the New York Times that if the Democrats nominated Sanders, “there is a growing concern among especially those of us on the front lines that we will not only lose the White House but the House of Representatives.” Texas Democrats believe Sanders would torpedo their hopes of big gains in the state legislature.

Socialism — explicit socialism, wearing the label proudly — has only niche appeal in this country. The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed 42 candidates in 20 states in 2018. None of their senatorial candidates won, neither of their gubernatorial candidates won, and three of their twelve House candidates won: incumbent Danny Davis in Illinois, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. As you may have noticed, those are heavily Democratic districts.

Wait, there’s one other wrinkle, and I’m not making an age joke. Sanders said yesterday he had changed his mind and will not release any more of his medical records. This is a 78-year-old man who had a heart attack in October. At the time, the senator’s campaign said he had been hospitalized with “chest pains,” and three days later announced he had a heart attack and that doctors had inserted two stents.