Thread by @studentactivism

As I noted yesterday, the NYT endorsement decision was made, and endorsement editorial was written, by one person. That's how it always works. It isn't a collective choice

https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1219110721478414337

The Times narrowed the pool down to four candidates by asking every member of the editorial board to pick their top two, and they read off those ballots during the announcement show, but it passed very quickly and I haven't seen anyone tweet the list yet.

I've currently got the show running on mute on my TV (no fast-forward on on-demand), and when it gets to the reveal of the ballots I'll add them to this thread.

My moderately strong hunch, though, is that the number of editorial board members who picked Warren and Klobuchar as their top two is no higher than one. Could literally be zero, and if it's over two I'll eat my hat.

All of which is to say that as always, if you want to understand a collective decision, it's useful to understand the process by which that decision was made.

Okay, so we're up to the vote part of the show. Important context: The vote was taken on December 17, nearly a month before Booker dropped out.

The votes:

Warren Klobuchar
Biden Klobuchar
Booker Warren
Bloomberg Buttigieg
Warren Biden
Biden Booker
Klobuchar Booker
Warren Buttigieg
Klobuchar Buttigieg
"Buttigieg, obviously"
Warren Sanders
Warren Booker
Warren Booker
Klobuchar Booker
Klobuchar Buttigieg
Klobuchar Warren

That's the tallies as they were announced onscreen. I saw a tweet with slightly different numbers a little while ago—not sure what its source was.

If we go by what was shown on screen, it's eight votes for Warren, six each for Klobuchar and Booker, five for Buttigieg, two for Biden, and one each for Bernie and Bloomberg.

Most popular pair was Booker/Warren, with three votes. Warren/Klobuchar—the ultimate endorsees—got two votes out of fifteen cast. (As did Klobuchar/Warren and Klobuchar/Buttigieg.)

If these numbers are right, Warren was the only candidate picked by a majority of voting members of the NYT editorial board, and three quarters of the board members who supported her DIDN'T also support Klobuchar.

(Since somebody asked, there's no indication in the show that the top-two votes were ranked. Order doesn't seem to be significant.)

Oops: I miscounted. It's seven for Klobuchar, not six. Sorry. So Warren with eight, Klobuchar with seven, Booker with six, Buttigieg with five.

My takeaway: What a ridiculous process. (As presented. Maybe there were additional meetings that weren't shown or discussed on screen.) If nothing else, wouldn't you want to meet again after your third-place guy dropped out?

"With Booker out, it's down to Warren, Klobuchar, and Pete. Send me your top two of those, ranked. Thanks." —An email that seems like it would have been reasonable to send to the NYT editorial board.

Anyway, that's enough time wasted on this silliness, so I'll close with the one thing that I and the NYT ed board can agree wholeheartedly on:

Don't vote for Biden in the primary.

Thinking about the NYT ed board ballots some more, I realized what they should have done, if they wanted to do something weird: Endorse a Warren/Booker ticket. Not a co-endorsement, a prez/veep ticket.

If you think of the left wing of the field as Warren and Bernie, Booker as a wild card, and the centrist wing as everyone else, four of the NYT ballots were all centrist and another four were mixed left-centrist. Booker got six votes—half Booker-Warren, half Booker-centrist.

A Warren-Booker ticket would have at least one candidate on it who eleven out of the fifteen voting members of the NYT ed board placed in their top two, and it would have been a way for the Warren skeptics to nudge the discussion of her candidacy.

Plus it would have been, you know, endorsing an outcome that was actually a thing that could happen in the world.