So primary season for 2020 has opened, and the first target is Bernie:

Has the fire Berned out?" the Boston Globe's Michael Levenson asks on the front page.

The state of play: "[A]s Sanders weighs another campaign, some say that even as he has moved the Democratic Party ideologically — pushing issues such as Medicare for all, free college tuition, and a $15 minimum wage into the mainstream — the party has moved past him personally."

Today, I received an e-mail from MoveOn.org asking me to donate five dollars in order to fund a new commercial attacking Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The commercial would focus on the prospect of Trump getting his hands on America's nuclear weapons. As the e-mail stated:

Donald Trump's climbing in the polls.1 It's time to go nuclear. (In a way.)

MoveOn made an important discovery in the course of our intensive research this summer: A key bloc of swing voters appears to be most strongly persuaded to vote against Trump when confronted with the threat of his finger on the nuclear button.2

As part of this research effort, our Video Lab made an ad, ran the video online to show it to voters in swing states, and teamed up with researchers at the Analyst Institute to study its effectiveness—and the results blew us away.

In our controlled study, men over the age of 30 who watched our video about Trump's finger on the nuclear button were seven percentage points more likely to support Clinton over Trump, compared to those who didn't watch the ad.

Given his at times erratic behavior, concerns over Trump getting the bomb are understandable. However, the people at Move On failed to consider the issue of their own candidate getting the bomb, which is arguably concerning in its own right.

My Gut Reaction: Somehow, I don't think someone who threatens to annihilate Iran is a safe option for the presidency, either.

More below the fold...