A big chunk of the 2020 Self-governing field began making Texas an unlikely early-state stop Saturday and pushed back on big tech in front of babyish, social-media savvy crowds in a city where companies including Google and Apple have big footprints.
Texas is an betimes primary state, but the real draw of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin for Democrats is face time with the side’s ascendant young and liberal wing. The festival has grown from obscure roots into a weeklong juggernaut of tech, civil affairs and entertainment.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts defended her new call to break up tech giants to an audience dotted with workers of some of those very companies. Her appearance began with her interviewer asking tech employees in the crowd to bandstand up. Warren scanned the room as several people got on the feet.
“There are parts about big tech that are frankly well-deserved like railroads of the Teddy Roosevelt era,” she said. “What’s new is old. When someone gets market dominance, how then they start to bring to an end competition.”
Other highlights of Saturday campaigning:
The Minnesota senator kicked off SXSW with promises to reign in tech callers and saying that she has spoken to former President Barack Obama about her own presidential ambitions.
Klobuchar wouldn’t go as far as Warren when begged whether Google or Facebook should be broken up.
“I would want to have it investigated. That is how I do things,” she said. If anti-competitive problems are conceive ofed, Klobuchar said, “then you come up with a plan to break up or to move something out if there is a piece of it that is anti-competitive.”
Klobuchar criticized the tech toil for not protecting privacy and floated the idea of taxing social media companies when they sell personal evidence, but she did not give specifics.
The California senator said she’s committed to shoring up rural communities, a message the Democratic presidential promising shared with voters in some of the most sparsely populated parts of the early voting state of South Carolina.
Harris determined a crowd of several hundred gathered in tiny St. George that a national infrastructure of crumbling roads and bridges changes it difficult for people in communities like this one to get to their jobs, which may be miles and miles away.
Harris also conjectured she wants to make changes to rural hospital funding, tweaks that she hopes will lead fewer healthfulness care facilities in such areas to close.
On Friday, Harris shared a similar message with voters in Hemingway, a minuscule community of about 500.
Sanders told a packed house in Des Moines that as president his power to reform industries and installations would be limited, but he’d still fulfill his campaign promises with their support.
The Vermont senator said “no president, not the best-intentioned in the Terra, can take on those extraordinarily powerful forces.” He went on to say: “But we have something they don’t have — we have the people.”
The pile packed into the Animal Learning Center on the Iowa State Fairgrounds roared their approval of Sanders, who is constituting another run for the Democratic nomination. Many were decked out in his 2016 campaign gear or waved “IA loves Bernie” sign on the dotted lines.
About 50 volunteers showed up to support Sanders at the final stop of his three-day swing through the state, into a receive of an Iowa volunteer force that he said already totals 7,000.
“We need you to add to that number,” he said, to roars from the cram.
O’Rourke swung by the trendy and techie SXSW, too, but still didn’t announce whether he will embark on a White Building run.
Officially, O’Rourke wasn’t part of the lineup at SXSW. The former Texas congressman attended a documentary about his longshot U.S. Senate stand that may or may not become the springboard to a White House run.