Tulsi Gabbard appears to be driving the Democrats even more nuts than they already are (and that’s really saying something).  On the one hand, fears are rising that she would undertake a third party run, as lefty Jonathan Chait writes:

Tulsi Gabbard has been slowly edging toward leaving the Democratic Party and, it now seems more likely than not, launching a spoiler candidacy to peel disaffected left-wing votes away from the Democrats. Her “present” vote on impeachment, followed by a disavowal of what she called the “zero-sum mind-set the two political parties have trapped America in,” sets the stage for Gabbard to play the role of 2020’s Jill Stein.

On the other hand, the DNC just snubbed her in a new ad:

With less than a year until November 3, 2020, we must come together now and work towards the common goal of defeating Donald Trump and sending a Democrat to the White House.

Join us today: https://t.co/BI3HJf0bk2 pic.twitter.com/HxihCR50LF

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) December 23, 2019

Missing from the ad are Gabbard, joined by, as Leah Barkoukis noticed:

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, Sen. Michael Bennet, author Marianne Williamson and former Rep. John Delaney were not featured either.  But the fact that [Deval] Patrick, who is polling much lower than Gabbard, was featured, makes the Hawaii Democrat’s exclusion especially curious. 

Twitter video screen grab

My guess is that Gabbard’s “present” votes in impeachment have made her persona non grata in the DNC, so they just couldn’t possibly bring themselves to include her in the group assembled for the ad. In fact, the entire party power structure now sees her as a pariah, if not a traitor, as Lloyd Billingsley reports:  

Former congressman and Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports, has called for Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to resign “the sooner the better” following her vote of “present” on the articles of impeachment against President Trump. (snip)

“Trump won the election in 2016,” Gabbard said in the CNN debate that turned out to be more of an impeachment inquest and socialist shout-out. In effect, Tulsi Gabbard was saying, “Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016,” a clear violation of the Democrat speech code. The former First Lady had been repeating the claim that she defeated Donald Trump, telling PBS “Obviously, I can beat him again,” and that she was panting for a “rematch.” With Tulsi Gabbard, as with Trump in 2016, Clinton saw the evil hand of Russia at work.

“I’m not making any predictions,” she told POTUS 44 retread David Plouffe,  “but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” a clear reference to Tulsi Gabbard.  “She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said, “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” Plouffe closed out the interview citing Hillary’s “belief that Tulsi Gabbard is going to be a third-party candidate, propped up by Trump and the Russians.”

The former First Lady and Secretary of State cited no evidence for her claim and the Russian bots and such proved elusive. Even so, Clinton’s charge became the new party line for the Democrat-media axis. “If Tulsi Gabbard runs,” tweeted POTUS 44 UN boss Samantha Power, “it would be a huge windfall for Trump, Assad, Putin, Xi.” For her part, Gabbard noted that the New York Times and CNN were also claiming she was a “Russian asset.” This, she said, was “completely despicable.”

I chalk this up to TDS. Democrats are so consumed by hatred that any deviation from the party line is regarded as treason. Heaping abuse and humiliation on Gabbard thereby driving her onto state ballots as a third-party candidate would be suicidal. But deranged people are incapable of acting in their own self-interest.

The only way this is “rational” is that a third-party run would give Dems another excuse for losing, much as they blamed Jill Stein for Hillary’s defeat in 2016. But given the lust for power at all costs that characterizes Dems, self-destructive impulses like this make no sense, other than as a gauge of their madness.