My liberal sister crossed the line to vote for Kasich in VA. My nutball cousin also voted for Kasich, but he may have already been a Republican.
Why is the NYT "calling" Vermont for Sanders with 0% of the vote in? Not that I doubt he'll win, but it casts the whole notion of "calling" in a bad light.
Didn't vote
If world does go pear-shaped in the next year (see thread below on AGW) I think I would rather have someone who could go Louis Napoleon and Sanders ain't that.
Don't you mean Napoleon I? Louis Napoleon sucked it from pretty much all angles except boulevard creation.
Does this mean you are against American boulevard exceptionalism?
AIHMHBAD, Marx's point in the 18th Brumaire is that if you fail to guide populist unrest, you end up with Donald Trump Louis Napoleon.
So, is Sanders going to do better in Georgia than in SC? (Right now he's losing by 40% instead of 50%) Why would that be?
So, is Sanders going to do better in Georgia than in SC? (Right now he's losing by 40% instead of 50%) Why would that be?
Nate Silver says:
Exit polls had Clinton beating Sanders by 25 percentage points in Virginia and 31 percentage points in Georgia, which is pretty close to pre-election polls in both states. Clinton's margin among actual votes so far is larger in both states, but there aren't many votes counted yet.
So if you're looking at counted votes that may (or may not) be less accurate than the exit polls.
Also, why has Vermont not started reporting?
Also, I know it's a lock, but it still seems...tempting fate to call VT for Sanders with 0% of the vote in.
Well right but Bob seems to be hoping for a new Louis Bonaparte as a positive thing, which is an admirably unique political position in America ("I'm a Bonapartist. No, not that kind. The other, more "as a farce" kind.")
9
If Sanders ends up "merely" losing GA by 30%, what makes that state more favorable to him than SC? More poor whites?
Also, quick predictions based solely on my spidey sense (disclaimer: I haven't checked any state polls or 538):
MA - Sanders wins comfortably, but not a blow-out 5-10%
AL - Clinton landslide, in between GA and SC
TN - Clinton wins, but it's reasonably close 5-10%*
MA, AL, TN - TRUMP WINS!!!#$)#@$(#@!!!
*This one is most made up. Clinton has neighboring state advantage, + south, though, more poor whites, history of labor (coal mining). Could be completely wrong in the prediction.
AIHMHBAD
"As I have mentioned here before aiglet demonstration"?
Goodbye, super Tuesday, did you vote for Trump or Cruz?
Global Warming gonna hit like a tsunami.
I am presuming the recognition among experts that a full command economy is necessary will become visible by fall. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
Course, I said here that I wanted Obama to do it in 2008.
This isn't cause I tend toward authoritarianism; quite the opposite. It is because the dangers are that serious and that immediate, and the opposition is homicidally crazy. I think a lot of the security establishment can be brought aboard. I have no idea about foreign policy and how it plays out overseas; this is an argument against Clinton; Sanders and Trump could pull back and go isolationist.
Optimism kills.
Enough;forget it; enjoy the evening; events will refute me or not.
oops, I forgot OK. MSNBC says Sanders is up a bit in exit polls.
D'j'y'all see the exit polls of Republicans on supporting a ban on Muslims entering the US? 78% support in Alabama. Jeezum Crow.
More poor whites?
No, more rich urban whites. There's no Atlanta in South Carolina.
I'm playing the prediction markets for the first time. It's fun!
Looks like I'll have made some money betting on Ted Cruz by the end of the night.
5 - Louis Napoleon sucked apart from actually being reasonably good at running the country and avoiding stupid wars (apart from one.) So, ah, I guess, if you have to, better Napoleon III than I.
You know, there's nothing quite like a "express a preference" (cough-vote-cough) caucus that you can leave after to make clear what "high density housing" means, especially in a relatively liberal part of the city full of young people. That line stretched through multiple rooms.
Huh. Despite Jerry Falwell Jr endorsing him, at Liberty University's precinct, it's Rubio 513, Cruz 387, Carson 162, Trump 90.
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NMM to the XV International Brigade
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I'd like to keep an eye on Super Tuesday states with new voter ID laws as of this election: Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia.
Though that piece focuses on the effect on the Dem primaries in those states, I could certainly see issues among some Republican primary voters as well.
24: At my friend's precinct over on West 7th, they had a 2 block line.
That sounds about right. It was only a one block line to get in. But there were multiple caucuses going on in the building so there were additional, almost as long, lines to get to the actual places where the caucuses were happening.
This shit's crazy
Vermont Sanders 88.2 Clinton 11.6
Alabama Clinton 73 Sanders 19.9
Oklahoma Clinton 47 Sanders 46
(all early; but I haven't seen massive changes this year as vote finalizes)
One block line in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood, with another block's-worth of line inside the building. Unless for some reason, your last name starts A-D, in which case you could breeze through.
Why is the NYT "calling" Vermont for Sanders with 0% of the vote in? Not that I doubt he'll win, but it casts the whole notion of "calling" in a bad light.
They call states when the exit polling is unambiguous, I thought.
Huh - Buzzfeed says Sanders won Oklahoma.
36
Yeah, he's up by 11% right now. I'm not sure what makes OK so different from TX or IA or TN. I figured it was kind of a southern state and would probably go for Hillary. Maybe it bodes well for Sanders in the southern Midwest?
Well, don't know about Iowa. Then maybe turnout?
The Democratic Party in Oklahoma is minuscule compared with Texas. Small samples make big swings a lot easier.
Iowa is caucuses, which is an entirely different and more manipulated thing. Have we all forgotten the screaming hot takes about the "coin flip"? It's like that was a momentary and meaningless outrage.
39
Also, I remembered, IA was a caucus, and it's highly likely Sanders won the popular vote. Maybe not by 10%, but maybe OK is more similar to IA.
This is also the perfect result if you want to rat fuck the Republican party. Cruz wins two, but does poorly enough that he's still definitely a clear third. Cruz is not going to drop out, after all, he's won three to Rubio's zero. Rubio isn't going to drop out, because he's a strong second in most states. They're each going to get 20-25% of the vote in each state, allowing Trump to win with 35-45%. I don't see how this process ends any time soon.
No lines to vote Democrat in Dallas. My Republican friend told me it took him and his wife an hour and a half to vote in Highland Park for early voting on a weekday.
Yeah, Bernie's finished. Hillary better win this thing.
Trump is being gracious to Ted Cruz and punching Rubio in the LOSER balls. Best part was he said something like, "I can beat Clinton. Marco can't be Clinton. If Ted wins he could also beat Clinton, because after all, unlike Marco he has won something."
Huh. He says he's going to build a safe zone in Syria for refugees and make the Gulf States pay for it.
I'm not sure what makes OK so different from TX or IA or TN. I figured it was kind of a southern state and would probably go for Hillary.
I think Ed Kilgore's explanation is correct: the Sanders vote is a proxy for how a state's Democrats feel toward Obama. Has little to do with left or right, and a lot to do with Black or White. He speculates that Sanders will win WV for the same reason.
Also, gun politics have a huge influence in those states.
Wow Kasoch has a shot at winning BT? How embarrassing for Rubio is Kasoch wins more states than him.
Wow that was the drunkest typoey comment ever.
Most shocking to me so far: MA at 49% for Trump. I knew there were some real racist motherfuckers in MA. But 49% of Republican primary voters?!
Wow. That was just about all he could say. Wow.
If Kasich wins VT, that's even more delicious. There's no way the dude who's professional Miss Runner-Up in the Miss American Dystopia pageant to demand actual WINNERS drop out.
I saw something that said Trump does better in places with high union membership.
Ugh. THis is the worst. I let you guys trick me into thinking about electoral politics and this is what I get: .83 reporting. Jerks.
the Sanders vote is a proxy for how a state's Democrats feel toward Obama.
I guess this makes sense. I've had a hard time figuring out why she's been so popular among blacks this election, especially after she didn't exactly cover herself in glory in the way she opposed Obama in 2008. I get that her husband was popular among blacks, but her South Carolina margins go way beyond what that would explain.
Unions pull people who might vote for Trump to the dems
Rubio is up in MN, but only 10% reporting. How many people are even in Minnesota? There are 10,000 lakes but like five people and three of them comment here.
57: Especially in states like South Carolina, the Democratic establishment is black. Backing the establishment candidate, who was also one of the the most prominent members of the Obama administration, isn't really that surprising.
I am happy that my friends who used to be freaks and weirdos, and still kind of are, but are moving rapidly towards conventionality, will still do things like going to their caucuses to propose planks supporting marihuana legalization.
Well, it's up to 15% now, with Sanders leading everywhere except the Sixth District.
CO and MN are both good places for Sen. Sanders, and it looks good for him in both right now.
Yeah, Sanders is doing ok, still serious underdog, but well enough to raise some important questions.
Huh. They're calling it for Clinton in MA, which surprises me. That seemed like prime Sanders territory.
Good thing I sold my Sanders shares in MA at a five cent profit this morning, then.
What disturbs me preliminarily is that Sanders is doing much better in all the swing states. Why should I care if Democrats in southern states prefer Clinton (or that Democrats in New England prefer Sanders for that matter)? That'll do jack-all to get the Democrat elected. The only states that matter are IA, NH, NV, VA, MN, CO. And Sanders is ahead in 3 of those and close in two others.
March 15 (FL, OH, NC) is also big, and then the only remaining swing state is PA on Apr 26. I suppose WI on Apr 5 if Walker has poisoned the well enough.
Equally frightening is that Rubio is ruling the swing states on the Republican side (except NH). He's definitely the scariest option in terms of his potential to win the general.
The MN map that's started to show up now that voting tallies are being reported is, at around 44% in, sort of hilarious because it totals out to around a 60/40 split (slightly closer but not much) between Sanders and Clinton. And if you check the individual district numbers, all but one of them is... basically a 60/40 split favoring Sanders. Consistency!
The 3rd District thinks it's special though. More important than the other districts. You know how they are there.
Me, I'm a Charles Bonapartist. I think our aristocracy should be conscripted into investigating crimes.
Have we heard if teo is voting?
I noted in one of the earlier threads that I'm hoping the Dem side is wrapped up before the Alaska caucuses on March 26 so I don't have to decide whether to go to one. Today is only the Republicans.
Soo....as of now, Trump is doing better than Clinton, and the states he lost are split between 2 people. Why is this not "all wrapped up" on the Republican side?
73: All that the dead-horse-beaters have is hope, and that is enough. But it clearly is. Christie and the other endorsers understood after the last primary; I can only assume there'll be even more tomorrow.
70.2: Yeah, it was the 3rd district I was looking at earlier, and confusing it with the 6th. Buncha old rich people, what're ya gonna do?
Bernie's margins in rural MN are surprisingly high, even with the moribund Iron Range radical tradition making a little bid to reestablish itself.
I wonder why Rubio did better here? I'd like to think it was somehow due to slightly-less-crazy Republicans predominating, but that would probably be wishful thinking.
75.last: Looking at the per-county map, he seems to do better in cities and college towns. Although not Boston! So maybe that holds in the south only? Maybe the Minnesota Republican population is similar to southern urban Republicans?
I guess it makes sense Boston would be an exception. That's the headquarters for future elites. They aren't interested in raising their own taxes.
The Bernie coalition is definitely not the standard "Democratic primary underdog" coalition of college professors and their cronies, but it's still mostly white people unfortunately.
I am so looking forward to Trump-Christie vs Clinton-Franken.
73: Pre-existing narrative about who is actually a real candidate and who isn't?
75.3 actually might have something to it though. My suspicion is that a lot of Rubio voters are people settling for him mostly because he's the available candidate who they've been told is a serious contender but who doesn't make their skin crawl. And I can definitely see a stronger reaction against Cruz/Trump style authoritarianism here than in a lot of places, if only for its garish over the top nastiness. (Not, again, that Rubio isn't just as nasty as the two of them. But that's not something you'd know from reading the news in a not-obsessive way.)
Although certainly Trump is well on track for nomination given American norms of how we count votes - i.e., elevating the plurality winner - it wouldn't be a priori undemocratic if all the others managed to get together and oust him at the convention, as long as he continues to lack a majority of the GOP popular vote, conceivably even of the delegate count.
Not that they have their act together nearly enough to actually do that.
I saw an interesting comment at fivethirtyeight tonight. The narrative has been that the only way to block Trump is for the field to narrow and for someone to have a one-on-one race with him. But, perhaps the way to stop Trump is for everyone else to stay in the race, win delegates here and there and try to produce a brokered convention -- in which Trump had a strong plurality of delegates, but not a majority.
I thought McManus was crazy when he predicted that, but perhaps that is what will happen.
82 written without seeing 81, though we said similar things.
Hasn't the Rubio campaign explicitly stated that they're aiming for a brokered convention? It certainly seems like the only way Rubio has any chance at this point.
79 A Franken VP pick would go a long way toward helping me get over my bitter resignation to the Hillary inevitability. Because, you know, old white lefty Jewish dude.
Also Franken would know exactly how to needle and provoke Trump in best way.
Some local color on the Alaska GOP scene. The NYT is reporting the AK results by state house district, which is an improvement on their previous practice of just reporting statewide totals (and probably better than the obvious alternative of reporting by Census Area).
Actually seems kinda likely now. Trump has a little less than half of the delegates so far, and I think the primary calendar has been kinda weighted towards Trump. If that ends up throwing the nomination to Rubio, I'll be pissed.
The winner-take-all primaries that start March 15 add an extra wrinkle. The biggest of which are FL, OH, AZ and NJ. Kasich is supposed to take OH and Trump leads in FL and probably NJ.
86: Exactly. Unite the Ds and make inroads with the election-as-entertainment demographic.
I don't think there will be a brokered convention, but there's this sense I catch of it being an illegitimate maneuver, whereas in this case if enough of the non-Trump-voting Republicans hate Trump enough it could merely be making the same kind of determination an IRV process would.
A brokered GOP convention will produce Trump / Cruz. The latter will make Cheney look unambitious.
I'd have thought a brokered convention was impossible in this day and age, but if it were going to happen it does seem like maybe it would be provoked by a candidate who (1) consistently wins a plurality but not a majority of party votes (2) is someone who maybe a bit more than 50% of the party actively dislikes, and 1/2 of those people affirmatively can't stand; (3) is clearly a very very bad general election candidate and (4) who the organized party hates and has few if any connections to either the party organization or powerful politicians. It's not likely but it does seem like slightly more Republicans dislike Trump than like him, especially elites, and he's a bad enough general election candidate that people might decide its worth the risk to vote against him on the first ballot at the convention and then cut a deal. And since he's a cult of personality it doesn't seem like a lot of R voters would stay at hime because their choice of Trump was thwarted. So -- who the hell knows, we're in uncharted territory here.
Dem primary went exactly as I hoped and prayed, Sanders did well enough to put his issues on the agenda, but not well enough to seriously contest and people will now start unifying and getting ready for the fall.
88
Trump will probably get AZ as well. He's been endorsed by Jan Brewer, and AZ Republicans seem like the types who would be into a giant wall on the Mexican border.
If Trump gets AZ, NJ, and Rubio's home state of FL, is there any plausible reason for Rubio to stay in? Winning only MN (the Mondale strategy?) isn't exactly a mandate for the nomination.
What are the odds that Christie is angling for Vice President? 100%? 99.5%?
Depending on how Bridgegate turns out, he might just be angling for a pardon.
Trump was leading in the early returns from AK, but now Fairbanks has reported and put Cruz in the lead.
How are things looking in the unorganized borough*?
*I learned about this just now on Natr Silver's site.
The NYT isn't tabulating the results that way, as noted in 87, but from eyeballing their map it looks like Trump is dominating in the unorganized borough so far. The parts of it that have reported mostly have very few Republicans, though.
Although Ben Carson did win Bethel with 17 votes.
Well, I doubt it will benefit him much. Note that I said "with" rather than "by" 17 votes. There are very few Republicans in rural Alaska.
Not a Tunnel, a Wall: The Chris Christie Story
"When you think about it, canceling the tunnel to NYC is just like building a wall. You'll thank me when Manhattan is turned into a prison island under the Trump administration."
Thanks to that switch in AK, the Times is now predicting that Trump and Cruz will have received nearly equal numbers of delegates yesterday. Which seems crazy, but I guess winning TX big will do that for you.
We don't yet seem to have results from the Mat-Su Valley, which is the right-wing heartland of AK, so I would be hesitant about coming to any conclusions just yet about the AK results. I could see the Mat-Su going for either Trump or Cruz.
The first two Mat-Su precincts to report show majorities for Trump, although it's not actually clear that both are in the Mat-Su proper (one is in a state house district that is only partly in the Valley).
Actually, after consulting the Alaska GOP website, it appears that the house district in question is actually within the Mat-Su Borough. It's not clear which part of it the NYT is reporting, though.
More Mat-Su results are coming in and Cruz continues to lead. He also seems to be dominating in the more conservative on-road parts of the unorganized borough.
There are quite a few winner-takes-all states coming up soon. "A Republican Party rule lets states that hold their election after March 14 award all delegates to the winner of the statewide vote. Eight states and a territory hold winner-take-all elections according to the Republican National Committee: Florida (99), Ohio (66), Arizona (58), all in March; Delaware (16) in April, Nebraska (36), Montana (27), New Jersey (51), South Dakota (29) in May and the Northern Mariana Islands." (Bloomberg)
Trump is going to win Ohio (unless Kasich, who's running level with him right now, takes it away from him; and that may be the only reason Kasich is still in the race); he's probably going to win Florida; he's going to win Arizona. So by the end of this month he's picked up another 223 delegates just from those three states. There's another 620 or so delegates up for grabs in proportional-voting states before the end of March. Say he takes half of those (that's a reasonable estimate, a bit conservative in fact given his performance up to now).
So he finishes March with 533 more delegates, added to his current total of 285 = 818 delegates. And he only needs 1237 to win the nomination.
Problem with Bob's 18th Brumaire scenario is that any candidate who might do a Bonaparte is also likely to deny that climate change is serious until what remains of Florida is no longer connected by land to the continental United States.
54 and 58: No, sadly. His protectionism is helping him. According to the Globe, in MA in the Republican primary 55% of those who were union members voted for Trump.
I'm really starting to believe that Sanders would do better against Trump than Clinton among the undecided and disaffected but that they aren't voting in the Democratic primary.
So, how am I supposed to organize? Because I feel totally helpless between elections. All of the other offices (Democratic town committee (a slate of 35), state assembly person etc.) were totally uncontested. I didn't even vote for those offices, because it seemed pointless.
The phrase "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Dynamite" comes to mind.
"The Eighteenth Lobster Thermidor of Mr. Creosote: A Love Story."
This point was probably raised above, but in Virginia, lots of Dems and independents were voting in the primary against Trump. So the numbers are skewed to increase the non-Trump Republican votes, and lower the Dem votes.
Can you guys believe that this is Unfogged's FOURTH presidential election? We are so old.
I'm really starting to believe that Sanders would do better against Trump than Clinton among the undecided and disaffected but that they aren't voting in the Democratic primary.
No way. Clinton is the perfect opponent for Trump. He could bully the fuck out of Sanders and the syncophants will eat it up, but if he bullies her, he'll get eaten alive, and that's one of his best moves. Next, when he tries, she can do her Benghazi Hearing cold face - she already has a well-rehearsed, well-loved response to that kind of muck. Third, he just plain hasn't been up against anyone like her in a debate. It will look like they are on two different planets. Whereas Sanders would potentially look like he's on the same planet as Trump, the angry men planet.
if he bullies her, he'll get eaten alive
By whom? Also, the thought of eating Trump, alive or dead, makes my gorge rise.
Thankfully, we live on the angry beetle/nematode planet.
I think people will have a visceral negative reaction watching her get bullied that they don't have when they watch Bush/Rubio/presumably Sanders get bullied.
What disturbs me preliminarily is that Sanders is doing much better in all the swing states.
Eh, people tried to use that logic in 2008 (Clinton was winning the swing states then, you'll recall), and it was completely bogus. Much as internet lefties don't like her, the vast, vast majority of voting Democrats do, and they'll turn out. Maybe not like they did in 2008 for Obama, but probably like they did in 2012 for Obama, which was more than enough.
Frankly, because it will evoke a gut intuition of a guy punching a girl.
They're called "women", von Wafer. You must know some.
(In case you're still not in a joking mood about the election -- this is pointless trash-talk, and not an accusation of sexism or anything.)
It's really hard for me to imagine what a Trump/Clinton debate would look like. At least Palin was only up against Uncle Joe. The democratic and republican debates really are different kinds of events.
It would look horrible. Sound horrible too. Zero jazz points.
So many Bonapartists in this thread. Where are the Orléanists?
Clinton-Franken
Is there any chance Clinton would choose Sanders for VP as an attempt at a "unity ticket"? Trump is being sorta nice to Cruz, so maybe he's thinking a similar thing, except more in a "unity against all that is reason and light and not ugly faces" direction.
It's a basic law of physics that the only thing that can defeat a shouty old man is another shouty old man.
Is there any chance Clinton would choose Sanders for VP as an attempt at a "unity ticket"?
I am hoping she'll pick him for Treasury Secretary. The guy would be like one of those hunting dogs that can lock its jaw shut so even once it's dead you have to pry it off with a crowbar.
Trump being nice to someone? His end is near.
132, 133: Surely the Lemmon Law
I think heebie's right about Trump/Clinton. Like, what he does so well is be an amusing bully - he's fun, and it's fun to watch him being terrible. I think she's capable of sucking the fun out of the interaction: she'd look coldly serious as he clowned, and the whole thing would get depressing rather than excitingly amusing.
I'd rather pull my toenails out with pliers than sit through them debating, but I do think she can kill his entertainment value.
Eh, I'll admit that Clinton would probably do a bit better than Sanders in an actual debate against Trump. In every other part of the campaign, though? Trump would just love to run against the quintessential centrist Washington insider, while Sanders would just love to run against an actual billionaire.
Sanders is way way too old to be VP!
Trump is vulnerable to negative campaigning.
Sanders likes to talk about never having run a negative campaign, whereas Clinton people have already promised "a "scorched earth campaign." Especially if he was leading in the polls, I could see Sanders not doing enough attacking, and maybe not being as good at it as Clinton's people. The media isn't gonna do the job for them. Of course the DNC and various super pacs would step in, but probably not as effectively.
Trump is the perfect target for Sanders' narrative. Look, here's a guy who fails his way through life- four bankruptcies, failed businesses, racist past (& present), but because he was born rich he can do no wrong and always gets another chance. Normal people go through one bankruptcy and they never own a house again. Trump is the walking example of how the world is different for rich people.
Clinton-Franken
First it's Klobuchar for Supreme Court, now Franken for VP? What is this obsession people have with MN senators!? Get your own politicians, damnit!
Anyway I think it's obvious that Clinton's biggest factor in choosing a VP almost certainly won't but should be based on trolling the nastier bits of the right. People talk up the (Super) Castro Brothers a lot, though I've never actually been clear on the reasons aside from the fact that everyone did it before (Julian Castro -> Democratic Party Rubio?). But a Hillary/Castro ticket would be a brilliant way to give large parts of the Republican base a stroke, and it certainly wouldn't hurt when it comes to locking in a big chunk of the Latino vote either. If people really are insistent on stealing a MN legislator though I would like to point out that Ellison is both a really good way to reach out to the Sanders bloc after the primary rather than just taking them for granted*, and also a black Muslim.
*Anyone who believes that she'll feel any serious need to or interest in doing this, have you considered in bridge investments recently?
Sanders would be a much stronger candidate in some ways. Clinton has sky high unfavorabilities and Sanders is just a better politician. I think it's much harder than in a normal election to say which candidate is the strongest.
There's probably a dozen democrats that would be stronger candidates than either Clinton or Sanders. Both of them and even more so Trump have some clear strengths and some glaring weaknesses.
I assume Castro VP is a fait accompli.
a Hillary/Castro ticket would be a brilliant way to give large parts of the Republican base a stroke, and it certainly wouldn't hurt when it comes to locking in a big chunk of the Latino vote either. If people really are insistent on stealing a MN legislator though I would like to point out that Ellison is both a really good way to reach out to the Sanders bloc after the primary rather than just taking them for granted*, and also a black Muslim.
But that's not what she needs to do - she's got the black vote locked up already, she's got most of the Latino vote too and the Muslim vote (inasmuch as it exists) given what Trump's been saying about them. She needs to go after the white college-educated vote, with its incredibly high turnout, so she needs a white guy in his fifties.
What's the rule about someone who already served two terms being eligible for VP? They're not, right, because to be eligible for VP you have to be eligible for president? So no Clinton/Clinton 2016.
Sanders is just a better politician
I love Sanders and will vote for him in NC's primary, but if he were the better politician, he'd be winning. Anyhow, I can't imagine him ending his career as Clinton's VP and having to go out and slap a smiley face on policies he doesn't agree with. He's going to return to DC as a vastly more powerful senator, leading the progressive caucus with Warren and Brown. That's a good thing.
A Trump/Cruz ticket looks plausible, though.
She needs to go after the white college-educated vote
Maybe she can be a boring, experienced politician with hawkish foreign policy experience and strong ties to Wall Street, and the opposing party can nominate a well-known buffoon who wants Mexico to pay for a wall on the border. What's the next key voting bloc?
150: The white college-educated vote is one of the ones she's doing ok with in the primary, though. The white working class vote, on the other hand, is one of the places where Sanders is giving her trouble.
148: In my heart I dream about a case where Clinton is either indicted early enough, or has a health complication show up in an undeniable public fashion, the party is forced to pick a new candidate at the convention, and Sanders throws his full support and votes behind Warren. I can absolutely buy him doing that, and I definitely believe that Warren would be an amazing candidate too.
152: I find that hard to believe - we're talking about someone coming in from outside the party structure calling himself a socialist in an election where the party as a whole had pre-selected the candidate to the extent that the only democrats running against her were the kinds of marginal figures who could best be described as the "in case she falls down the stairs" candidates, and who had practically been inaugurated publicly before she even announced. And now even if he's down against her and still unlikely to win the fact that it's a race at all is a testament to something impressive about him.
Reagan lost to Ford in 76. Was Ford the better politician?
154.1: true, but the turnout there is so high compared to other groups that even a 2% shift towards Clinton among educated whites is enough to protect her against a yuge shift (in turnout and preferences) among uneducated whites. But, then, I suppose you can argue that she needs to go after the latter to prevent exactly that shift from happening.
The good thing about Clinton is that she's tied very closely to a president who won the last two elections and (given demographic changes) would win this one even better than he won 2012; so the conversation can be about "what bits of Obama's support is Clinton at risk of losing?" If 5% of those uneducated whites shift from D to R (so it's now 67% R), she's still OK. Any more than that and she has problems.
149: The betting markets seem to think so.
Total misnomer -- Mediocre Tuesday would be generous.
Trump has a deathgrip stranglehold on dumb whites.
155
Right. I think people are starting to forget this. Sanders was persona non grata in the MSM until December, and if they were forced to mention him at all, it was as a giant joke. I am a little sad he didn't win MA, but to even have an real presence at all is a giant victory for the left. We need to keep the pressure on the centrist wing. Also, if Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is successfully primaried, I'll count that as a win for Sanders's run.
Also, why is Kasich still in the race? He's clearly fucking it up for Rubio (Kasich is peeling off ~5% of the vote Rubio needed to top the 20% in threshold in several states), on his own he's not doing well enough to legitimately claim he has a serious claim to the nomination, and he appears to be a party player. The only thoughts I can think of are: 1) Giant ego, and not a real party player, or 2) The party is thinking Rubio is a dud, and they want an establishment back up. They don't care how undemocratic it looks, through a brokered convention, they'll nominate the guy who's been getting 5-7% in most elections outside New England.
For VP, Clinton needs to nominate someone younger, leftier, and a person of color would also be nice. Bill Clinton on the ticket would straight up lose her leftist and millennial support.
Against Trump, I don't see how Clinton loses. She gets the black vote, the Latino vote, the female vote, and the white college educated vote, all in high numbers. Trump gets the working class white vote, and the white male vote, but those are the votes Romney and McCain already got against Obama.
155: he does have the coveted Richard M. Nixon endorsement.
142: From the primary, Sanders seems to have a fairly narrow definition of "negative campaigning" given that "unlike some candidates, I am not owned body and soul by the banks" doesn't seem to count.
(Which means I have no doubt he'd find ways to attack Trump in the general. Not that it matters since he's not going to be the nominee anyway.)
Against Trump, I don't see how Clinton loses.
Easy. Low turnout.
I get that Sanders started late and without the institutional support Clinton gets, but it doesn't look like he's managed to do much to get any black support. I find it hard to call him the better politician when he doesn't seem to be able to crack 20% of the black vote in any state with an appreciable number of black voters.
167
Except, when the opponent is orange Mussolini, you have highly motivated voting blocs no matter how uninspiring the Dem candidate is. Blacks, Latinos, women, and very likely college educated whites are going to go out in droves to vote against Trump.
161:
I always laugh a little (though sadly) whenever I see people talking about Sanders performing "about the way people expected" or whatever, given that they mean basically "like we expected last week". A month before New Hampshire those seem people thought it would be a tossup at best. I still think the institutional clout is too strong in the Democratic party for him to take the nomination, but also I think it's pretty clear that without that Clinton would have had a very hard time getting the nomination against any left/social-democrat candidate. (I would say Sanders there, except without that institutional support we would almost have certainly have seen someone more linked to the party playing that role.)
My guess is that he's accurately read Rubio as a damp squib no matter what the rest of the party establishment is desperately hoping, and also he's old enough and hated enough by the Koch structure that he doesn't have much to lose by pissing off the party at this point. I don't think he's hurting Rubio as much as people assume, though he is. But he's definitely smart enough to look and Florida and realize that Rubio is toast the second that state shows up, barring Trump suddenly disappearing from the face of the earth. If he can win Ohio then he's the only one even remotely acceptable to the establishment with a strong shot at that point: he'll have almost as many delegates as Rubio is likely to, and he won't be covered in loser-stink either.
169: exactly, Trump will single-handedly generate high turnout among all sorts of Dem voters.
Also, why is Kasich still in the race?
See 113 - he is nowhere almost everywhere else, but he is neck and neck (538 forecast) with Trump in the race for Ohio in two weeks' time, and all 66 of its winner-takes-all delegates. It's not implausible that if he can stop Trump winning in Ohio then the party will feel it owes him big time.
Trump gets the working class white vote, and the white male vote, but those are the votes Romney and McCain already got against Obama.
No. Romney didn't "get" the working class white vote. He got 62% of it. If Trump gets 62% of that, he loses. If he gets 69% of it, he wins.
167: Trump will motivate Democrats to turn out. Nobody will be claiming that there's no difference between the two candidates.
Or a three-way race that is impossible to predict the outcome of at this point.
162 Can she nominate Chelsea? Sew up that millennial vote and secure the family legacy in one fell swoop.
168: The extent to which Clinton has managed to lash herself to Obama has been carrying a lot of weight there, but my read on it is that at least as well understood as a combination of (reasonable) risk aversion and the constant and near unanimous drum beat of "SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople, SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople..." that started from the campaign and basically everyone in the press when Clinton suddenly faced a tie and a big loss in Iowa and New Hampshire, and has fed on itself ever since. The idea that that isn't hurting him among black people is kind of crazy - or at least if it isn't that's flat out bizarre.
I'd think that being unable to effectively counter the campaigning of the other side is basically a failure as a politician. I don't know how else you'd class it.
Trump is the dream matchup for Clinton. Everybody who would be tempted to reject her for being insufficiently progressive will be too terrified to stay home on Election Day. Since she is a centrist Washington insider, she will be the candidate of the entire oligarchy that secretly runs the country behind a veil of democracy.
177: Sanders is also the guy who wanted someone to challenge Obama in the 2012 primaries. He's the guy who thinks that Obama should have lost his job four years ago! That probably makes an impression.
The "SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople, SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople..." is just so disingenuous that it makes me want to chuck my laptop out the window every time I see it. Not to mention the utter lack of silence about how Hillary seems to do worst best minorities in states with the strongest voter ID laws...
"He'd be winning if the other candidate's campaign wasn't effectively putting forth their interpretation of events" isn't really a defense.
I can't imagine [Sanders] ending his career as Clinton's VP and having to go out and slap a smiley face on policies he doesn't agree with. He's going to return to DC as a vastly more powerful senator, leading the progressive caucus with Warren and Brown. That's a good thing.
This is completely correct.
I find that hard to believe - we're talking about someone coming in from outside the party structure calling himself a socialist in an election where the party as a whole had pre-selected the candidate to the extent that the only democrats running against her were the kinds of marginal figures who could best be described as the "in case she falls down the stairs" candidates, and who had practically been inaugurated publicly before she even announced. And now even if he's down against her and still unlikely to win the fact that it's a race at all is a testament to something impressive about him.
I'm going to say the same things that I've said before when we've talked about electibility -- Sanders has done better than expected, and looks like a skilled politician, but the results to date do not make me think that either (a) Sanders is a political star in the way that Obama was or (b) that Clinton is a mess and that the primary exposes profound weaknesses (it does expose some weaknesses, most of which should go away in a general election).
Let's look for a minute at Sanders strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths
1) Extremely good at Mark Schmidt's, "It's not what you say about your positions, it's what your positions say about you." -- is able to use his ideological positions to communicate that he, "cares about people like [the white working class]."
2) Stubborn, in a good way. Willing to work hard and be persistent against long odds.
3) Willing to ignore the beltway "conventional wisdom."
4) Has been an excellent fundraiser.
5) Good retail politician -- comes across well on the campaign trail and on TV. Particularly impressive in his ability to win younger voters.
Weaknesses
1) Poor relationship with the general group of wonks -- political professionals who are angling to be advisers to major political campaigns (there are various reasons for this, not all them his fault, but I do think it's a weakness).
2) Hasn't been able to boost turnout in the primaries, which has been consistently 20-30% below 2008.
3) TV ads haven't been effective (I remember seeing articles about Iowa and Nevada saying that he blanketed the states with ads, and they didn't affect polling numbers).
4) Hasn't been able to connect to African-American voters (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic voters).
5) We don't know how he'd respond to sustained negative attacks.
I think that list makes him look fairly good -- the strengths are all more important than the weaknesses. However, I think the weaknesses are likely to be larger problems in a general election than they were in the primaries, and the strengths will, on average, be less important in the general election.
Since she is a centrist Washington insider, she will be the candidate of the entire oligarchy that secretly runs the country behind a veil of democracy.
I think this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. The lesson of 2016 so far is that the "oligarchy that secretly runs the country behind the veil of democracy" is, ultimately, a very small slice of the electorate that does, ultimately, derive its power from an electorate that is satisfied enough with its qualities of life not to care. The masses really do have the power to burn the whole thing down.
I would add to the strengths that he's harder to attack on personal grounds than most candidates. He can be effectively attacked on political grounds - that's what Clinton has been doing. But every candidate has things they can effectively be attacked for and things they really can't, based largely on public perceptions of them.* People attacking Trump for being bought out by wealthy interests aren't going to get much traction because, well, they'll just look like they're talking a bunch of nonsense (unlike if they attacked him on grounds of being kind of a con artist who doesn't care about conservativism).
And for all that Sanders has his weaknesses it's hard to personalize them: he's almost monomaniacal about what he cares about, and it's almost impossible to look at him and not see sincerity. It just sort of radiates off of him, and even his biggest political enemies in the Senate will give interviews going "Yeah, you kind of have to respect him for his integrity." So while he's vulnerable when it comes to his policies ("SOCIALISM SOCIALISM ELECTABILITY SOCIALISM"), he's not a great candidate to go against on a personal level. (I think this is probably the strongest argument for him in a race against Trump, who really has to fight on those grounds. He'd be way more vulnerable to Cruz, for example, in a way that Clinton wouldn't be.)
*Note: before anyone brings up Kerry this doesn't necessarily have that much to do with actual complicated facts about their history. Clinton could be the most principled politician to ever principle but it wouldn't mean a damn thing given how she comes off to people. Kerry may have been a super badass but his face didn't look like it so when people saw the "he's a weakling" smears they tended to think "Ok, yeah I see that."
"The "SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople, SandersIsTheCandidateForWhitePeople..." is just so disingenuous that it makes me want to chuck my laptop out the window every time I see it."
It is something that a lot of black voters believe, though; or, at least, they believe that ClintonIsTheCandidateForBlackPeople. The polls, the primary results and the endorsements all reflect that.
Now, either they've all been conned by the fearsome Clinton machine... or they're reflecting the fact that the contest is between someone who's spent several years as a highly visible senior cabinet official for the first black president, and is running on his legacy, and someone who spent several years criticising the first black president and saying he should have been kicked out four years ago.
A Trump nomination (or a Trump non-nomination) does create a possibility of a three-way race in the general election, as Mobes says. This in turn creates a (very unlikely, but real) risk that no one would get a majority in the electoral college and the election would go to the House of Representatives. This in turn would create one of the most gigantic clusterfucks ever, since the House votes under bizarre rules where each state delegation gets 1 vote, unless a State's representatives are evenly split, in which case the state gets no votes. So you'd have crazy bargaining and state delegations picking candidates whom a plurality of their voters didn't vote for.
Even more weirdly, the new Senate gets to pick the Vice President. So, if the Democrats take thr Senate in 2016, you could have a situation where there's President John Kasich, who got 25% of the popular vote to Clinton's 48%, and the Vice President is Democrat Julian Castro who is an assassin's bullet away from taking over. The 12th Amendment is fucked up.
And for all that Sanders has his weaknesses it's hard to personalize them: he's almost monomaniacal about what he cares about
...and there you are. That's his weakness right there. Even his supporters can't describe his good points without accidentally using the names of mental illnesses. If he was the candidate in the general, they'd go after him on the grounds that he was a raving, senile old fool.
I would add to the strengths that he's harder to attack on personal grounds than most candidates.
I'd agree with that, and I think that's an important addition.
I'd also say that we don't know quite how far that goes, because I don't think it's been seriously tested, but that's a caveat not disagreement.
If he was the candidate in the general, they'd go after him on the grounds that he was a raving, senile old fool...
...running on exactly the issue that his opponent was trying to capitalize on. Like I said: against Trump his strengths are pretty massive.
184: In theory, yes, but in practice you would need 50.1 of the masses to want to burn things down, and agree on a solution. Look at Trump. He's running on a burn-things-down platform. Are we going to vote for him? Obviously not.
184: and to be honest, if the alternative is Trump...
184: I do enjoy thinking about all the money the oligarchy is squandering in this election.
Kerry may have been a super badass but his face didn't look like it so when people saw the "he's a weakling" smears they tended to think "Ok, yeah I see that."
I'm not really disagreeing or anything, something like that seems to have been the case, it's just funny living over here on my different planet.
But that's not what she needs to do - she's got the black vote locked up already, she's got most of the Latino vote too and the Muslim vote (inasmuch as it exists) given what Trump's been saying about them. She needs to go after the white college-educated vote, with its incredibly high turnout, so she needs a white guy in his fifties.
This plus getting under Trump's skin is what gets me to Franken. He's a little older than ideal, and locking down MN that much tighter doesn't add anything, but other than that he fits the profile.
Does anyone else think that two women on the ticket would feel a little shocking? Like, 'oh, they mean it about electing women.'
194: I didn't even mean that he looked like someone obviously weak, but that attacks there could legitimately hurt him in a way they probably wouldn't have, e.g., Clark or Dean. There were plenty of things that could have hurt either of them. But not really that one because one was known basically for being a military guy in a way that Kerry wasn't, and the other was just kind of naturally fighty looking. It's just that for every candidate there are some attacks that when made are pushing against things that everyone "knows" about them and so get discarded almost immediately as meaningless or silly. (If, for example, Clinton were to attack Trump as really dovish I have a hard time believing that would do a damn thing even though in comparison to her he totally is.)
She needs to go after the white college-educated vote, with its incredibly high turnout, so she needs a white guy in his fifties.
I'm not sure this is true: the reason to pick someone like Ellison isn't to make black Muslims think that the Democratic party is for them (because, hahahahahahaha). It really is trolling: a Clinton/Ellison will end up freaking out a lot of people, both in the bigots who will find that ticket absolutely hysteria-inducing and the people who get to watch one side of the political sphere engaging in a shrieking fit of open bigotry for four months or so.
And that if anything that would help her pick up white college-educated voters, because those are people who, even if they are conservatives and racists, are going to feel super uncomfortable about being in a party that looks like the Republican party does at that point. (In other words, the "I'm a conservative but if Trump wins I'll voted for the hated Clinton because I'm not one of those people supporting Trump" effect.) A white guy in his fifties is just going to be a politician just like any other no matter how clearly not that way he is.
I live in a blue state that's going to stay blue. What can I personally do to help Dems retake the Senate? (Note that I hate talking on the phone.)
199 -- seduce Mark Kirk (or, even better, Kelly Ayotte) and secretly record a video.
199: Donate to Ted Strickland!
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/2016mar?amount=5&utm_source=sp8611435&utm_medium=email&sc=sp8611435&refcode=sp8611435&ta=0
I would buy a J ,Robot-Kelly Ayotte sex tape.
200: R Tigre has 2 good suggestions! Why not do both?
I was just looking at the elector-vote list of Senate races and, based on their description, KY looks like it could be a race to get excited about:
Kentucky has a reputation for being a solidly red state, but that's largely at the federal level. In state elections, Kentuckians often lean fairly Democratic (though that did not hold true in 2015). Rand Paul--who is only moderately popular--is vulnerable to a serious Democratic challenge, and now he's got one from Lexington Mayor Jim Gray. Gray is wealthy (and so can self-fund), a reputation for being a "straight shooter," has a small business background, and is openly gay. He thus has something of a "moderate maverick" persona that actually plays quite well in the Bluegrass State. Meanwhile, Paul's strongly libertarian views are out of the Republican mainstream, and Kentuckians are not thrilled that he used them as his "insurance policy" against a failed presidential run. What should have been a safe seat for the Republicans is now looking more and more like it could be in play.
Does anybody know how accurate that is?
Rumor has it our local rag is planning to endorse Trump.
What do former presidential candidates do with the odd $billion in corporate donations that they haven't managed to spend by the time of the election?
206: All kinds of shenanigans, from what I understand. I'm forgetting the details, and don't have a moment right now to look it up, but there are, I believe, ways for them to make the money their own. Not all of it.
206
Doesn't most of that money go to PACs which the candidates are (*cough*) totally hands-off and unconnected to?
184: I do enjoy thinking about all the money the oligarchy is squandering in this election.
I've agreed with pretty much everything Megan has said, all election season long.
Just like I've been agreeing with you, h-g.
85: TPM has more on the Travis County GOP chair who makes Trump look positively genteel.
Trump doesn't need our help to find a vice president.
Doesn't that money mostly just go to other parts of the oligarchy, in classic sell-shovels-to-gold-rushers style? How much of it trickles down?
Moby knows it's going to be him.
NMM to Carson campaign, though as with everything else, he has picked
a weird way to communicate that.
Everyone is saying the primaries are wrapped up, but there's till time to make the Reconstituted Corpse of Napoleon III/Bob McManus ticket happen.
My understanding is that excess political contributions do go to either the candidate him- or herself (or his/her campaign staff, or his/her future campaign war chest, as it were); or else to other manifestations of the cause.
Contra Megan and H-G, this money does not go wasted, not by a long shot. But people can delude themselves that it's so, if they like.
Meanwhile, I'm curious about the state of affairs with erstwhile Democratic voters -- chiefly millennials -- who have said with passion that they will not vote for Clinton in the general election.
How seriously do they mean that, and how seriously do we need to worry about it?
219: They should be taken as seriously as the 2008 PUMAs - those Clinton voters who couldn't vote for Obama.
85/212: That guy is fucking crazy-balls.
My understanding is that excess political contributions do go to either the candidate him- or herself (or his/her campaign staff, or his/her future campaign war chest, as it were); or else to other manifestations of the cause.
Contra Megan and H-G, this money does not go wasted, not by a long shot. But people can delude themselves that it's so, if they like.
If you spend a million dollars on a TV spot that nobody pays attention to, does it make a sound?
How exactly was Jeb!'s $130 million campaign well-spent?
218
I believe the "wasted money" is the money that has been spent already on candidates who didn't get elected. If you believe that each dollar spent on that is a dollar that didn't get spent on some other insane Koch initiative (or politician), then that's a good kind of wasted. Also, excess dollars in Jeb Bush's pocket don't bother me much. Better there than funding an insane but electable candidate.
Super Tuesday drollery: Sanders prevailed in Clinton, Mass., while Clinton won in Sandersville, GA.
Somehow I find in wonderful in a zen sort of way that there are no comments yet on "Mystery wrapped in an enigma."
How exactly was Jeb!'s $130 million campaign well-spent?
I like to think of campaign spending a quadrennial fiscal stimulus project.
Jeb's money was very well-spent. It bought me the ability to remind people who are thinking about voting that some rich white guys who care very much about their returns on investment judge the value of their votes to be over $1000 each.
There's also the money that goes to caterers, event space rentals, sound equipment rentals, vehicle rentals, party supply companies, dry cleaners, etc. I'm sure overpaid "campaign consultants" hoover up a lot of the funds, but at least some of it gets into local economies.
Also, there is no way Clinton loses college educated whites to Trump. Y'all have GWB-induced post-traumatic election disorder. To translate into a continental setting, this race is basically Merkel vs. Berlusconi. Merkel wins the college educated vote.
220: They should be taken as seriously as the 2008 PUMAs - those Clinton voters who couldn't vote for Obama.
Okay. Obviously Obama won anyway. Did he make up some proportion of the will-not-vote pseudo-electorate through other means? In other words, can Clinton make up the will-not-vote absence -- in the general election -- through some other means?
Truly, I don't know whether to take these will-not-vote people seriously or not this time around. It's well known that Sanders is capturing a remarkable percentage of the 18-29 vote. It's quite annoying that some of them are throwing a hissy-fit against Clinton.
I've only asked this because it's seemed to me that we have some people here in touch with that will-not-vote-if-it's-not-Sanders group.
227: Good point. It is consumption that would probably otherwise be invested, so it is in a real sense a transfer of wealth downwards, even if that's only a small portion of the total.
228: There's also the money that goes to caterers, event space rentals, sound equipment rentals, vehicle rentals, party supply companies, dry cleaners, etc. I'm sure overpaid "campaign consultants" hoover up a lot of the funds, but at least some of it gets into local economies.
We're talking about the money that's left over after that.
I am not saying the Native Americans deserved what happened to them but sometimes God removes his protection from people who worship pagan gods
This woman could have a say in determining what's in school textbooks all over the U.S.
Do something, heebie!
I think the reason working class black people support Clinton is mainly 1) They're more scared of Trump than the white working class, but even more importanly 2) they think the country is going in the right direction, which the white working class really, really doesn't.
219: My friends list is surprisingly balanced. I know one Sanders supporter who said he would sit out the election if Clinton wins the nomination and one Clinton supporter who has said the reverse, and several more people who are supporting each but seem reasonable about it. As for whether to take the threats seriously... the Sanders supporter is the more impulsive type, less civic-minded, so I think a refusal to vote for Clinton isn't an idle threat. I'm sure the Clinton supporter means it today, and I have the sense that he might change his mind if he really had to, but since we live in a solidly blue area, he would probably figure that it doesn't matter.
I'm a tiny bit annoyed at the Sanders supporter, since he lives in a swing state and also because some of the arguments he's made haven't been totally rigorous. I'm very annoyed at the Clinton supporter, since he's my neighbor, posts on Facebook several times a day, and is being a complete asshole about the primary.
229.last: I'm presuming that a fair number of the will-not-vote-if-it's-not-Sanders group will change their minds when Sanders eventually endorses Clinton and campaigns on her behalf. (Assuming, of course, that Sanders' affect when doing so does not resemble Chris Christie's "my soul has been eaten" face from last night.)
228:
Merkel v. Berlusconi is a good comparison. It gives me some comfort that the states Trump has won are non-swing states.
On another note, as this process continues, I'm starting to wonder if its intentional that Super Tuesday is when many of the most reactionary states vote. The deck is pretty deeply stacked against progressives.
I think MHPH was the one that pointed out that it's not clear that we should care that Clinton won South Carolina and Georgia.
I guess this is what it means to really BELIEVE in a candidate --
Trump voter on Fox News says he likes that Trump doesn't give specific policy ideas because otherwise other candidates might steal them.
https://twitter.com/elisefoley/status/705005244988596224
I'm guessing the people who would have come out to vote for unnamed-Democrat was won't really be changed one way or the other, even though some of the people I've seen doing the no-votes-for-f***ing-Clinton thing are in that group.
I suspect there will be some people who would have voted for Sanders not coming out for Clinton, but not so much because of the anger that we see right now as because of the fact that Sanders' support is coming from a lot of people who don't necessarily vote a lot. And that's probably because they're people for whom there are substantial barriers to voting like poverty, registration (age, moving from place to place), etc., and Clinton isn't offering something important enough* to them to justify doing what it takes to get to the polls. So it's not the PUMA thing, if there was something involving more people than I could fit into my living room there in the first place, which I kind of doubt. But it is a thing all the same.
* To get in there before someone decides to feel superior to naive fools who would vote for Sanders, this is not "I think that Sanders will magic single-payer into existence" stuff but "be part of a movement pushing us in the direction we really need to go"
237: Probably? But to be clear we should care about them inasmuch as it's basically the only bit of influence anyone remotely left wing living there has on national politics. But we shouldn't take it to be an especially good indicator of who would be a good candidate in the general election. So, important yes. But not important when it comes to knowing who is or isn't electable.
233, 239:
That reminds me: my brother tells me that that worksheet that contained a mistake saying that the rationals were uncountable was silently removed from the current version of his course materials. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards a proper understanding of cardinality.
227- Thanks Trivers! Could you elaborate around that a little? I want to repeat that to all my friends, and I don't want to get immediately stumped about how I get to that number.
240- This has some appeal for me but I feel like the fact that turnout is so low now makes it less relevant than it should be.
240: Clinton isn't offering something important enough* to them to justify doing what it takes to get to the polls.
To get to the polls in the general election? Huh.
Sanders drew some Greens or other Leftist third party voters to consider voting Democratic. Not a very big group of people, but there are people who would have voted for Sanders but won't vote for Clinton because they are not and have never been Democratic voters. In this case, Sanders was the aberration, not Clinton.
Whatever, same as it ever was: for some people, the possibility of a Republican Presidency + House + quite possibly Senate (if people don't turn out to vote for Dem down-ticket candidates) is no big deal. All I can do is have contempt for people who take that view.
I'm very unenthusiastic about voting for Clinton in the general election, to such an extent that I might not. I would definitely vote for her if I lived in a swing state, but I don't, so my vote or non-vote would only be of symbolic value regardless. Obviously Clinton is vastly preferable to Trump, or any of the Republicans--obviously--and I suppose there's value in expressing that preference. I think it may depend on how the general campaign plays out. I fully expect Clinton to walk back most of the progressive proposals she's been pushing in the primary once she pivots to the general. E.g. I doubt we'll hear much more about her strong plans for reigning in the excesses of Wall Street -- plans much stronger and more credible than those proposed by Sanders, as she's claimed dozens of times. If she tacks any further to the right, I'll have a hard time voting for her.
248: I would vote in down-ballot elections regardless.
248
Eh, people have different voting criteria. If people want to be strict deontologists about it, fine by me. But anyways, you guys can be free to mutually despise each other.
Win or lose, this is the bottom-line on the Sanders campaign for me:
Do they have a plan for bringing the energy around Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, Occupy!, Wisconsin, and their own campaign into a strategy for taking over power in the Democratic party and winning elections at all levels of gov the way the Tea Party did? Sanders has argued for the necessity of such a strategy, and it's one of the reasons beyond platform that I've always supported him, but I haven't seen anything concrete in terms of how he plans to leverage his current organizational infrastructure to win elections beyond this campaign.
I can't find where I originally read this, but on the subject of why Sanders hasn't been able to win the black vote:
"One of my experiences that I think I won't forget for a long time is a call that I got from the Sanders campaign. This person that called asked me was I voting for Sen. Sanders. I said no. I was voting for Secretary Clinton. The phone went silent for a little bit," Scott recounted. "You could hear this person struggling to come up with what they're going to say next. ... They call that a real pregnant pause, nine months' worth of pregnant pause. And he finally came back and he says to me, 'You know, Senator Sanders is for welfare.'"That was a call to the president of the Charleston NAACP, who freely admits that she lost it. He readily acknowledges that it's not as if Sanders told his people to say that, but it's a mind-blowing mistake, especially when you have to assume that the caller knew in advance that any given call to an African American was 3:1 likely going to be to a Clinton supporter.
252.3 is my question as well, and it's why I've never had my enthusiasm whipped up by Sanders: I expect his "movement" to evaporate just like Nader's in 2000 and Obama's in 2008. I was briefly willing to entertain the idea of a wave of Sanders-associated candidates winning House and Senate seats, but primary turnout numbers have made clear that there is no groundswell, just a modest number of very enthusiastic people, which, together with $4.35, gets you a fancy coffee (but probably not a big one).
Whatever, same as it ever was: for some people, the possibility of a Republican Presidency + House + quite possibly Senate (if people don't turn out to vote for Dem down-ticket candidates) is no big deal. All I can do is have contempt for people who take that view.
omg nbd.
That was a call to the president of the Charleston NAACP, who freely admits that she lost it. He readily acknowledges that it's not as if Sanders told his people to say that, but it's a mind-blowing mistake, especially when you have to assume that the caller knew in advance that any given call to an African American was 3:1 likely going to be to a Clinton supporter.
These are the great results you get when people sign up at websites saying "Hey, Pitch In By Doing Phone Banking From Home! Call People 5,000 Miles Away And Just Wing It!"
I'd rather have an evaporating movement than none at all, though.
I prefer movements that are more sublime.
All Bernie and his supporters can do is try. It's short-sighted to say that Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street or the Sanders campaign don't mean much of anything just because they don't change Everything Right Now.
If you're a racist nutjob, you keep plugging away until you get your Trump (or the next guy who's even more of a racist nutjob). If you're on the left, you are glad that Bernie revealed a strong desire on the part of Young People These Days to challenge Democratic orthodoxy from the left. That's a useful piece of information to have, and absent Bernie - or someone like him - we wouldn't have it.
Any interest in talking about Hilzoy's concise analysis and prognosis of Trump's popularity?
I like her idea of providing some path back to sanity for the people angry enough to vote for Trump.
But my own limited understanding of that mindset is older people wedded to the idea of American exceptionalism and pioneer spirit or something similar. If the're living somewhere where all the good work has dried up, rage actually seems like pretty normal response, that or religion.
260.
Link fail, Hilzoy here: https://storify.com/crofer/hilzoy-how-the-republicans-got-donald-trump
248: That contempt is a lot easier to feel when you don't actually have any substantial obstacles between you and voting, and have forgotten how much trouble is involved in getting to the polls, let alone getting to vote, for a pretty massive chunk of the population. Why do you think poor and younger people vote in so much smaller numbers than senior citizens anyway, lack of noble civic virtues?
Everyone is so accustomed to watching Trump eat everybody's lunch that I haven't seen much discussion of his victory press conference last night - but I thought it was pretty brilliant. In its conception and execution, it was (at least by Trump standards) very dignified and presidential.
I suppose the National Review types have gone so far out on a limb that it will be hard for them to walk it back and endorse Trump, but I think he's going to win over a lot of Republicans who have heretofore found him too down-market.
Sanders has argued for the necessity of such a strategy, and it's one of the reasons beyond platform that I've always supported him, but I haven't seen anything concrete in terms of how he plans to leverage his current organizational infrastructure to win elections beyond this campaign.
I know we've been round and round about this before, but I would be stunned if any of that infrastructure remained to do anything at all, and the "I am creating a permanent political revolution" part of Bernie's campaign was always obviously the silliest. Bro, you have no party infrastructure. But that doesn't at all mean that his campaign hasn't been worth it or a good thing -- it's definitely helped galvanize the left wing of the party and makes it likely that some of the young-person left-wing will find its way into more and more organized things in the future. And it's moved some of his economic agenda into the party mainstream. That was well worth doing. Though, as I've now said way too much, my own view has been that for his strategy to be effective and useful he needed to be pretty successful, but still stay very far away from actually getting the nomination, which IMO would be a disaster. This actually seems to be what has happened, so yay reality. (Of course, Sanders could still win the nomination if Hillary absolutely implodes in some way, in which case I'm taking a gulp of fear for the general election, but in that scenario Sanders will deserve to be nominated and will clearly be the best available choice.)
The only downside from his campaign right now, it looks like, is that it does seem to have inspired some people to be irrationally anti-Hillary on the internet. But I think that whatever the Doug Henwoods of the world have in their bonnet about Hillary Clinton has much more to do with them than it does with Bernie Sanders, and so isn't really something that can be blamed on the Sanders campaign.
I wonder whether yesterday evening or today is worse than Chris Christie. Yesterday evening was clearly dreadful, but today he has to face Trump's wrath for upstaging Trump.
This truly is an election cycle for validating proverbs.
This is 1 reason (of many) why I never wanted to demonize GOP voters. They need a route back. Hard enough w/o encountering contempt.
This part of Hilzoy's storify bit seems a bit off to me: one of the absolute, biggest, most central, historically consistent bits of right-wing/conservative/nativist/authoritarian politics in America has been the firm, unyielding and totally unresponsive to anything in the actual world belief that they are held in utter contempt by those liberals.* No amount of not actually showing any particular contempt for them, or even denying that there's really enough of that to matter, or pointing out that what they're seeing in some case is principled opposition rather than that, has ever made the slightest bit of difference. It's absolutely central to the right wing victimization complex that they're the object of contempt by their enemies, and by the time someone is willing to drop enough of that to matter they've probably left almost everything of that poisonous ecosystem behind them anyway.
I'm not saying we should be nasty to people we know personally or anything, but the instinct to believe that if we just act nice, gentle, charitable and conciliatory we can probably talk most/a lot of them back down off the ledge isn't really borne out by much of what I've seen. People do make their way back, but it usually looks a lot more like it does when anyone changes substantially: either they, and no one around them, really notices anything changing but then one day they realize "Oh. I'm not really part of that group am I", or something happens and there's a sudden nasty shock which they can't rationalize away, like Trump. (Or probably the latter is the bit right at the end of the former.) Neither of those involves the kind of route I think she's talking about though.
*Or Northerners. or city-folk, or whatever flavor of tribalism is relevant at the time.
264.last - I've been really surprised at the thin skin of Internet assholes on both sides of the Bernie/Hillary divide. Really, folks, this has been an extraordinarily civil campaign.
Bro, you have no party infrastructure.
The entire point of an insurgency like Bernie's (or Trump's) is to seize the party infrastructure.
Trump - unlike Bernie - had the good fortune to be running against some extraordinarily lame candidates. I mean, seriously, the Republican Establishment had settled on Jeb-whose-last-name-must-not-be-spoken -- and doing so was entirely rational. This is your Republican Party in 2016.
Shoot, I'll have to search around a bit to find it, but it was one of the classic internet essays. It was about how people in tight religious groups lose their faith (pretty sure), with lessons for how to reach authoritarians.
The main takeaway was that these people are trading a lot of freedom for a protector (the patriarch or god). The biggest source of dissonance that made people lose their faith was if the protector didn't protect them. When that happened, they were susceptible to reasoning.
The essay was way better. Lemme see if I can find it.
268: Me too. Besides, I do hold them in utter contempt. Most of them are dumb as fucking posts.
269: I swear I've read that article. It was conservative Mormons. Actually, I think I may have posted it here? IIRC a former livejournal friend linked to it, having had a similar experience in her own life, escaping some quasi-cult in west Texas or Utah or something that she grew up in.
263
Yeah, I don't know if the magazine would formally endorse him, but a bunch of the writers have signed on to the #neverTrump movement. Now they're actively hoping for a brokered convention where the GOP establishment picks a non Trump.
Those of us in the #NeverTrump camp are saying all this now -- in the heat of the primary -- not because we're taking our ball and going home, but because we're laying down a marker. We will fight Trump through every state, to the convention, and beyond. #NeverTrump isn't a sign of surrender but rather a rallying cry. The battle, after all, is far from over.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432237/donald-trump-why-i-cant-vote-trump-nevertrump
Bro, you have no party infrastructure.
It's not a party infrastructure, but it's an infrastructure. He scheduled two just-in-time rallies in Texas last Saturday (put on the calendar the night before), had the venues well-organized with volunteers and paid staff, generated 5-digit turnout at the rally in Austin, and got everyone's email who attended and immediately started sending out communications (like half an hour after I checked in).
That's exactly the kind of organization that could turn local races where nobody votes, if it had competent people carrying the banner of his agenda. It's also a plausible path for someone who started his career as a socialist mayor. And, unlike Obama, I don't think much of the enthusiasm for his campaign among young people is tied to his personal qualities (beyond his consistency of having a left economic message and acting on it).
That Hilzoy thing is great. If you read it, she's not just saying be nice to people to make nice with them. She's saying that to the extent that you believe that there is in fact some broad base of working- or middle-class white Republicans who are voting against their own interest (and, you pretty much have to believe that if you're on "the left" broadly defined), the only way to get those people to support some policy that you want is to build some plausible form of trust with them -- if they baseline hate/distrust you, all the appeal in the world to issues that are plausibly supported by them does nothing.
By adopting "trust no one, all experts are evil, all politicians are bad" Republicans created the opportunity for Trump, because inevitably people were also going to start distrusting Republican politicians, at least when they couldn't immediately deliver. That seems right. Doesn't mean that there weren't other factors too.
That's exactly the kind of organization that could turn local races where nobody votes, if it had competent people carrying the banner of his agenda.
Conceivably, if it were sustained in some organized way applicable to other candidates under some kind of non-personal structure. But absolutely zero about Bernie's career or campaign or base of support suggests that this could or will happen. The money and the staff and the rallies dry up once he does.
I'm not going to find that essay fast, but based on my vague memory of it, it is not going to be reasoning nor our sweet demeanor that woos authoritarians back from Trumplove. They wouldn't be reachable until after he's failed his end of the bargain, which is to protect them.
277
That reminds me. The only people I know IRL who really do resemble the "Bernie Bro" caricature don't actually support him, because he's simply a capitulation to kinder, gentler, capitalism.
#noMensheviks
I mean, is there even a sustained, effective left-socialist party organization based around Sanders' constituency in Vermont that's done substantially more than elect him? (This is a serious non-rhetorical question which others may know more about than I do, but I believe the answer is basically no. He's been a very effective constituent-services politician but hasn't set up an actual left-wing political machine or party infrastructure operation. Wikipedia points to this thing which doesn't seem deeply directly linked to Sanders and also doesn't seem like a very big deal.)
My county actually broke for Bernie!
279:
Did you not read that Jacobin article that made the rounds here about a month and a half ago? His fingerprints are all over the city of Burlington, which was politically conservative before he became mayor. After his election, he was stonewalled by the conservative city council for two years, so he used his bully pulpit to rally people to vote in a new council. Voter turnout increased dramatically and they elected a new, more progressive council. Burlington is still a very progressive city. This is pretty much what he's promising to do as President. How much success he'll have is debatable, but the guy basically set the political agenda for a whole city for a few decades and has one of the highest approval ratings of any sitting congress persons.
Burlington consist of 40,00 people.
I mean, all due respect to Bernie, am sure he's a great civic leader, but the scale and organisation of that kind of thing is very very different to the scale and organisation needed to transform even a city like Chicago, let alone the States as a whole.
Makes me curious if he's partly responsible for Vermont being so unabashedly leftist, as opposed to just left of center. To the point of them potentially becoming soon the first state to legalize recreational marijuana use via its legislature rather than the ballot, plus of course all the single-payer stuff.
284: I wouldn't be surprised if he played a big role. I've never been to Vermont personally, but I've heard from people who have family there that there's a major divide between the old-time rural New England types who have been there forever (and are generally fairly conservative in the old-time rural New England way) and the hippie types like Sanders who arrived more recently and have come to dominate the state. Obviously Sanders is hugely popular in the state, so he can clearly appeal to both groups on some level, and it seems plausible that his personal popularity has made the transition smoother than it might have otherwise been.
Incidentally, an interesting fact about Vermont political history that I learned recently while researching this year's Senate races: Leahy is the only Democratic senator the state has ever had.
Thinking about it, the heart of the matter is that Sanders turns out working-class voters, who are incidentally white because that's what the demographics of Vermont or wherever are like, where that's a thing. Trump turns out white voters where white voters, as such, are a thing, i.e. in the South. They are incidentally working-class because that's the biggest class, in the same way as any political movement in Vermont will tend to skew pasty. In some places, class prevails over race; in others, race trumps class. In the US context, we call the second "the South".
Whether Sanders can win depends whether you think you can get enough mobilisation vig from the first group to outweigh the second group.
Also I think Hilzoy has a point about deliberately generating a low-trust society.
I don't think 187 is remotely right in either direction, but don't really have the time or energy to write a long response. At best Sanders in primaries has turned out some portion of lower-income white voters (mostly young - and possibly lower-income mainly for that reason) who are inclined to vote Democratic and who, for the most part, would likely vote anyway (there's no evidence of increased turnout in the Democratic primaries caused by Sanders, at least compared to 2008). In Vermont, by contrast, Sanders seems to have won over basically the entire state regardless of class (or race, to whatever tiny extent that matters), apparently by being a really really really good constituent-services politician in a small state that previously had a long tradition of having very liberal Republicans and not a big Democratic working-class base and to which, for whatever reason, a lot of hippies moved. I doubt his success in Vermont is meaningfully based on white "working class" mobilization (whatever that term "working class" might mean in Vermont, which isn't even a little bit clear to me).
As for Trump, his support seems heavily grounded among low-education Republicans (not necessarily the same as low income, and he's done pretty well in different income groups). But it's not particularly regional to the South -- his best primary state so far is Massachusetts, he did very well in New Hampshire, and also in Vermont. He seems to pick up the angry right-wing asshole 25-45% of Republicans of all persuasions, whether Southern evangelicals, New England Massholes, Appalachian bubbas, or Midwestern angry Mike Ditka/Bobby Knight types (both actual Trump supporters!). It's a pan-regional constellation of assholes.
It's a pan-regional constellation of assholes.
I sincerely hope this is a case of "Great news, Mr Trump, every ignorant asshole in America supports you."
"Well, that's no good, I need a majority."
According to some thing I just looked up, 30% of Vermont's population between 18-34 in 1970 were hippies living on communes, and the state's population, which had been stagnant before then, grew by 30% in the late 60s-70s, largely from people from out of state. The simplest explanation is that it became a hippie state because lots of hippies went there and liked it and stayed.
Corey Robin analyzes Supertuesday and says it ain't over yet.
I've seen lots of claims that Sanders is only winning because of white men; among every other demographic, he loses. That simply isn't true. In Vermont and New Hampshire, he beat Clinton among all women voters. In Oklahoma, as I said, he nearly tied Clinton among women voters. In Nevada, he nearly tied her among Latino voters (though the experts are still debating that one). In Massachusetts, as I said, he got 41% of non-white voters.
292: an interesting example of a man clutching at straws in order to use them to construct men with.
Megan or heebie: any luck in finding that article?
It sounds interesting and like something that could be useful, maybe more socially/culturally than strictly electoral-politically, in generating anti-capitalist messaging. ("Your god, your father, your boss, and the structures they maintain do not know what's good for you and, more importantly, cannot protect you or what you love. For example..." etc.)
I mean seriously. Robin, never the shiniest bauble on the Christmas tree, is basing his entire argument on people assuming that "nearly tied" doesn't mean "lost".
Whether or not it's over yet, and the media is putting its thumb on the scales pretty aggressively there, Robin isn't saying anything dumb there, or making whatever mistake it is you're attributing to him. He's pointing out that the story that a lot of places are telling about how Sanders can't win is based on treating him like a factional candidate with a smallish faction and arguing that he's only done well in states with abnormal populations. And he's pointing out, pretty accurately, that there's relatively little evidence for the claim that he's especially that way.
In the quoted bit he's pointing that "Sanders is weak among women and non-white voters", which is something I've heard a lot now, sits somewhere between "not likely" and "open bullshit" depending on which of those two groups you're putting more emphasis on. He's not weaker among women - the differences there are an artifact of age groups. And he's weaker among the black community specifically*, but there's little to no evidence that he's weaker among any other minority groups. Scorn is fun, but there's really no evidence that he's being a moron there.
*(Or now that I think about it 'the black communities in the south' which may or may not be different from the ones in other places, though he doesn't put any real weight on that point. If you take the Nate Silver argument that we have to ignore the entrance and exit polling that showed he was stronger among the latino demographic in Nevada seriously the conclusion to draw from that is that Sanders did a lot better among the black community in Minnesota, after all, because the two districts that contain almost all the black voters in the state went more heavily for Sanders than the ones right next to them. (The rust belt/farmer/almost-no-one-lives-there districts went for him in equally strong numbers, but are harder to compare to black city-folk and white-city-but-wealthier fold.)
284/285: The maximalist claim would be that Bernie's a big part of the reason that VT and NH are so different, but I have no idea if that can be supported at all. How similar/different were they in, say, 1920?
They were both much more nearly rectangular in shape until The Bern moved the border so that Vermont looked like a 'V' on the map.
296: Robin's argument is exclusively against strawmen, because the only thing he proves is that not literally all of Bernie's support comes from white men. In states where Bernie won big, he got a bare majority (or nearly half!) of women, and the best showing he can point to among African-Americans is losing them 3:2.
Against the IRL claim that Bernie's victories are delivered by white men, he's got nothing. If you win a state while (only just) losing women and losing blacks, then your victory margin must have come from....
By 1920, Vermont's Long Trail was already being constructed while New Hampshire didn't give a shit about backpacking.
In the quoted bit he's pointing that "Sanders is weak among women and non-white voters", which is something I've heard a lot now, sits somewhere between "not likely" and "open bullshit" depending on which of those two groups you're putting more emphasis on. He's not weaker among women - the differences there are an artifact of age groups. And he's weaker among the black community specifically*, but there's little to no evidence that he's weaker among any other minority groups.
OK, then. How about this:
Sanders won a majority of women's votes in the primary or caucus in the following states.... [answers here]
Sanders won a majority of the following minority's votes in the following states.... [answers here]
Because I think the answers are:
Sanders won a majority of women's votes in the primary or caucus in the following states.... Vermont, New Hampshire.
Sanders won a majority of the following minority's votes in the following states.... Hispanic/Latino, Nevada.
And that doesn't obviously look like a candidate who isn't weak among women and minorities.
It's certainly dubious to extrapolate anything whatsoever from Vermont returns.
304: But duuuuuude, have you ever looked at an extrapolation from Vermont? I mean really looked at it.
297
I don't know about the 1920's but long before Bernie Vermont was seen as more liberal (and hippie as previously pointed out), and NH as conservative, poor and somewhat racist ("the Mississippi of the North"). The "Northeast Kingdom" in VT is still pretty poor, though, but recently it's been overrun by developers, or so I hear. NH is much less poor and conservative than it used to be due to the southern part being overrun by refugees from MA. (NH people often say they fled from MA taxes and traffic and then instituted them in NH as soon as they arrived. They also complain MA immigrants wanted kindergartens and sewage systems and other frivolities.)
Part of the difference must be that Vermont has long been more oriented to New York and NH oriented to Boston.
298
Bernie also had Lake Champlain excavated to give VT a "coast" like NH's.
You're still, blatantly, ignoring the obvious point about the women vote (made by like everyone when looking at polls and Robin that post right there) which is still that it's a division relating to ages. Clinton wins older women by a large margin; Sanders wins younger women by a large margin. In states where Sanders won the women voters or that were close it had a lot more to do with a shift in older women than anything else. In most states older people make up a disproportionate share of the electorate, for probably obvious reasons. This is pretty directly obvious in national surveys and borne out by the exit polling in the states that have voted as well.
As far as the hispanic/latino vote you're forgetting Texas (big Clinton win) and Colorado (big Sanders win but without any demographic polling that I've found). So that's still pretty inconclusive, unless Colorado was literally Latinos V. Everyone Else.
There are Bernie fans in my FB feed who seem legitimately disappointed that Sanders called Phish a "great band."
I think some people don't realize that that Berned in DC facebook page isn't real.
289
I doubt his success in Vermont is meaningfully based on white "working class" mobilization (whatever that term "working class" might mean in Vermont, which isn't even a little bit clear to me).
"Working class" in Vermont means people in tourism, agriculture (among other things, Vermont produces 42 percent of America's maple syrup), and natural resources extraction (and not oil or coal, but logging and mining). I don't have surveys to back this up but I can't imagine that those industries don't influence how people think about stewardship of the land. Gotta keep maple trees healthy to get syrup and leaf-peepers, and global warming could kill the snowboarding industry, which means environmental protection, which means...
As for agriculture, it's a small part of the state's GDP, but I still think some details about it are worth mentioning. For one thing, farms in Vermont are much smaller than average. (177 acres vs. 441 acres.) They're more likely to be small businesses, very small, rather than factory farms, for whatever meaning that loaded term has. And here's the thing: farming is not a lucrative industry, especially for a small business. They need subsidies and they know it. They get them for sentimental reasons but also because tourists come to Vermont to see rolling hills with cows on them. Again I don't have any data here but I can't imagine that doesn't influence how Vermont's working class thinks about government subsidies and the "free market" in general.
Sanders was initially mayor elected by college professors and activists (and the police union, according to Wikipedia, an alliance that seems weird today), but he's been in statewide offices for the past 25 years. A college town can't carry him to that. Is it so hard to believe that he's been genuinely representing his constituency since then?
Until someone who knows more stops me, I'm just gonna keep pointing to tidbits about Vermont political history I learned on the internet or am speculating about. Vermont had basically no Democrats at all for most of its 20th C history, because (compared to even NH or Maine) it had essentially no industry and thus no immigrants and thus no white ethnics to organize, while being a die-hard Yankee Republicans from the Civil War kind of place. "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont" said FDR in 1936 when those were the only states to vote R. Riffing off of the Republican classic line "as goes Maine, so goes the nation" because Maine was just so damn Republican then.
BUT these were mostly weird super liberal Republicans, who unlike elsewhere managed to survive even into the 21st Century. Like totally into poverty relief and farm subsidies but ALSO unlike FDR not into Jim Crow or political machines of colorful Catholics. It looks like even in around 1955, when both Vermont and NH were extremely Republican, NH was already going full asshole Republican mode and getting into McCarthy and ratfucking unions, whereas Vermont was full of kinder gentler Republicans. Why? Who knows, but New Hampshire is a shit-hole. And then in the 1960s and 70s the hippies came. So you had pretty much the only place in the US with liberal, but not Democratic white working class, politics, and then a shit-ton of white hippies decided to move north, plus probably like 6 black guys to be in terrible fake reggae bands. It was uniquely primed for hippie politics.
307: What's your point, that young women who don't vote favor Bernie? What's the significance of that?
You're still, blatantly, ignoring the obvious point about the women vote (made by like everyone when looking at polls and Robin that post right there) which is still that it's a division relating to ages.
In fact, among young people, Sanders still draws more support from men than women. And women don't become any less female because they age.
Anyway, if actually winning a given demographic doesn't mean you have more support from that demographic, why should Bernie's greater support among young people count?
Robin's deeper point is that demographic groups that don't agree with him shouldn't be considered to be authentically members of that group. Women don't support Bernie, only old women do. Black people don't prefer Hillary really because young black people prefer Bernie. Southern Democrats don't count.
I'm politically sympathetic to Robin's views to the point of hoping Bernie wins the nomination. But I'd change my view in a heartbeat if I thought that Bernie shares Robin's dumb, dismissive views about Hillary's supporters.
And it's so fucking small! Hippies moving could change politics because there were so few other people. 30,000 young people 18-30 on communes in 1970, but only 100,000 18-30 year olds total. In the pre-hippie era the political fight was between more conservative business Republicans, who appear to have been literally 3 rich families and their minions, and the more dominant liberal Republicans.
You're still, blatantly, ignoring the obvious point about the women vote (made by like everyone when looking at polls and Robin that post right there) which is still that it's a division relating to ages.
Not ignoring it, it just isn't relevant to the question of "is Sanders weaker among women?"
If the answer is "yes, because older women don't generally vote for him", that's still a "yes".
312: You kind of forgot the "exit polling" bit there: young women who vote vote for Sanders in disproportionate amounts. (Also, really? That's kind of a bullshit straw man there to attribute to me, especially since that was actually pretty significant fucking news a while back.)
Also I think 313 has to depend on a really aggressively uncharitable reading of what he's saying (to the point where I think it's a bit dumb.) What he's doing looks to me exactly like pushing back at the idea that there's a unified voting bloc there so that it's reasonable to talk about women-voters or minority-voters, while the actual fault lines here are different. That's a very reasonable point to make, and an important one to boot because the Clinton campaign (and supporters) have been pushing really really hard on the idea that Sanders isn't a candidate for those groups, and that his base is a bunch of racists/misogynists and so on. Which, he's accurately pointing out, is a whole lot of nonsense.
And unless there's been a noticeable shift in polling, this bit right here is actually false. (Which, again, seriously!? This was a big deal when the polling on it started coming out because it massively undercut the narrative that the Clinton campaign was aggressively trying to sell):
In fact, among young people, Sanders still draws more support from men than women.
What that polling showed is precisely the opposite of this: the support among women was equal to greater among young people. The greater support from men came (again, this being the important difference) from the older demographics entirely.
313
I don't think it's meant to dismiss Hillary supporters at all. It's simply pointing out that there's a giant trend (people over 40 vastly prefer Hillary, people under 40 vastly prefer Sanders) that gets masked by lumping data together. It's bad social science in that it's purposely obscuring what is happening, but in this case it's used to claim that "only white men support Sanders," which is superficially true only if you aggregate the data in an obfuscating way.
It IS true that more women support Clinton, and it IS true that Sanders has major problems with black voters. If you look at age, however, you find these trends mitigated or reversed. It tells us nothing about who is going to get the nomination (older voters vote in larger numbers, and they'll ultimately decide the nomination), but it does tell us that "only white men" vote for Sanders is false. It also reveals potential trends about the future of the party, such as that young people are to the far left of older people, and the Democratic party would do well to take note.
Also I think 313 has to depend on a really aggressively uncharitable reading of what he's saying (to the point where I think it's a bit dumb.)
To be fair, Robin has said some dumb things on this subject.
316: See, e.g., this from about a month ago.
My understanding of Vermont has happily been expanded, but now I wonder about a sans-Sanders counterfactual - if not for the movement/activists/Bernie, would the new suburbanites have drowned out the hippies and made it more like, say, Connecticut?
Everyone: stop, just stop. You, Corey Robin, everyone. You're trying to make numbers do something they're not meant to do. From now on, all analysis must be performed in terms of "odds ratios", or else you're going to statistics jail, or if that doesn't scare you, statistics Guantanamo.
Bernie also had Lake Champlain excavated to give VT a "coast" like NH's.
Thus unleashing long-dormant prehistoric beasts on the helpless populace.
I wonder if the rest of the Iroquois thought that loin cloth was a bit too short for a guy his age.
And the reason why people are pushing back against it, aside from social science pedantry (which probably only applies to a small group of people disproportionately represented among commenters here), is that it's offensive. It's a form of really gross and cynical identity politics that is normally deployed by Republicans.
321: You can fuck up just as badly using ORs as other statistics.
321
I'm really not sure we need odds ratios to find trends in aggregated exit polling data given our goals here. But feel free to calculate them and report back!
326: But the odds ratio is the literal number you are arguing about. Demographic factors increase or decrease your chances of voting for Sanders, relative to some comparison case. This is what the entire argument is about.
You can see on the graph you linked to that in the Reuters sample that being a young woman increases your odds of voting for Sanders, and being an old woman decreasing your odds, relative to men. So it's not a fixed age effect -- there's an interaction between being a woman and age. For race, it looks like there might be a race effect, and an age effect, and it's plausible that they don't interact. But this is just looking at the bar chart, which puts me at heebie's principal level of technological sophistication.
310.2: There's lots of subsidies to farmers nationwide, though not necessarily progressive ones. Not sure how Vermont is going to be unless there's more state-level farmer programs.
(328 looks like viral marketing for insurance.)
327
I didn't link to an article, you are thinking of someone else.
The point I was making was simpler than that, which is simply that younger women support Sanders in large numbers, and older women don't, and you're going to have to take that into effect if you want to make a claim about gender. If we wanted to calculate how much more likely it is that women support Clinton/Sanders given an age cohort, then yes, an OR would be useful.
Cyrus: Any idea how Vermont's delegation voted on the New Deal, where the rubber hit the road?
If Ben and Jerry's is any guide,what works in white lefty Burlington can scale anywhere.
To be more clear, I was addressing a binary question: did Sanders win the vote in group X, to which the answer is yes or no. For women, it's "no" as total category, but if we disaggregate it by age category, we end up with: yes, yes, no no, or yes (under 40), no (over 40).
Thinking about your question though is interesting, and I am not being flippant now when I say it would be interesting to see ORs for different demographic groups.
it does tell us that "only white men" vote for Sanders is false
But that's a straw man, no? The "only white men" quote comes from Robin, not someone that he's responding to.
And here's the thing: farming is not a lucrative industry, especially for a small business. They need subsidies and they know it. They get them for sentimental reasons but also because tourists come to Vermont to see rolling hills with cows on them. Again I don't have any data here but I can't imagine that doesn't influence how Vermont's working class thinks about government subsidies and the "free market" in general.
Very pointed (and accurate) description of how that affects the way farmers think about the free market from Catch-22:
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism....
Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.
Hm. Looks like their Republican establishment came around, if not immediately.
Here's a fun tidbit: until the 1940's, there was a tacit agreement that governors would serve no more than two years in office, and they would alternate between from east and west of the Green Mountains; order of succession was determined up to ten years in advance in the backrooms.
334
I've seen enough of "Sanders supporters are the same as Ron Paul/Trump supporters" articles that the straw man isn't simply a figment of Robins's imagination.
311: then a shit-ton of white hippies decided to move north, plus probably like 6 black guys to be in terrible fake reggae bands.
Or the founding members of Detroit proto-punk band Death who in the end do form a reggae band ....
Here's a cut of their's from 1975, "Politicians in My Eyes."
The Hackney brothers ended the band in 1977. The brothers then moved to Burlington, Vermont and released two albums of gospel rock as The 4th Movement in the early 1980s. David moved back to Detroit in 1982, and died of lung cancer in 2000. Bobby and Dannis still reside in Vermont and lead the reggae band Lambsbread.
328: When a 100-employee farm gets a subsidy, it's between the owner, their accountant, and their trade association doing the lobbying, and it's business as usual for the other 98 people working there. It doesn't influence how those 98 people think about subsidies. When a family farm - let's say four family members and six employees, adjusted seasonally - gets subsidies everyone in that family knows how they're making ends meet. Or so I imagine. I don't have experience with 100-employee farms, but I really did know family farmers who could talk your ear off about milk price supports and conservation easements. There was still some when-I-do-it-it's-OK in there, and they didn't like the parts of government that get in their way any more than anyone else does, but they were aware of the relationship between their livelihood and Sanders' platform.
320
My understanding of Vermont has happily been expanded, but now I wonder about a sans-Sanders counterfactual - if not for the movement/activists/Bernie, would the new suburbanites have drowned out the hippies and made it more like, say, Connecticut?
Maybe? Your counterfactual is vague.
If not for the movement and activists and Bernie, then sure, Vermont would be a lot less hippieish. The movement in question is hippies moving there. I'd say like Connecticut except that Vermont can't be too suburban just because it's not too urban. Making Montpelier into Hartford and/or Burlington into Bridgeport would have required a historical point of departure long before the 1970s.
However, if you're just asking for a sans-Sanders counterfactual, with a movement and activists but no New York socialist Jew running for mayor of Burlington in 1980? Hard to say. I've been talking about farming so far, but let me switch gears here - Burlington is by far the biggest city in Vermont. Its airport got a new terminal in 1973, Ben & Jerry's was founded there in 1978, and construction of the Church Street Marketplace started in 1980, so it was doing well before Sanders became mayor, but I have to assume that he kept things going in the same direction if not better. We can narrowly say that if not for Sanders, Burlington would have continued to have a Republican mayor, since he won so narrowly. If so, Burlington would have more condos and fewer parks and museums. That would definitely make the state as a whole more Connecticut-like. Is that enough to count?
For the record, I'm getting a lot of these details from Wikipedia, but we took school trips to that museum, I've been on dates on Church Street and to that waterfront park, friends of mine went to UVM, and I had family in South Burlington.
331: 336 beat me to it with more of a source than I would have had. I know Vermont was one of the few states to vote against FDR.
I'm doing nothing but Vermont political history commenting all day. That's my commitment to you.
I think more than a comparison to Connecticut (maybe the most heavily industrialized state, with Vermont maybe the least) I'm more interested in why politics in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire seem to diverge so much. Even in the early 60s, Vermont had a liberal Democrat as governor, Phillip Hoff, who broke with LBJ in Vietnam -- he was a for-real liberal. He ran in the Senate in 68 and lost to a guy, Winston Prouty, who seems to have been the most conservative major politician in Vermont at the time, but who, despite supporting Nixon on Cambodia, spent a lot of his time supporting liberal social programs like old age insurance and Amtrak and assistance for families with disabled children.
Meanwhile, in NH at the time, you had an actual conservative Republican senator, who voted against the 64 Civil Right Act, plus a Democratic senator who seems like an ordinary white-ethnic labor pol, who was elected in kind of a fluke and was the last D elected from NH to the Senate until Jeanne Shaheen.
Why the difference? It looks to me like VT's relative absence of industry and immigrants (even French Canadians) kept its class structure and society relatively equal and homogenous and into social solidarity, and then there was a great hippie wave. If that's right, Sanders is probably best seen as a guy who was (very effectively -- he's obviously a good and popular local politician) able to cobble together an excellent political coalition, but not one meaningfully based on creating a political machine to organize the working class against capital. This could be wrong!
330: Sorry, it was MHPH in 319, which has a link to an article has a graph that shows that young women are seemingly more likely to vote for Sanders than young women, and old women are less likely to vote for Sanders. There's no numbers, though, so it could sampling error.
340 posted before seeing 336-339. Vermont political history commenting Thursday!
I know someone who's an anthropologist of small-scale democracy in Vermont. I would ask him about this, except I'm skipping out on the event I would see him at today.
Perhaps the most literal opportunity to use the phrase "suck it up, buttercup" ever. Come on, ask him! Who else is interested in what that guy has to say.
334: Yeah, I can't imagine where he might have gotten the impression that anyone would be pushing that that narrative at all that's just crazy talk. I mean, the very idea that anyone would be promoting this narrative constantly or that you'd be seeing it in practically every time someone who supports Clinton analyses the race is preposterous. It's certainly nothing you'd see That wouldn't make sense at all.
I was responding explicitly to this claim: In fact, among young people, Sanders still draws more support from men than women.
The graph there, and polling before that too, indicated the exact opposite. That among young people support for Sanders is higher among women than men.
Applause for 345. B+ comment (would have been an "A" if it had been signed).
343, 344 Where's your commitment to the blog, Buttercup?
Yeah, 345 is great.
I like Corey but lately reading him makes me think of that X-Files "I want to believe" poster.
Fine guys. Next time I see him I will ask him. Or if I'm inspired (not likely), I'll write him an email.
It was me but now I feel awkward taking credit for it.
A Vermonter friend of mine spent some time doing door-to-door campaigning in rural areas there, and apparently while that was a difficult task overall because of a strong expectation of privacy, it was only when he got close to or unwittingly over the NH border that people starting threatening shotguns.
346: But you're missing the bigger picture. Analysts are morons, and the reason is because they use words. Words are bad. Only numbers can be trusted. All election commentary should consist of long lists of odds ratios, with no words other than the label for the group.
This 2012 profile from 538 (still part of NYT at the time) has a nice chart of the move left since the 60's on presidential politics.
Heading north, these migrants had a choice of where to settle, and some self-sorting took place.More conservatives tended to choose New Hampshire, attracted to its low taxes and "Live Free or Die" ethos. Vermont, where cows outnumbered people before 1963, tended to attract young, left-leaning and outdoors-loving professionals, both Mr. Nelson and Mr. Johnson said [two poli sci profs at Vermont colleges--JPS],
Tigre is essentially correct in 311, but Vermont is less hippieish than this conversation suggests. Sure, Ben and Jerry's, but when they opened in Burlington, they distinguished themselves by being hippies. Also, sure, Bread and Puppet, but they're way out in the Northeast Kingdom, and like Sanders, they started out in Brooklyn. Vermont is much more "don't fuck with us" than "let us impose our liberal values upon you."
Vermont is also famously dismissive/distrustful of outsiders ("flatlanders"), so the state's embrace of Sanders is pretty remarkable. I was in high school when he became mayor, and he was attacked in the media from day one. And he's been pretty fucking great ever since.
Jesus, you might like the Dufay-Bearbeitungen on Isabel Mundry's Traces des Moments.
Vermont is also famously dismissive/distrustful of outsiders ("flatlanders"), so the state's embrace of Sanders is pretty remarkable.
Yes, and I learned that the opposite of a "flatlander" in Vermont, i.e. a native Vermonter, is a "woodchuck." This bar is woodchucks only, flatlanders!
BUT the current Vermont governor, Peter Shmulin (a Democrat first elected in 2011) is the first Vermont governor who is a Vermont native since 1973. Everyone else moved into the State, including this remarkable-seeming Swiss-Jewish woman who was established pre-Sanders and whom Sanders challenged for the governorship in 1986, and who also is likely the only governor of a US State to write a book called " The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and Family."
Kunin was a sorority sister of my mom at UMass.
who also is likely the only governor of a US State to write a book called " The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and Family."
It's pretty unusual for two people to write books with the same long title.
355: I do. Praise you, nosflow.
Further to 357: And governor when my mom was chief ME, but they never really hung out.
Vermont has a chief mechanical engineer?
Maybe! But she was the medical examiner.
354
NH, VT and ME all share a distrust of "flatlanders" and "out-of-staters" and similar riffraff. Not to mention tourists. They are pretty happy to take their money, though.
In fact, her vanity plate read QNCY.
The flatlander vs. woodchuck divide is a real part of the state's culture, but not in the way segregation is a part of Alabaman culture, more like the way leiderhosen is a part of German culture and an analogy ban is part of Unfogged culture.
345: Skimming through the links, Robin isn't replying to very many of those arguments.
Take your first link. Even Robin's cherry-picked data supports (or at best, fails to rebut) Rev. Maupin.
Robin:
With the exception of Nevada, the states where there's been dramatic support for Clinton among non-white voters have all been in the South. And in Nevada, Latino voters almost went for Sanders
...
in Mass., Sanders got 41% of the non-white vote.
Note what Robin is not claiming here. He's not claiming that Sanders is winning among non-white voters even outside the South and Nevada. He's just saying Clinton's support hasn't been greater in a "dramatic" way. Clinton's minority support sure as hell has been dramatic in the South.
And, of course, Robin never explains why the focus should be on non-South, non-Nevada voters. Nothing in Robin's claims (beyond his hopeful projections into the future) contradicts Maupin.
Robin does, however, successfully rebut is his own straw man: that Sanders "is only winning because of white men."
||
How quick of a jump between companies ends up looking like an employment history red flag in the startup world? A company that I am really interested in (and who says they like me) says they won't be in a position to make an offer for at least a couple of months, and I have an offer from another company to start immediately. I can't really wait out the two+ months (and it's not a sure thing) but I would be inclined to jump on it if/when the offer came.
||>
From now on, all analysis must be performed in terms of "odds ratios", or else you're going to statistics jail,
I'll give you 30-to-life.
371: I've never worked in HR, but I have to assume that any one such jump looks understandable and forgiveable. If this is your third or fourth time doing it in as many years, then maybe it would set off reg flags. But one time, well, sometimes offices close right after hiring someone, sometimes a family member has a medical emergency and you have to take care of them, etc.
At least, I hope so. As I mention I recently started with a new employer technically, but I'm still looking and I sorta kinda have a prospect.
That's only one set of odds. You need two odds to have a ratio.
more like the way leiderhosen is a part of German culture
Liederhosen: extremely tight-fitting knee-length trousers worn by German tenors in order to help them reach the high notes.
Happened to run across this just now in my Facebook feed.
Slide 14 tells us that "the strongest Sanders supporter is likely to be a young white man." Per the WSJ, he leads Clinton in that white male 18-44 demographic by 65-28. In the white female 18-44 demographic, he leads by 50-45.
No doubt Sanders does better among real young people. (Sorry, gang, if you're 42, you ain't young.)
I can't vouch for the WSJ's sourcing or interpretation of data, but despite it's Murdochity (murdochaceiousness?), the Journal is a pretty reputable outfit.
"the strongest Sanders supporter is likely to be a young white man."
BERNIEBRO DO YOU EVEN LIFT.
368: Photo in the flickr pool.
Mine now. I had to swap out the plates for Oregon ones, but it turns out that a neighbor of my younger brother is the daughter of a writer for the show, so I sent one to my mom for an autograph for him.
Let's dive deeper into Vermont political history. The key political moment seems to have been this anti-development law from 1970. On its face it looks like everything "market urbanists," planners, and increase-welfare-for-the-poor-by-abolishing-zoning types now hate. Yet it apparently (backed mainly by Republicans!) created the basic aesthetic and property infrastructure for contemporary Vermont. Paradox, or something possible only in low-denisty rural state with pre-existing relative social egalitarianism?
376: I don't know where they're data came from, but it's super sketchy looking and I haven't seen much that suggests anything looking remotely like that gender difference in either national polling or state exit polling that I've seen*. (And you're right: including 40+ year olds as "young" is pretty sketchy.) I'd take it with a huge grain of salt by which I mean "give it the finger".
*Or age ones: they have Sanders listed as winning among 18-34 year olds by 24%, and Clinton winning among 35-49 year olds (those age groupings alone are weird looking to me - normally you see them split up differently) by 20%. That's pretty questionable. In Nevada, which I picked because it was a close race rather than a blowout, Sanders won 30-39 year olds by over 30%, and lost 40-49 year olds by 2%.
Let's dive deeper into Vermont political history.
I admit, I'm enjoying the R. Tigre Vermont blogging. It's amusing (and educational) to watch your sometimes manic commenting energy directed towards such an anodyne subject.
Sanders won 30-39 year olds by over 30%, and lost 40-49 year olds by 2%.
That is striking. I knew that the gap in younger voters was huge but I hadn't realized that the cut-off was that old, and that sharp*.
Let's see, people who are 40 now were 16 in 1992. Do you think that part of the difference is between people who were adults during the first Clinton presidency and those who weren't?
* though I'm not sure it makes sense to look at just one state. I'd also be curious to know what the sample sizes were for those age groups.
382: I now see that the final slide gives the sourcing: AP; General Social Survey; WSJ/NBC News telephone polls; National Election Pool exit polls. They don't say which data comes from where.
382: I wouldn't call it the key political moment, but it was huge, and similar to the urban growth boundary established here. Clearly, I can't get away from hippies.
Clearly, I can't get away from hippies
The key is to start a really epic—I mean epic—drum circle, and then right as it really gets going you just slip away unnoticed.
381: True Rockefeller Republicans? The last true Rockefeller Republicans? The only true Rockefeller Republicans ever? One more bit of Vermont trivia: some Rockefellers lived there.
Heh. A 300-plus-comment thread seems like a terrible way to get someone into Unfogged, and yet I almost want to ask my dad to chime in. He was a lawyer in Vermont in the 70s and 80s and worked on land use stuff. Googling turns up at least one time he worked for the Agency of Environmental Conservation. Act 250 was relevant.
386
I was just going to comment on that. I don't know anything about VT, but I do know about Portland's urban growth boundary, which sounds similar. IIRC it was also done by environmental Republicans in the 70s.
Don't you live in SE Portland? That is (used to be?) hippie central. At least move to Tigard or something.
381 is supposed to read "low-dentistry", right?
A 300-plus-comment thread seems like a terrible way to get someone into Unfogged, and yet I almost want to ask my dad to chime in.
Make sure to tell him all about going presidential, NMM, Halfordismo, and ekranoplans first. And don't forget Opinionated Grandma.
389: NE, near Alberta. Equally hippie, with maybe a little more hipster thrown in. Now even more fragrant with pot smoke than usual.
Further to 386, an example of how Vermont implements statewide policy in a way that distinguishes it from crazy-libertarian New Hampshire and Maine: in 1968, two years before Act 250, when much of the rest of the country was rioting and burning shit down, Vermont banned billboards. It may seem like a small thing, but I breathe a sigh of relief whenever I cross the state line.
300 plus comment thread is the perfect introduction, the banter which alternates unpredictably between, well, between modes of discourse is half the charm.
300 plus comment thread is the name of my new band.
A guy on NRO (Buttercup got me started) is now calling for a joint Cruz-Rubio ticket to form an asshole big enough to blast Trump out of the running.
We're going to need a bigger asshole.
Well, it's clear enough that the future belongs to socialism. A sweep in the states in 2020 doesn't seem vrazy.
I totally get dismissing Clinton winning Georgia etc. She's not going to win it in the general, so what exactly has she demonstrated?
IIRC it was also done by environmental Republicans in the 70s.
Headed by the amazingly great governor, Tom McCall. He would likely be considered a raging leftist today, and he has an odd parallel with Sanders, in that he used the governor's office to put on a rock festival (Vortex 1, look it up) and Sanders used the mayor's office to establish a punk club.
398: Well....it's not a contest to determine who is most electable. It's a contest to determine which candidate most democrats want to represent their party. Georgia Dems get to have their say!
Well, yeah, you win the delegates and you get the nomination.
And yes, AA voters in Georgia are important people. I'm not sure how fair it is to judge whether Sanders can plausibly contest the general by his movement's failure to fire their imaginations.
As I said, though, it's the future, and nothing President Clinton is going to do will stop this from coming.
Folks know that Vermont was an independent republic before joining the US right? Don't tell anyone in Texas.
402: INORITE. And Vermonters totally mess with Texas when it comes to voter turnout.
I know that Tigre committed himself to Vermont-blogging today, but I wonder if I could tempt him away from that commitment to license-plate blogging.
The reissue of the old California colors on new plates is an abomination, right?
I'm almost inclined to agree with 398, but my sarcasm detector is going off.
Semi OT, but any thoughts on Romney's speech this afternoon? Maybe it needs a new thread. I have mixed feelings about it. He doesn't seem to have announced his candidacy, which some prognosticators were predicting. A three-way race would guarantee the presidency for any Democratic nominee but might be bad for down-ticket races, so, ambivalence! But Congress is unlikely to go well anyway and if nothing else it would make a hilarious circus.
As for what Romney did say... is there a word for when something is both amusing and infuriating? It would probably be German. Romney made a lot of totally valid critiques of Trump, but also criticized Trump for calling Bush a liar. He had a non-endorsement of different people in different states just to game the primary rules. It would be superfluouous to link to someone arguing that Trump is the creation of the Republican Party, and it's hilarious to see how they're handling it.
All that being said, at this point my biggest worry is that Trump falls behind from here on and Cruz gets the nomination and looks reasonable compared to him. (Or anyone else, but Cruz is the one in second place.)
Also, I got my neighbor to say he could indeed vote Sanders in the general if necessary. Yay, not an asshole any more.
If billboards are outlawed, only outlaws will have billboards.
As long as the Pennsylvania ones not longer imply I might be friendly, I don't care.
One more note: whoever put quotation marks around the link to Trump's positions here is a national treasure.
As I said, though, it's the future, and nothing President Clinton is going to do will stop this from coming.
Unless of course she bows to pressure from the fossil fuel interests backing her campaign and tiptoes around the very serious measures we need NOW to help mitigate climate change, in which case all predictions about "the future" are off the table. There may not be a future.
408: Or somebody employed by Ted Cruz.
I totally get dismissing Clinton winning Georgia etc. She's not going to win it in the general, so what exactly has she demonstrated?
398: Well....it's not a contest to determine who is most electable. It's a contest to determine which candidate most democrats want to represent their party. Georgia Dems get to have their say!
Peep gets it right and, beyond that, anybody who approves of Dean's "50-state" strategy shouldn't start writing off any states.
I'm almost inclined to agree with 398, but my sarcasm detector is going off.
There's a weird tendency to suggest that an individual's vote doesn't matter unless the individual lives in a swing state.
This is wrong, of course. Individual votes in swing states don't matter, either.
Apparently it was made here. About two hours ago, if I've done the time zone math correctly, and is the only edit that user has ever made. I don't know too much about either Wikipedia or IP addresses, but according to this they're from a suburb of Dallas.
It would be an interesting twist, and perhaps a better system, if a party decided it would only hold primary elections in states that went for that party in the preceding election (or perhaps were with a few % of going to that party, e.g. "swing" states).
The blue plates I remember from hot rod magazines of fifty years ago?
415: Why stop there? Since no major party commands a majority, the parties should only allow voters who aren't members of a party to vote. They're the ones that really decide elections.
Or only held primaries in states that *didnt* vote for the party in the preceding election! Or only held primaries in swing states!
417 seems like it would produce perverse results.
414. It's bob, enacting a Japanese tradition that we should all be more familiar with.
My kind of fun: http://paulbibeau.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/secret-of-rapture.html#.Vtiyx1ndnEk
414. It's bob, enacting a genuinely novel Japanese tradition that we should all be more familiar with.
FIRST BLACK COLONEL SANDERS IS COMING
MLK's dream is realized!
Even Ta-Nehisi Coates will surely concede this is far better than reparations.
"Only primary votes in swing states matter" was Mark Penn's argument for Hillary in 2008, and was as wrong then as it is now (wrong not only as a bad way to count primary votes, but wrong as a way to consider electability -- you can be a better primary candidate in a swing state while being a worse general election candidate in the same state because they are different elections!) and ... NOPE NOPE NOPE NOT GONNA SWITCH OFF THE VERMONT POLITICAL HISTORY COMMENTING
The Oregon/Vermont comparison is interesting. Both very white (in OR's case, due to deliberate quite racist policies, in VT more due to the fact that minorities didn't want to move there), both bastions of genuinely liberal Republicans until very very late in the 20th Century, both places where there was a large-scale hippie invasion in the 70s of sufficient size to materially alter the state's politics. But, today, where even the most conservative areas of Vermont are not conservative at all (only went for Obama by under 20 percentage points! you fascists!), eastern Oregon is insanely, intensely, crazily conservative. The only thing that keeps that state from being Idaho Jr is that most of its population lives around Portland or in other parts west, and those people are really overwhelmingly liberal, but the state is surprisingly close to a swing state and maybe the most politically polarized state in the union.
Why the difference? Maybe it's just size -- VT is smaller and was always more socially egalitarian. Maybe it's something specific about the West. Maybe it's that OR has one big city and people who live very very far from that city and resent and hate it. But I don't know and it's an interesting question.
idp, you can choose between blue/yellow or the even older black/yellow. It is plenty jarring to see the black/yellow on some new Honda.
OK, that's fair, because the VT license plate is cool and would itself be an interesting story. My idiosyncratic view is that the blue/gold plates are rad and perfectly acceptable on new cars. But the black/yellow plates, while also rad, should be for old cars only and never on a new car.
The "driftless area," Northwestern IL, Southwestern WI, and the matching parts of IA and and MN, has been described as sharing a lot of VT's characteristics. Topographically distinct from the surrounding parts of the respect states, it also has such indicators as voting for Obama despite being rural and small-town.
405: I think Josh Marshall is the clearest thinker on Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party. Certainly clearer than anyone in that party.
413, 424.first: Eh, I approve of the 50-state strategy on paper and wouldn't make an argument nearly as strong as "only swing states matter" (obviously not, as a Vermonter!) but I do think it was worth at least a little consideration who was getting votes in red, blue, or purple states.
Strictly speaking, individual votes only matter in elections that are decided by one vote; that is, very nearly never in popular votes. To be only a little bit more earnest about it, they matter to the extent that they encourage other people to vote and demonstrate other forms of civic engagement, so that one voter can take partial credit for the voting or good actions of a dozen other people. We are all connected. And in a much more earnest view of democracy, voting is a duty disconnected from its outcomes; it's civic engagement for its own sake.
But where someone gets their support from seems like it might be at least a bit relevant to their electability and/or how they'd govern.
424: I'm not researching this but I was thinking of a Vermont/Minnesota comparison. Both rural, northern, white, and liberal bastions. But different immigration histories, and one is much bigger than the other.
I'm also enjoying Tigre's Vermont blogging. In fact, I think we should encourage him to research and report back on other relevant states.
Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery. In 1777 (while still a colony).
If I had known that the old plates were coming back, I never would have moved. I am 100% serious.
I agree with halford's 426. It makes sense intuitively.
432: While still a colony? What I'm reading suggests that the instrument that (mostly) abolished slavery was the same instrument by which they formally became independent (the 1777 Constitution).
Semi OT, but any thoughts on Romney's speech this afternoon?
I thought it was pretty rich that he led off quoting something Reagan said campaigning for Goldwater in 1964. I suppose it's a conservative bona fides namecheck, but when you're talking about unelectable candidates...
So, would the plan be to coronate Romney at the convention or simply run him third party?
Also, they do know hatred of Romney is one of the reasons their base has gone full fascist, right? Bringing him out saying mean things about Trump is simply waving a red flag in front of a bull. Either this was orchestrated by secret Trump supporters, or they really profoundly do not understand the party they created.
If it's Clinton-Romney-Trump, it's going to make me sadder we didn't nominate Sanders. This is possibly the only configuration of candidates where Sanders would be a shoo-in.
Good Lord this election is getting strange.
435: Good point. I meant, before becoming one of the states of the US (1791).
It's a coronation, but what you do to the person is crown them, not coronate them. Take it from a monarchist...
Some thoughts on California license plates:
(1) The current ones are in some butt-ugly Baywatch-wannabe typeface;
(2) Halford is 100% correct about the black/yellow and blue/yellow as both being rad but for different applications;
(3) I hope they bring back these gems from the '80s. Hipsters would eat that shit up.
441
Hanoverian or Stuart? (Sorry, too much Stross and MacLeod).
Delegates are already partially weighted by how far a state leans Democratic, so why not weight the swing states more?
leiderhoser
Those Hosen certainly do inflict a certain amount of Leid.
444 makes a good point.
The problem with that is that what actually counts as a 'swing state' isn't really obvious, or at least a lot of people disagree about it. I've seen both PA and MN referred to as swing states but that has always seemed kind of fishy. At least with PA there's a clear confusion about 'likelihood of going democrat' and 'likely margin of going democrat' which has lured a lot of Republican candidates into the trap of spending time/money there only to discover that that seemingly small edge their opponent had on them wasn't going away no matter what they did.
I think Josh Marshall is the clearest thinker on Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party.
Nate Silver cites a remarkable statistic.
[E]ven though the battle between Donald Trump and the Republican "establishment" has been a story since the summer, we should still pause now and again to gawk at the spectacle. On Thursday, Mitt Romney, the previous Republican presidential nominee and the closest thing the GOP has to a party elder, denounced Trump in the strongest possible terms. Trump responded by making what sounded to me like a blow job reference.
This is really happening. At least I think.
. . .
The exit polls have asked Republican voters in seven states -- here's Tennessee, for example -- whether they'd be satisfied if each of Cruz, Rubio and Trump won the nomination. Remember, these are actual voters -- voters who gave Trump a win in six of the seven states where the exit poll asked this question -- and not some hypothetical universe of "likely voters." On average, just 49 percent of these actual Republican voters said they'd be satisfied with Trump. The numbers for the other two candidates were better, but not by much: 53 percent of voters said they'd be satisfied with Rubio, and 51 percent with Cruz.
I hadn't realized how close Vermont came to literally "swinging" into Canada. They were in open negotiations with the Governor of Quebec and might well have joined had the revolutionary war not ended when it did.
446
True, but it's easy to come up with a system, however arbitrary it might be. Any state with previous presidential margin
I mean, I'd rather use the interstate compact to abolish the electoral vote, and then every vote does count, but while we've got this messed up system we should acknowledge the reality.
And, in more recent news, this is one of the weirder things about Vermont. The low-income health care program for kids (like an SCHIP program, but Vermont did it earlier and more intensively, is called "Dr. Dynasaur" for some reason. No explanation as to why "Dr. Dynasaur" or why the weird-ass spelling of "Dinosaur."
Hey Tigre, I was thinking about your challenge to people to bet on the Democrats winning the Presidency to prove they really believe it. I think you're missing something.
Bets don't necessarily reflect beliefs. I don't pay $200 per month for my health insurance because I think I'll get sick. I pay $200 a month for health insurance because a) I can afford to and b) because if I get really really sick, it would make my life better if someone handed me a few thousand dollars.
So I went and bet on a Trump Presidency, actually.
449: "Only states that sign the interstate compact get delegates at the party convention.."
I didn't realize how far they'd come. States that have 30% of the total electoral votes have passed the compact. Maybe by 2020?
Some explanation, at least. It feels like they wanted a mascot, designed one, then named the program after it.
At least with PA there's a clear confusion about 'likelihood of going democrat' and 'likely margin of going democrat' which has lured a lot of Republican candidates into the trap of spending time/money there only to discover that that seemingly small edge their opponent had on them wasn't going away no matter what they did.
"What if we fit all the Democrats into ONE out of 13 congressional districts? Will they be the minority then?"
432 Was Vermont ever a colony? A no man's land with contested authority between New York and New Hampshire, yes, but actual British rule? There probably were NY colonial court rulings, which were ignored on the ground . . .
IHMB my mom's ancestor who was a member of the Vermont assembly in the early 1780s. Fined for skipping meetings, actually.
I'm not saying that any election or voter doesn't count. They all count, and all matter.
The question is what have we learned from HRC's victory in Georgia that is relevant to the general election.
Is that not the point of Mr. Robin's discussion and those responding to it? If the question is instead who's going to win the Ohio primary, well, we'll know soon enough. And maybe Georgia doesn't tell us very much about that either.
456: I think it was initially claimed by France, then fell under (at least indirect) British rule from 1763, then declared itself a state in 1777, then joined the US in 1791.
Anyway, when I wrote that Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, I then thought, But that was before it was part of the United States. And then thought, If not a state, then a colony. Because of my colonial mindset, no doubt. I blame the Crown.
In any case, I think it's always been a bit quirky, though obviously it has not always been 'liberal' in a contemporary sense.
262: Why do you think poor and younger people vote in so much smaller numbers than senior citizens anyway, lack of noble civic virtues?
I haven't had time to read beyond this point in the thread, but dude, I was talking in 248 about people who certainly do have the wherewithal to vote, since they're proclaiming that they will choose not to vote if Clinton is the nominee.
I'm off now again, though: it's my brother's birthday and I gotta call him now.
I'd have to look it up but I think you've got it backwards. Vermont wasn't a no man's land in the usual sense, it was claimed by both NH and NY.
Bets don't necessarily reflect beliefs. I don't pay $200 per month for my health insurance because I think I'll get sick. I pay $200 a month for health insurance because a) I can afford to and b) because if I get really really sick, it would make my life better if someone handed me a few thousand dollars.
Considerations (a) and (b) explain your paying for health insurance only if something like the following is also true: the guarantee of the insurance payout, taking into account the probability of serious illness as you see it, is worth at least $200 a month to you.
Your estimation of that probability, intuitive or explicit, is the belief reflected in your bet. That's all that RT meant, or needs to have meant.
Bets don't necessarily reflect beliefs. I don't bet $10 that you can't perform some absurd physical feat because I think you can't do it to the tune of $10; I do so because I think the spectacle of your attempt will be worth $10 either way.
You might now say that my bet does reflect the belief that it will be worth $10. But I don't think that's what anyone really means when they say that a bet reflects beliefs, because they tend to mean that the bet reflects beliefs concerning the same thing that the bet concerns. It's supposed to be a way of revealing beliefs, so it isn't well supported if you have to find out what the beliefs the person has are in the first place in order to explain how the bet reflects those beliefs.
Donald Trump just talked about the size of his penis in a televised presidential debate.
Neil Postman is shitting in his grave.
In other news, I broke my own logic re: bets. I bet like 10 bucks that Cruz would not speak the most. But now if he speaks the most I'm gonna lose money *and* have to listen to Ted Cruz talk extra.
Bets don't necessarily reflect beliefs. I don't bet $10 that you can't perform some absurd physical feat because I think you can't do it to the tune of $10; I do so because I think the spectacle of your attempt will be worth $10 either way.
That sounds like a combination of a bet and buying a ticket.
I mean, I think it's sill to put to much weight on, "put your money where your mouth is" because there's all sorts of reasons why somebody might believe something but not want to bet on it.
That said, asking yourself, "would I put money on these odds" can be helpful in clarifying the level of belief.
I don't bet much, at all, and I will say that making my bet with Tigre about Trump has changed how I've followed the race. When I took the bet I said, "I don't think Trump will be the nominee, but I also think 5:1 odds are worth taking." Without the bet I wouldn't have asked myself what I thought the odds were.
Wow, you convinced me to open up the debate and this exchange between Rubio and Trump is surreal.
This might be the craziest thing I have ever seen.
Donald Trump just talked about the size of his penis in a televised presidential debate.
Even more impressive than the size is the fact that he got Mexico to pay for it.
I've noticed that about prediction markets. I think very carefully about what the odds are.
On another note, how is it that we stop football games for up to ten minutes to double check a first down on a head coach's whim but politicians can't stop the debate for a five minute fact-check?
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Crossed my mind today, after reading Josh Marshall and others on the implosion of the GOP...what if what if 20-50% of Republicans switched parties to Democrat. If Clintonism is a 6 on a scale of 10, Repubs couldn't take over, but maybe move the party from 6 to 4 or 3. These wouldn't be the noisiest voices out there that switch, so it could be invisible til it happens.
That might create a Southern Crazy Party of 20%, an LDP of 70%+ in permanent profitable power*, and an irrelevant left in Burlington and Boulder.
IOW, I think the result of this year could easily be a big shift to a sanish right.
*politics is about pork constituent service
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The scenario in 473 has been on my mind recently and it's kind of terrifying. Clinton, Ryan, Romney team up to push serious austerity through.
473: the left is already irrelevant and we already have two major parties who are unified in their subservience to the financial interests of big business. So the primary novelty of the situation you are describing would be that the crazy 20% would be relegated to a fringe instead of driving one of our two major parties. Not ideal, of course, but overall that seems like a major improvement.
473 has occurred to me, too. That there could be a new Neoliberalconservative Mainstream.
Did you guys hear the Trump campaign has a new campaign slogan? "A thousand points of white"
475: calling it the crazy 20% sounds pretty optimistic to me. I mean, that's around where Trump supporters sit (for now), but it's hard to look at Cruz and think "I can see how someone sane would support that".
It sounds funny when you just say "gamalielgamalielgamaliel" over and over again.
I can't help but admit that Rubio's line about yoga was absolutely amazing, and probably one of the only things I've seen from him that didn't look scripted well beforehand.
At this point I'm terrified that someone besides Trump is going to win the Republican nomination, and all of the media and many voters will breath a giant sigh of relief and declare a resounding victory for the forces of moderation. When in fact ALL FOUR PEOPLE ON THIS STAGE ARE LUNATIC EXTREMISTS, and would have been widely recognized as such as recently as five years ago.
Mumble mumble Overton window mumble, etc.
481- You've got a point there.
Does anyone else think that FOX seems to be giving Kaisich a lot of airtime and generally friendly handling?
I can see it: he's all they've got at this point now that Rubio is getting increasingly weaker. Kasich is a long shot to win, but boosting him could help split the delegates enough to manage a brokered convention which really might be their best hopes of a not-Trump candidate at this point.
He's also just not popular enough to have a good record to attack him on, and his aww shucks persona and low polling means no one really wants to attack him either.
481:
I wonder if the Republican plan since maybe January was to just get a brokered convention and run Rom. That way he skips the primary smears and looks like a selfless patriot technocrat fulfilling his duty to party and country.
I'd be delighted if they were dumb enough to alienate half the party like that.
But Cruz and Rubio have really been playing softball with him.
ALL FOUR PEOPLE ON THIS STAGE ARE LUNATIC EXTREMISTS
They said the band would never make anything of themselves, but five decades and twelve multi-platinum albums later, even the haters have to admit: Donnie and the Nazis ROCK!
Also a lot of people are pointing out the joyful nonsense of watching Cruz/Rubio spend the entire debate accusing Trump of being a con man who will destroy the country "...but of course yes I would support him in the general election."
Luntz has the face of a man who is one disappointing poll away from drinking himself to death.
I wonder if the Republican plan since maybe January was to just get a brokered convention and run Rom.
Rom Emanuel?
As I remember, Kasich was the Rubio of his day, during his aborted 2000 presidential campaign. It's only taken 16 years for him to go from "This young guy? Cutting the line, isn't he?" to now seeming like every 40-year-old's father-in-law.
488- I wonder if everyone in that focus group understood the fight was fixed, or did no one in the room have a 3 digit IQ?
driftglass: I strongly urge the GOP establishment and Fox News to continue openly colluding against Donald Trump and complaining that the people who vote for him are clueless idiots who can be conned into anything.
488-2 Professional courtesy.
CNN scrubbed it quickly when they realized how much joy it was bringing to the world, but for a few glorious moments they had "Donald Trump defends size of his penis" as a headline.
I will cherish that screencap forever.
but for a few glorious moments they had "Donald Trump defends size of his penis" as a headline.
Well, I missed the debate. So Trump was attempting to flirt with Megyn Kelly, was he?
460 That's what I meant, and should have been what I wrote. There wasn't a Vermont colonial government in the same way there was a colonial government of Georgia.
O, if only we had a Vermont blogger, who could shed some light on the apparently murky and mysterious origins of this state.
I recall crossing Lake Champlain by ferry when I was maybe five years old, the High Peaks of the Adirondacks in the distance. It looked and felt like Canada, only better. I have loved Vermont ever since.
But I will say this in defence of my home and native land: while Vermont maple syrup is delicious and homespun and all the rest of it, it cannot even compete with the sweet stuff from la belle province. This is just a matter of fact, by the way: the best maple syrup in the world comes from Québec.
This review of a book about Ethan Allen (behind a paywall, sadly, but perhaps a subscriber can cough it up) sheds some light on how his land deals figured into the making of the state.
501 is apostasy. When Sanders becomes president, he's going to build a wall on the northern border and make Canada pay for it.
501
The way things are going, in not that long the only maple syrup in the world will come from Québec.
438: I agree with Buttercup. Makes me sad that it's not Sanders.
I think 438 is wrong, and dangerously so, for reasons that have been mentioned before. In a three-way race you stand a chance that nobody gets a majority in the electoral college and it goes to the House of Representatives (57% Republican). It's only one voter per state delegation, so Montana's one Republican counts as much as California's 39 Democrats.
506: Does Clinton-Romney-Trump make that less likely than Sanders-Romney-Trump? I have no idea.
I did see some polling that in a Bloomberg-Clinton-Trump race, Bloomberg draws considerably more support from Clinton than Trump. (Though in the poll I saw, Clinton still won.)
As I'm sure he'd tell you, he was a Navy SEAL and can surely take all 39 of them at once.
In a three-way race you stand a chance that nobody gets a majority in the electoral college
Only if the third candidate actually wins any states. If he just strips away 10% of the vote from one of the other two, then you'll still get someone with a majority in the EC.
Has there been any polling on what happens with Trump v. generic Republican v. generic Democrat?
507.1: I have no idea either. I'm just pointing out that a three-way race doesn't not guarantee a win for the Democrats and could make it harder than a two-way race.
507 last -- won the electoral college?
Let's see, people who are 40 now were 16 in 1992. Do you think that part of the difference is between people who were adults during the first Clinton presidency and those who weren't?
I think the difference is they were 20 in 1996 and so got 3-4 years of experience in a high pressure economy. Every cohort ofafter has struggled after graduation.
"A private poll Bloomberg conducted in late February showed Trump rapidly losing support from mainstream Republicans after being mocked by Rubio as a con man, retweeting a Mussolini quote, and refusing to immediately disavow the KKK. 'That did not go over well,' the adviser says. The same poll showed Bloomberg pulling far more votes from the GOP side than the Democrats."
513: Those were great years. I think my salary increased by more than 50% over that time for the same job. Part of the reason I want another Clinton is the first one worked out so well for me.
492 of course would involve Rom sweeping his Analyzer over the convention delegates and realizing that 90+% of them were Dire Wraiths.
511: Won the plurality of the vote.
Perot didn't win a single EV, and I have a hard time imagining a spoiler Romney, Bloomberg, or even Rubio doing better than him.
513 There may also be an age of experience of the Nader thing at work as well.
PTSD from the Mondale loss continues for a lot of folks as well.
Unlike Perot, Romney has won hundreds of electoral votes in a previous election.
I wouldn't have imagined the US Supreme Court ordering a halt of the counting of votes under the supervision of a state's supreme court, and yet here we are.
Maybe folks around the country should put a whole lot of energy into funding Denise Juneau, running for our House seat, to improve odds should this race go to the House.
520: Yes, but he's a party man. Without the full weight of the party, what does he get?
521.1: Point taken.
I would worry about 506 if it were Sanders - Bloomberg - Trump, but not with Romney. Sanders wins the Democratic coalition, plus maybe a few more white working class voters who are turned off by Trump's overt racism. Romney and Trump each win 1/2 of the current Republican party. There is no way a candidate who would have otherwise voted for Sanders in a 2 person race against Trump is going to switch to Romney. If anything, that would be more likely to happen with a Clinton voter.
You don't need a Sanders voter to switch to Romney to throw a three-way election. All you need is enough Republicans who can't stomach Trump, who would have either voted Democrat or stayed home, to vote Romney. That's very likely many millions of people.
There is no way a candidate who would have otherwise voted for Sanders in a 2 person race against Trump is going to switch to Romney.
How about these guys?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-lifelong-conservatives-who-love-bernie-sanders/417441/
But MacMillan, a 65-year-old Florida resident, was disappointed. "I looked at the stage and there was nobody out there who I really liked. It just seemed like a showcase for Trump and his ridiculous comments," she recalled. "It was laughable, and scary, and a real turning point."So she decided to back Bernie Sanders, the self-described "Democratic socialist" challenging Hillary Clinton. MacMillan was a lifelong Republican voter until a few weeks ago when she switched her party affiliation to support the Vermont senator in the primary. It will be the first time she's ever voted for a Democrat.
That story may sound improbable, but MacMillan isn't the only longtime conservative supporting Sanders. There are Facebook groups and Reddit forums devoted entirely to Republicans who adore the Vermont senator.
These people are literally Romney voters who are supporting Sanders because Sanders is the not-Trump. You can't tell me that none of them would switch back to Romney if he got into the race.
I would worry about 506 if it were Sanders - Bloomberg - Trump
I wouldn't worry about Romney either.
National polls and numbers are meaningless. The only question is what states a third party candidate would win. So if Ohio goes 40 Sanders-30 Romney-30 Trump Sanders gets all the EVs.
So I might worry about Bloomberg taking New York, maybe New Jersey and Connecticut. That might be big enough, or specifically taking from the Sanders/Clinton Democratic majority, to throw the election to the House. In which case, given the three choices, the House might go for Bloomberg. I presume this is what B is considering.
Very very unlikely, in any case. If possible, can Bloomberg even get on the ballot?
Probably not, but I'd bet Trump (if he doesn't win the primary) or Romney could.
526 is correct. If Clinton puts the Obama coalition together again in terms of turnout and voting preferences (which seems like a reasonable assumption) she gets 332 EC votes. Which means she can survive the loss of NY (29), NJ (14) and CT (7) but only just...
This article suggests one solution to the practical problem of getting one's name on the ballot this late in the game:
There is no obvious alternative on the right to Mr. Trump, but Republicans believe that an existing minor party, like the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party, could serve as a viable vehicle, allowing crestfallen Republicans to show up on Election Day despite their distaste for him.
As I read that, the thinking is: these small parties already have a spot reserved on the ballots in all 50 states, but they haven't yet picked their candidate. So somehow you convince them to pick Romney or Paul Ryan or whomever.
524
Right, but what bob said. There are not enough secret Romney supporters in any one state that, if instead of staying home they vote for Romney, they would throw that state to Romney over Sanders. It's possible Romney could win a Red state from Trump, but not that Romney could win a blue or anywhere close to enough purple states to steal EVs from Sanders. Sanders is getting half the pie. The remaining pie is either being eaten mostly by one person & the rest thrown in the garbage, or being split by two people. Either way, Sanders gets enough EVs to win.
New York is a very big prize, and because of the concentration of Democratic electoral votes in so few states, an absolute necessity. I told y'all I find the red-blue map terrifying.
Bloomberg, Trump, or Romney (c'mon) fighting for NY would be interesting.
1) If Sanders is the nominee, coming out of a vicious convention, I could see enough disaffected and angry Clinton supporters to be a problem. The reverse not so much.
2) Spending $200+ million smartly in the three states (+Penn?) in a couple months might be a fun experiment.
It's not a fixed pie. Trump is bringing many new voters into the Republican primaries. If they stay for the general and the not-openly-racist wing stays, that could put a purple state into play.
To be clear, I think that a Democrat is more likely than not to win. I just don't see that a three-person race is safer than a two-person race.
Previously I predicted there wouldn't be any independent Republican split-off (like Romney or Rubio; no predictions about Bloomberg). I still think that's most likely on balance.
But I will go further and say that if I'm wrong and that does happen, the independent will get no more than 25% of Trump's votes (absolute count, not EV). There is still a lot more unity between Trump and Republicans than the Republicans admit (attitude-as-ideology) and most of the movers appear to be craven as all hell.
Why don't I make you guys a new thread. Poof.
532: Yeah, Pennsylvania is a slightly shaky blue, isn't it? And then Florida and Ohio.
In a race Clinton-Trump-Bloomberg, where would the disaffected Repubs go? A few would vote for Clinton, but many would go Bloomberg, who is unknown and anodyne to much of the country. I think just for the hate reasons, more Republicans would go for Sanders than Clinton, but damn if I know.
All gone crazy. Let us game out three independent candidates: Clinton-Sanders-Bloomberg-Trump-Rubio.
Shoulda gone to the House in 2000. Damn Scalia in Hell.
Yeah, it seems to me to be a contest of whether Trump or Sanders are bringing more new people to the polls, and the verdict, thus far, isn't very favorable. If Sanders wins the nomination by swamping the polls with new people, well, then he's the nominee, and has done it in a way that reflects well on his chances in the general. If he wins by peeling off enough regular Dem voters because Clinton is "too corrupt," then we do have to worry about demoralization of Clinton supporters. It's not going to be a huge percentage or anything, but in the face of a popular movement from Trump, which is swamping the polls, it could well be enough to cost a few states.
I'm glad Sanders is in the race, plan to vote for him, and hope people inspired by him keep it up in state and local races so we go significantly in his direction in the coming cycles. The Dem establishment is not going to have another HRC like 800 pound gorilla candidate in those future cycles, so the headwind will be much less than it is this time.
I don't know how unknown Bloomberg is to them, though. And he certainly wouldn't be once the race started and Trump started ranting about how he ruined New York by banning soft drinks or something. That's a grievance that right wing cranks have been nursing for ages.
CCarp- what kind of stuff do you do to stay involved. I don't have a ton of spare time but would like to be useful. I'm not enamored of my state's Democratic establishment but don't know what I can do about it.
how he ruined New York by banning soft drinks
Also public enemy number one to the NRA.
Now we need to make Guam a state for the count to work.
539 -- I'm a member of the county central committee -- representing a precinct (and will be on the primary ballot again in June) -- and have a bottom of the totem pole position that puts me on the executive board of the county party (and sent me to the state rules convention last summer). This has me first in line when candidates call for volunteers, but also lets me know our legislative delegation, and most of the city council and county commission personally. I like most of them. And have a good platform to argue with the rest. Central committee members can spend 2 hours a month. Or more, as they wish.
Creating a third party is pretty much doomed to fail, and unnecessary, where there's a party just waiting for interested and active folks to take it over. Our CC has had a number of vacancies, and so pretty much anyone we can recruit can get a seat, depending on where they live.
It's not a perfect solution, but if our delegation won't push the state party towards the future, there's no county that will.
It's funny having people asking for me to endorse them. You folks know better than most what my opinions are worth.
