Sunday, May 1, 2016

6 Thoughts on the Current State of the Sanders Campaign


  1. Popular Vote: The Sanders campaign has alternately suggested that the super delegates should support the popular vote or that in states where he's won he should be leading in super delegates. I mean to douse this flawed argument. As it stands right now, Hillary leads the popular vote by a margin of 3.18M -- yes, I'm actually tracking this with a spreadsheet -- and clearly more people want Hillary to be the Democratic nominee. The intention of voters can't get much clearer than that.
  2. Math w/o Super Delegates: The Sanders campaign has stated that Hillary can't earn the nomination with pledged delegates, and therefore the convention will be a contested one. Not true on four counts.
    1. If she wins with roughly 72% of the votes in the remaining contests, she could win the nomination on pledged delegates alone. His math is flawed but his logic is worse, as he faces an even higher hurdle than she does, having passed the point last week where he can no longer win the nomination on pledged delegates alone. The irony, you see, is that for Sanders to actually win the nomination, he would have to rely on the Establishment!
    2. The math in the primary process: A candidate must win 50% + 1 vote, of the delegates, in order to win the nomination. The only way Sanders' nomination pencils out, is if the super delegates go against the will of the people -- Clinton leads Sanders 57.5% - 42.5% -- see popular vote argument (1).
    3. Hypothetically if you eliminate super delegates from the nomination process and then apply the 50% + 1 vote rule, Clinton would need to win just 40% of the remaining votes in order to capture the needed delegates. This is critically important because the Sanders campaign is critical of the role of the super delegates, which is why they continually demand that the media ignore the super delegates in the nomination math.
    4. There is no contested convention, no matter how the Sanders' campaign wishes to portray it. On the first ballot Hillary wins, plain and simple. If she doesn't win on the first ballot, then it is a contested convention. Just because the Sanders campaign thinks his nomination is a viable outcome doesn't make the convention a contested one. But in case it isn't obvious to the Sanders campaign: If you go against the will of 57.5% of voters, there will be riots and you will be vilified in history books.
  3. A Con Man: A few journalists and psychologists consider Bernie Sanders a con man. What I can't figure out is whether he's conning others or himself. For instance, he insists that he can pass his policies, yet he also insisted that African-American reparations is politically impossible -- most people could easily discern that either both are possible or both are impossible, but unlikely contrary to each other. The same thing comes to the delegate math and his anti-South rhetoric. Is he conning himself into believing this fantasy, or is he trying to con voters? Perhaps a bit of both. Seeing as young people are the only ones gullible enough to buy into what he's selling, he's certainly conning less experienced Americans. But when he offers up hypocritical arguments on the viability of his ideas and his candidacy, he's surely conning himself.
  4. The White Male, and Youth Candidate: I've mentioned this before, but Sanders' viability rests solely on white males, and the youth vote. In every other demographic, he loses. He loses Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Men of other races and Women of all races. The sole age group that he's completely captured is 18-24, by roughly a 75% - 25% margin. He holds a very marginal lead in the 25-29 group, but then loses all other age groups by wide margins. It's neither reflective of America nor of the Democratic Party. As I said last year, Bernie represents going back to old white men, and having gotten a taste of the alternative I think most Democrats would prefer to diversity rather than return to old white men. 
  5. The Better Candidate: The Sanders campaign likes to point to hypothetical general election polling to suggest that Sanders would perform better against any GOP candidate than Hillary. Yet in the nine Democratic exit polls where voters were asked who they thought would be better at beating Donald Drumpf, every nine of those polls said Clinton was stronger than Sanders, by an average margin of 67% - 30% (range = 58% - 73% for Hillary, 20% - 39% for Bernie). And it makes sense that people would vote for the candidate they thought would be the stronger candidate, right? When it comes to voting, people put their vote where their mouths are, as opposed to hypothetical general election polls, making Hillary the obviously better candidate.
  6. Hillary's Guilty of Something: If you read enough Bernie Bros, you come to realize that the Bernie Bros all think that Hillary is guilty of something. Or put it this way: WhitewaterVinceFosterTravelgateBlueDressMonicaLewisnkyEmailgateBenghaaaaaazi was one big conspiracy. When confronted on Hillary's emails, they rely strictly on innuendo of a worst-case scenario, not what the facts have so far revealed. So self-assured they are that the worst-case will come to pass, that they give Republican nutjobs a run for the money when it comes to accepting conspiracy theories. And they won't shut up about it. They're dangerous echo-chambers of the rightwing nutjob propaganda.

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