My wife and I filled out our ballots for the WA primary last week and I finally got them into a drop box yesterday. The only downside to a vote-by-mail state is they don’t give you an “I voted” sticker along with your ballot.
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This is not a conspiracy theory, this is propaganda 101. There may be some legitimate concerns about the process. But they’re being amplified and pushed for maximum FUD.
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Yeah. At this point, there is no real reason to assume that DNC will somehow steal the nomination from Sanders, or Biden will pick Nikki Haley (or any other Republican) as a running mate, or – from the other side – that Bernie will go for a third-party run if he doesn’t win the nomination.
Don’t succumb to paranoia and lashing out at each other over things that haven’t happened and don’t actually look like they will ever happen, please!
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I think I would have been a bit more colorful and inappropriate, but you can see where this is coming from.
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If Biden gets the nomination and loses that doesn’t mean Bernie was more electable, any more than we know that he was more electable than HRC.
I’ve said this before here: people should vote in the primaries for the candidate they’re most comfortable with, and trust that the results mean that the winner is electable; voting on the basis of electability is a mug’s game. Now, if a voter sincerely feels that Bernie is not electable because he is a pugnacious socialist who will repel suburban moms, or that Joe is not electable because he’s a doddering reactionary who will turn off young people, then that voter’s sense probably reflects the voter’s core comfort with the candidate. (You’re not going to believe that Bernie’s anger will turn people off unless you yourself perceive Bernie as excessively angry.)
Hypocritical for sure. As for ‘terrible’: participation in the debates has very much hurt Bloomberg, and it isn’t clear that that was an unintended consequence of changing the rules.
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Oh, it certainly does mean that
If and when Biden loses, the experiment has been performed
On that day his electability is known to be zero
Anybody whose electability was not tested, and remains hypothetical, is statistically higher
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No, it could simply be that on the day of the election all his supporters were sick with a virus, or that the day before there was a damning-sounding story about the emails Hunter. Moreover, Biden (or HRC) losing doesn’t give any information about Bernie’s electability.
That’s another reason why basing a primary choice on perceived electability is stupid.
excuses don’t matter, if you’re nominated and don’t win you’re not electable by definition
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Not the definition most people use. Moreover all the candidates currently in the running have been elected many times to various offices. In any event, by your definition none of the candidates are electable at this point, since none have won the 2020 election, so the effect is the same.
surely the whole point of the “electability” concept is to guess who’s more likely to win if nominated
none of them have known electability values yet, no, so we’re limited to guesses
after the general election, we no longer have to guess about those two candidates
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I feel like it bears pointing out that, in the context of presidential politics specifically, there’s one particular candidate who’s not been successfully elected to that office many times after running multiple terrible campaigns for the position. And I don’t mean Bernie.
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If “electability” is some kind of feature of a candidate, and not a fiction (as I believe it is), then it is only useful in advance, by - as you say - guessing, but the guesses don’t mean anything.
By your post-election standard, if Biden gets the nomination and loses, that doesn’t mean that Bernie was more electable. Likewise if Bernie gets the nomination and loses that doesn’t mean that Biden was more electable. Basically, all it mens was one was defeated for one reason or another at the general election, and the other during the primary process.
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yes it does 
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Seems equally valid to extend that statement a step further: “if you don’t win the nomination you’re not electable by definition.”
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The existence of Republican presidents in the history books seems to prove that there are candidates who could win the general election who would not or do not win the Democratic primary process
“electability” is a word that refers to predictions about hypothetical general elections
you guys play word games if you want
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Talk about ‘know your audience’!
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