I wonder if it’s more accurate to say "People are complex and vote based on their feelings.?
And on any given day their feelings of fear, solidarity, distrust, duty interfere with the thinking part.
2 Likes
I don’ know how carefully you read the Vox link you gave, but (a) the polls to which it links says that beating Trump is the main thing that will drive them to the polls, it never says that a perception of Biden’s “electability” is what caused them to vote for him over Sanders, and (b) it never mentions media like MSNBC as being the reason people might view Biden as more electable.
It doesn’t even support your earlier premise that people support M4A over ACA+public option.
I shared my frustration with the outcome of the primary
I don’t know how old you are, but my first active participation in presidential politics was painting signs to carry for LBJ. The only time in all those years that my top choice made it through to win the primaries was 2008. At some point you have to take this kind of thing in its stride.
When this happened 4 years ago, many of us did a rapid about-face and started trying to get enthusiastic about HRC. Maybe its time for a @khepra -style thread on Biden.
1 Like
(a) This is a fair critique. In my defense, the editor of the first Vox article never should have let “Additionally, many Democrats appear to have settled on the view that Biden is more likely to prevail in November than Sanders, and a large chunk of Democratic voters view electability as the single most important factor driving their primary vote,” slip by, when the linked article makes no such claim with the data. I’ve attached an additional article that points out that “A majority of Democratic voters casting ballots across four states said choosing a candidate who they believe can win is more important than choosing one who agrees with them on major issues, NBC News exit polls show.”
(b) I never intended for the Vox article to do all the heavy lifting on the media angle. My media argument was based on the fact that he enjoyed $70 million in earned media in a matter of days, and that voters rated electability as one of their main concerns (if not the main one). It’s true, it’s difficult to measure whether those $70 million of earned media featured a lot of electability material, but the electability angle came from somewhere, and you’ve already ruled out endorsements.
The linked Vox articles do support the claim that voters supported M4A over ACA+public option. “The exit polls from Super Tuesday repeated the trend we had seen in the early states: a majority of primary voters say they would support replacing private insurance with a single government plan, as Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan would do. The margins varied across the day’s states, with the more liberal places being more in favor and moderate ones being more evenly split, but the trend was consistent…What that discrepancy suggests is that while Democratic voters do like the idea, it is not the determining factor in their vote.”
A majority of primary voters say they would support replacing private insurance with a single government plan–since ACA+public option is not a single government plan, this seems to be a clear endorsement of M4A. To be fair, the article does a poor job of conveying this information, as they point out that voters tended to like both options, but there was still a clear preference for M4A. The only time there wasn’t a clear preference for single-payer was in the Kaiser survey data–that’s probably a helpful data source, but it would be hard to make the case that it’s a more accurate measure of voters’ motivations than an exit poll happening right after people actually voted.
How dare you accuse over a dozen BBS’ers of being Russian trollies!/s
4 Likes
One thing I’ve noticed that no-one seems to ever mention in these threads, is that Bernie was never really a Democrat. He’s always been a “Democratic Socialist” (or other form of “Independent”), and not a member of the Democratic party. He only joined the democrats for the 2016, and then 2020 presidential races. Otherwise, he never ran on the Democratic ticket.
And I’d suspect that a lot of his supporters (or even most of them) are actually independents rather than registered democrats. I do not find it surprising at all that Bernie had such a hard time getting the Democratic nomination, since he (and his supporters) were never democrats. They were/are progressive independents, or other varieties of independents who’s political tendencies never really matched up with one of the 2 major parties. Many of which are unable to vote in the Democratic primary, since they are not registered Democrats. The “bernie bros” as so condescendingly called were never democrats in the first place. They are just independents who were shocked to see a candidate with policies that they could agree with actually appear to have an actual shot at the presidency.
The big battle between the Extreme Right (Republicans) and the Moderate Right (Democrats), have left people with an actual progressive bent largely without a party they truly identify with.
4 Likes
I know Santa Cruz is a little strange, but I think it’s unfair to claim it is its own universe. 
P.S. I always hated that episode. I think a bookish person could figure out how to grind their own telescope lens. With enough attempts you could make a handheld corrective lens. Or I guess you could sit down and cry “it’s not fair!”.
I can think of at least one “Bernie Bro” who was a registered Democrat until he saw the complete fecklessness of the Democratic party in the face of creeping fascism (thanks, Tom Perez!) and had to negotiate the voter registration system to change his affiliation to “none” for the first time in three decades.
[Jim Halpert’s the camera]
1 Like
You’re not diving deeply enough. From these same links:
Here are some more important numbers: According to last month’s Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, 62 percent of Democratic voters said they favored both single-payer Medicare-for-all and a public option. For the rest, 20 percent said they support only the public option, and just 12 percent said they back only Medicare-for-all.
When the Democrats who said they support both policies were forced to choose one, a narrow majority opted for the public option.
So, more voters who support both prefer ACA+PO, and of those who don’t support both more support ACA+PO.
Just to be clear, I personally support M4A over ACA+PO, but it looks like voters who were thinking about this aspect of the policy might have actually been voting for the guy who they think was closer to their preferred policy.
Incidentally, I agree with you on the misleading wording of the Vox article.
I addressed the Kaiser poll in my reply, it’s the last paragraph I wrote. I do think the Kaiser results are a useful finding, but I put more weight on the results of the exit polls in terms of determining what was in voters’ heads when they pulled the lever.
To be fair to you, it was actually just the last sentence of the last paragraph, so I see how you could miss it.
The exit polls don’t compare the two alternatives, and don’t support your original assertion about what the Vox article says, which is all I was talking about.
If you want to convince yourself that when people explicitly say they prefer ACA+PO to M4A they really mean they prefer M4A, there’s not much I can say about that.
Many of the exit polls actually do show that voters support a “government plan for all instead of private insurance.” instead of. Unless you’re trying to argue that the voters didn’t understand that the ACA was a form of private insurance.
I actually apologize for using that horrendous Vox article–I chose it because I wanted to use a source that would widely be considered neutral and middle of the road. I didn’t realize it would be such a dumpster fire of misunderstandings and outright falsehoods. This commondreams article points to the same data and makes the conclusions much more clearly, and links to the polls themselves if you want to check out the data.
Again, people only had a preference for ACA+PO in the Kaiser poll–none of the exit polls back that up, and in fact show the opposite where the wording of the question allowed for a preference to be determined. The Kaiser poll was not performed on Democratic primary voters after voting, so I’m attaching more significance to the exit polls.
I guess if you can deal with living in the ruins of civilization and grinding your own lenses you can easily handle a Biden candidacy without threatening to hold your breath.
5 Likes
Pride is far more difficult to overcome than any physical threat.
1 Like
I have faith in you. Please- keep your nose!
5 Likes
You have evidently never actually met real lions.
3 Likes
as you wish.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
