Again, not that Ann Arbor is the greatest predictor of how the rest of the state is going to vote, but I have not seen one single sign or bumper sticker for Clinton in this town.
We’re feelin’ the bern.
This is great, but electionbettingodds dot com still has him under 10% chance of winning it. He’s got my vote, but I still expect to vote Clinton in the general.
Looking at the finished primaries, when Sanders won he won by a much smaller margin than the states where Clinton won (except Vermont, his home state.) He could still do it, I can see him taking the entire west coast, but it would (probably) still be by slim margins (like in Colorado). If he continues to win by smaller margins then he is going to have to take nearly every state. If a certain suspended boinger were here now I’m sure he would cut-and-paste a long diatribe about how I’m wrong, but this is just the math, it’s like seeing your baseball team in 3rd place in September and theorizing how many games they need to win to make the playoffs (and how many the other teams need to lose.) I’m not trying to bum anybody out or hurt Bernie’s chances, there are still a lot of delegates to be doled out, and the trend could change, but I look at the states still up for grabs and it will be difficult.
While I have my reasons for disliking Clinton, I don’t hate her, and I can see that she has a certain appeal to some. Elections are won in the middle, and while I would love a world where the US was a lot more liberal, I recognize that a lot of independents and moderates feel otherwise. A Clinton/Sanders ticket wouldn’t be the worst thing, nor a Sanders/Clinton ticket if he can pull it off. Either one would be better than a Trump win in November.
I think this kind of misses the fundamental key to Bernie’s occasional success: it’s not really extreme lefty weirdos who fuel his electoral fire, it’s working-class folks - his message resonates VERY strongly with post-industrial wastelands that eat up huge swaths of America. It’s less resonant where racial concerns are more primary (aka, most of the Southeast), but that’s not a “middle-left vs. extreme-left” divide, that’s a “economics is important vs. racism is important” difference of focus.
His chances are still low, but what I like about this victory is that it shows that the polls aren’t quite as trustworthy as assumed - his chances are low, but they’re probably not as low as the statisticians would present them as. As long as he stays competitive, Clinton is going to get called on her shenanigans, and that’s important, even if she manages to win - the louder the scream of “we have a movement here that’s bigger than your candidacy, Hillary” is, the more likely it is to affect lasting change beyond this year.
Minnesota: predicted to lose, won by a significant margin.
Michigan: predicted to lose, won by a small margin.
Colorado: predicted to lose, won by a small margin.
Oklahoma: predicted to lose big before polls narrowed, he won by a small margin.
Massachusetts: predicted to lose, lost by less than predicted.
There have been no states so far where Clinton had a surprise win, nor states where she won by a much bigger margin than expected, nor states where she lost by a smaller margin than expected. Sanders has been underestimated by the pollsters and pundits so far.
That’s hilarious, until I remember that CNN and the rest of the corporate media won’t pay much of any attention to what happened in Michigan, much less its significance.
From a washpo article this morning:
“But, given Sanders’s surge in the final days before Michigan — not to mention the positive press he’ll get in Ohio and everywhere else from his Michigan win — it’s hard to totally write off his chances.”
I mean isn’t that what this sentence is doing, writing him off? Why so begrudgingly written? The lack of impartiality is really making me hate the press. They get to choose the candidate FOR me, with every word they publish? Fuck you Washington Post, with a Washington post. I have had it with you and all the other establishment nazis.
I think it is very rude of Bernie Sanders to keep winning while we are trying to have a conversation about how his campaign is finished.
{note sarcasm & schadenfreude]
Yeah.
Exactly. This election is not a typical left versus right race. Trying to run the general using the “safe” strategies of the past will backfire, especially against Trump. People aren’t voting for Trump because he’s more right or more centrist. They’re voting for him because working class Americans in this country have rightly deduced that the current establishment candidates genuinely don’t give a flying turd in hell about them. They believe that Trump isn’t beholden to monied entities the way politicians typically are, the kinds of monied entities that make their working and financial lives more difficult than they need to be. I don’t see Hillary mounting a successful challenge to that. She can argue centrism as much as she wants, and she will- but I’m not sure Americans want a centrist this time around. I think they want something very few candidates are (at least on the surface) offering: Respect.
And that is the thing. So far where Bernie wins he wins by such tight margins, and often in such small states, that the delegate split is a wash. He picked up like 10 more delagates than Hill in Michigan. She picked up 27 more delegates than Bernie in Missouri alone. For Bernie to win he needs to start winning larger states by larger margins. And he needs to do it soon. There are no winner take all contests in the DNC primary cycle, so unlike the GOP there isn’t a late stage bulwark of large population states to push lagging candidates to the front.
This is basically an “upset” in the sense that it over turned expectations based on polling. (and also that it’s sort of Bernie’s first large, diverse state) That could represent a major, last minute shift in Bernie’s support in Michigan. But it’s more likely that the polls were inaccurate for some reason. It’s happened a lot this election. But it doesn’t change the math much, if at all. Hillary still leads in delegates, states won, and raw votes by a healthy margin. The polls at least in Michigan (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) seem to have underestimated Bernie’s support. But there’s not much information out there to conclude that untracked support is pervasive or large enough to push him beyond Hillary’s numbers.
I am not a reader of mainstream press about the election, and I most certainly am not a watcher of TV news at all. Yet I feel better informed than 95% of the voting public. Maybe it’s because I don’t follow the media.
That’ll be Hillary’s big weak spot in November. Trump has a tendency to air uncomfortable truths - expect him to remind EVERYONE of how cozy Hillary is with elites, how the policies of the '90’s helped bone our manufacturing sector, and, I dunno, call her a poop-face or something. (“I was making jobs while your marital duties were being performed by interns, lady”) The only thing worse than Trump being a racist blowhard is Trump being a racist blowhard who actually raises a pretty good point in between his spasmodic, offensive ranting. I don’t want to live in the world where The Donald ekes out a victory because Hillary looks too establishment. That’s a real possibility. Her winning the nomination gives him the space to say “Democrats are all about the same establishment that has been outsourcing your jobs and letting rapists and terrorists run wild in this country.” That’s dangerous space to give him.
@beschizza my dizzle, Jeebus Fucken Christmas up a tent pole, what the fuck is that last sentence? God Damn, boy, why don’t you drop down and give me twenty for that confused little turd!
wassat? It’s subject-complement agreement? bullshit, it’s collective nouns soldier and don’t you fucken tell me about grammar you punk kid…
Yeah you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be informed at all. I suppose you don’t follow “mainstream” media, though for different values of “mainstream” you can end up finding a lot of pretty mainstream stuff. Even the mainstream isn’t that bad at giving certain kinds of information. Or maybe you follow lots of media: Though I always kind of sigh and roll my eyes when people say this is a good idea. In my freshman year of college, when I had lots of time, I read two newspapers every day and got online to read various analyses as part of a routine. I don’t think the variety helped and it’s such a gigantic time suck that I don’t advise it. All in all the best advice seems to be: Curate your sources, think for yourself, and listen to other views from time to time.
Exactly, well said. I think it’s great for the Dems either way the ticket rolls, as you put it, since Bernie will tug the party back to some progressive reforms in the economic sector among others, and at the very least, show a somewhat clear plan for an American future, as opposed to the clown-car of mildly to maximally xenophobic racist bigot chickenhawks being touted by the [shattered/shattering/shit] of the GOP.
Clinton is the best politician still left in the running on either side. That’s not really a compliment.
Well, she’s the only establishment candidate not getting a real shoeing or already gone.
Like @ActionAbe said up there, with the electorate in an anti-establishment mood, she’s a poor choice for the general election.
Yes, Sanders has been winning by small margins and losing by bigger ones (in the region he’s weakest in, which were suspiciously front-loaded in the calendar), but he has been crushing Clinton with self-identifying independents - he won 70% of them in Michigan yesterday. Assuming that Clinton supporters didn’t stay home if their candidate lost (surely not, since they’ve been telling Sanders supporters they should dutifully vote for the Dem ticket), this would be a good thing in the general.
