Bernie and his supporters can seek to expand his appeal, and thereby win the votes necessary to win the nomination. That would probably require softening his stance on some of his positions–or, at a bare minimum, providing plausible plans for how he would get any of them enacted, given a likely-hostile Senate and a certainly hostile judiciary. It would also probably require making nice with some of the people he’s alienated by only deigning to become a member of the Democratic Party every four years when he wants Democrats’ votes for president.
Or he can expand the electorate by delivering additional turnout among low-propensity voters (which, as you note, did not materialize for him). Not sure how he planned to do that, but apparently Just Being Bernie isn’t enough, so he’s going to need to ramp up his organization significantly if he wants to remain ideologically pure and win on that basis.
Bernie is super not my guy, and I’m not convinced he has any desire to make the first adjustment or any aptitude to make the second, but it seems really premature to count him out after one bad night.
In regards to young people voting yesterday, I hung out for a bit after voting and didn’t see a single person under 30 come thru. Yes a small sample but, still.
It was interesting and disappointing that turnout among the youngest voters was much lower than in the 2016 primaries. He also got a somewhat smaller proportion of the young vote that did show up this time around. As was noted earlier, that does not bode well for the general election, regardless of who gets the nomination.
I could certainly be wrong, but it seems possible that the volume of some young supporters’ enthusiasm for him may have misled people–him included, perhaps–into thinking that he’s more popular among the under-30s than he actually is.
The Republic is already on shaky ground because of bungling of Congress on judicial nominees reaching back to 2011. The partisan shitshow that was the impeachment trial, one side did nothing and there were no consequences, the other side did too little and was unable to embarrass anyone.
I doubt another four years of His Majesty, Supreme Leader, Herr Cheeto, will make much difference. He’ll ride our country down to the bottom, but there are 50 senators beneath him giving it a great big push.
The damage has been done slowly over the decades. From the PATRIOT act and bad rulings like Citizens United. It’s are going to take longer to fix than any one President during a single term. President Trump almost certainly accelerates our decline, but he’s partially a smoke screen for the bad faith actors in our government. So much for “draining the swamp”, I feel like we got a smoke machine and can’t see the swamp anymore. At least it add a cool horror movie ambience to the scene.
So the hard-right republican trying to get nominated as a democratic candidate for president has realized he’s not going to get elected that way, and is now endorsing the center-right republican trying to get nominated as a democratic candidate for president, probably because it’s the most damage he can still expect to do to the democratic party’s chances of winning an election.
Bloomberg is nobody’s idea of a good candidate (except maybe his), but his money has been instrumental in some recent big Democratic wins–including turning Virginia solidly blue in all three branches of its government for the first time in a generation. As for Biden: I can of course speak only for myself, but painting anybody to the right of Sanders as a Republican is not the way to win my vote for Sanders.
The choice is giving an authoritarian ass with a cult following dedicated to making his every whim come true another 4 years to end American freedom as we know it or electing another authoritarian ass without the cult following and having to start the process of destroying America over again. I choose to dump the cult.
Are younger folks not voting because they don’t care in general, or that they have made the calculation that all they want is a chance to vote out il Douche? Voter turnout in general has not been great, and it seems that with a lot of people either already decided on keeping Trump or getting rid of him no matter who is the Dem nominee, it suopresses interest in the primary. In 2016 it seemed more a matter of really choosing between ideological viewpoints.
Every policy he has ever promoted as a mayor has been fully in line with the bullshit Trump pushes. His media outlets have similarly tended towards a very republican slant on reality. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, it’s probably not a cow.
It’s good that Bloomberg left. I noted with great interest that he didn’t rear up until after it looked like Warren and Sanders were gathering real support. I think Bloomberg entered the race ONLY because he worried that one of them would get the nomination and win the Presidency, and that scared him. He was afraid a Warren or Sanders Presidency would mean new laws and new Federal regulations that would cost him and his friends money. Bloomberg’s only real interest in being President was in making the world safe for billionaires. Another Presidency that puts personal interest above all else we don’t need.
HOWEVER, I do NOT want Biden to get the nomination. He’s just another business as usual old-school party hack. He’s the perfect candidate for the 1950s. But the leadership of the Democratic party have been struggling mightily to stack the deck in his favor, because he’s just another business as usual old-school party hack. They think they can control him and make him hew to what they dictate is the party line. Warren and Sanders scare them because they threaten the party leaders’ power. They represent the chance of a genuine change in how American government is run, and the absolute LAST thing the Demo leaders want is any change that might threaten their own power and privilege. The leaders of the Democratic party would rather nominate a candidate who they know is so backwards he’ll be rejected by any voter under 60, and wind up with another 4 years of Cheetolini, than take any risk of losing control of the party. Selfish self-interest has become entrenched as not just the biggest thing, but the ONLY thing, in both parties, and the Demo hierarchs would rather see this country slide down into hell than risk themselves personally losing anything.
I don’t buy the argument that Sanders is unelectable in the general on principle but his showing in the primary doesn’t really provide any data to support that he is “the electable one”. Also, ascribing bizarre, incoherent, and inconsistent motives to everyone’s actions except Sanders is not the way to win friends and influence people. Worrying that Bloomberg’s endorsement of Biden is bad for the democratic party’s electability chances, or that it will lead to bad policy is fine. Claiming he is doing it to deliberately sabatoge the party’s chances of winning pretty is an outrageous claim with zero evidence other than “I can’t accept that anyone could disagree with me, so if they appear to do so it must be whatever conspiracy theory I can come up with”.
I think that’s a greater effect of Bloomberg’s spend than any chance he had of getting nominated himself. That’s what the bulk of his ads were about - demoralizing voters, rather than winning them over.
