I believe the internet has now crashed.
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Unfortunately the states that arenât going to vote for Clinton have to have their say. The alternative would have some pretty terrible consequences.
Clinton is definitely Trumpâs easiest target, I guess weâll be seeing if he can actually pull it off. If Clinton spends the entire election campaigning on what a racist buffoon Trump is, then I think she may well lose it. Unfortunately, I think there is a really good chance sheâs going to be surrounded by advisors telling her to do just that.
Oh, I know. Iâm not really advocating further disenfranchisement of millions of people.
The whole system is massively disenfranchising as is. Everyoneâs vote should count equally, and people in late voting states shouldnât have their choices curtailed because an utterly different part of the country didnât like someone month earlier.
I continue to not understand why all states donât get a say at the same time. Without wanting to go all conspiracy theory, it feels like the order of the states were chosen to help Clinton. And I still think sheâs a particularly lousy candidate against Trump. Although sheâd do okay against Cruz (or especially) Rubio.
But sheâll probably win Florida and Michigan and thatâll be it and weâre stuck with the lesser of two weevils again. Le sigh.
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it feels like the order of the states were chosen to help Clinton.
Both parties exaggerate the power of the red states to make sure they donât get fucked by the mismatch between popular primart votes and electoral college bullshit.
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Me too. And some wine.
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Those close to the senator say his message to black voters evolved the longer he spent in the south, that he was fired up by the injustice he encountered and genuinely began to see that racism was a problem that deserved just as much attention as economic inequality. But they acknowledge that this message was less compelling, less authentic-looking, than the class struggle and risked looking opportunistic.
âI worry about him appearing to pander,â said one senior campaign insider privately over the weekend.
This did not go unnoticed among his opponents.
Barbara Boxer, a senator from California, was one of many leading Clinton supporters who resented being accused of being a patsy for the establishment by a colleague who came over as distant from the struggle of many minority voters.
âIâm Barbara Boxer: a Jewish, liberal feminist from California, or as Rush Limbaugh likes to call me, âan enemy combatantâ,â she joked to journalists at a congressional dinner in Washington on Thursday. âWhereas Bernie Sanders calls me âthe establishmentâ. Have you seen Bernie Sanders rallies? I havenât seen that many white voters since the Oscars.â
I do fear that (much as I personally really like Sanders and his personality), it might have been right message, wrong person. Either that and/or he has an awful lot of Democrat Party resistance to overcome.
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Ah well⌠I guess weâll just have to bide what little time the planet has left while we wait for the next term, and hopefully Warren will have a crack, fingers crossed. 2020 could be the year, what with Corbyn facing election then. Some of the groundwork has been laid this time around.
How do Warrenâs minority credentials stack up, I wonder?
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We canât be sure about that, right? Nate Silver believes Drumpf has a ceiling. And Drumpfâs appeal does seem strongest with GOP conservatives too racist to vote for Rubio or Cruz even though both have more conservative politics than Drumpf.
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This is slightly shoe-gaze-y, but donât write Sanders off yet. Superdelegates donât mean shit until the convention.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/the-momentum-story-how-the-bernie-sanders-crowd-can-still-win/
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He thinks he has a ceilling in the primaries, though, right? In a one-on-one against Clinton I think things are very up-in-the-air. We think Trumpâs hardline positions on walls and rounding up Muslims will hurt him, but is he even going to talk about those things in the general?
If the entire election is about âCan Clinton stop Trumpâ then I think the answer might be ânoâ. Clinton needs to give people something to believe in - a reason to vote for her. I donât know if she has that.
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Agreed.
True, the general election is up-in-the-air though thatâs always true of elections. LBJ won by a landslide in '64, and many voters thought the dems would nominate LBJ for another term in '68.
Nate Silver and others believe Drumpfâs strongest base of voters is white male voters who are not college educated.
So the discussions about whether his campaign has a âceilingâ or not may depend on whether Drumpf can expand that base to enough other white voters.
How hard is that to do?
John Cassidy talked to Ruy Teixeira for The New Yorker who agreed Drumpfâs could win the general election by converting white voters in ârust beltâ states.
Teixeira was skeptical though and talked about weaknesses in Drumpfâs campaign message.
. . .
Teixeira cited some more figures for individual states, distinguishing between white working-class voters who didnât go to collegeâDrumpfâs baseâand white college-educated voters.
In Ohio in 2012, Mitt Romney won the white working-class vote by a sixteen-per-cent margin: fifty-seven per cent to forty-one per cent. According to Teixeiraâs projections, Drumpf, to carry Ohio in November, would need to increase this margin to twenty-two or twenty-three points. âThatâs a big ask,â Teixeira said.
And Drumpf would also need to retain, or even increase, Romneyâs ten-point margin among college-educated white Republicans, even though at least some members of this group may be sufficiently put off by Drumpfâs extremism to stay at home, or even to switch to the Democrats. . . .
To be fair, she is trying. Her stump speeches, policy positions, and gentle leftward drift show it. I donât know if itâs enough, and given her history of political-position-by-public-polling I donât know if many will believe her, while Sanders has been consistently fighting the good fight for a long time, so thereâs no reason to doubt him.
I think he will try to pivot, though I donât think he could ever pivot enough to Etch-A-Sketch away the heap of madness on the public record, and given his nature, Iâm thinking a pivoted Trump would still be as repulsive. One PAC ad (âSponsored by the Americans Horrified By Donald Trump PACâ) in the general featuring the photo of Trump in the creepy lech pose with his teenage daughter+his quote on how much heâd totally nail his daughter if only they werenât related would do a crap-ton of damage, and Hillary wouldnât have qualms with putting it out there.
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I think a analysis around the usual demographic breakdowns will fall flat if Trump does indeed win. Itâs easy to say, "He needs a 10 point lead among white college educated Republicans, but I think that ignores too many possibilities. Just like some Republicans may be too put off by Trumpâs extremism to vote for him, many Democrats may be so turned on by Trumpâs extremism that they vote for him.
To repeat myself from that Sympathy for the Devil Empathy for Trump Supporters article discussion, Trump voters donât have to be single-issue pro-racism voters, they just have to be willing to tolerate racist views to get other things they want (I imagine this description captures well more than 50% of Americans). If you donât care about justice, you could argue the two most closely aligned candidates in the race for president are Sanders and Trump. And while I think Sanders himself understands racial inequality, weâve seen several instances where his supporters seem to think, âWhy wonât these black people just do what we tell them and vote for Sanders?â when demographic discussions come up.
Democrats have to worry about Sanders supporters staying home, but some of them arenât going to stay home, they are going to show up and vote for Trump. Is that going to be 1 in 1000? Is it going to be 1%? If it turns out to be 10% then Trump is going to beat Clinton and pundits who talk about 10 points leads among demographic group X are going to be scratching their heads because they canât see past left and right.
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Indeed. I donât have a problem with most of what sheâs saying (NSA/Snowden stuff aside), I just donât believe a word of it when she says it. And sheâll not convince me until I see her actually doing it. But without Rand Paul there isnât a single Republican even saying a single thing thatâs better than her on any subject. And significantly worse on most.
Crazy racist narcissist demagoguery aside, Trump is more moderate on many issues than his rivals. See his statements on Planned Parenthood, healthcare, spending on public infrastructureâŚ
Too many do, and it drives me nuts. I think there is a non-insignificant amount of Sanders supporters Iâd find really quite unpleasant (true of all candidates, natch).
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I wonât stay home in November, primarily because Michigan will invariably have ballot proposals, but I will not vote for Clinton, and I will not vote for Trump. I will vote for Stein or write-in Sanders. If 50% of voters in Michigan want to watch the world burn, it wonât matter if I vote D or G, so Iâll vote my conscience.
Again, Iâm not prepared to write Sanders off. Seriously, Clintonâs best states are behind her, Sanders are yet to come. Ann Arbor may not be the best bellwether, but I still havenât seen a single Clinton bumper sticker or yard sign. At least half the cars in this town are made of bumper stickers, so this is pretty telling of exactly how much support she has here.
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True enough. I donât know enough about the politics to know how Super Tuesday should affect my outlook on Sanders. Obviously it wasnât positive, but thereâs no reason to give up hope.
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Stop listening to mass media, which keeps insisting that Clinton has this huge lead, but itâs a sham based on how superdelegates are currently saying theyâll vote. Those donât count until the convention, and many will shift sides if the wind changes.
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I think youâre right; itâs going to be an unfortunate contest between Clintonâs lack of appeal vs. fear of a Trump presidency.
I sat next to an older Republican lady at lunch today who assumed I was also Republican, and who was, rather politely I thought, expressing her disgust at Trump and sanity-checking to make sure she wasnât the only one who was freaked out by him. She expressed the opinion that Hillary might well be a better choice than Trump.
I havenât lost hope that Sanders can pull ahead, but Iâm more than a little nervous.
No matter who is nominated and how uninspiring they might be, I sincerely hope the left fights hard to GOTV and claw some Congressional seats back from the Tea Party.
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