I am willing to bet that little to no effort on Clinton’s part will be needed to convince the overwhelming majority of Sanders supporters to vote for Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, she has to campaign for the general election, but I doubt very much she needs to do anything special to get the Bernie or Bust supporters on board. Their platforms are nearly identical and liberals are overwhelmingly pragmatic and open to compromise.
This is just another PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) which said to the bitter end that millions weren’t going to vote for Obama. In the end, it didn’t happen. Obama crushed the Democratic vote without ever doing any specific outreach to them.
I think her issue will be more with convincing leftist independents to vote for her… And I expect her to do jack shit to win them over anyway. She’ll tack right and pick a centrist running mate ASAP.
To be fair, there isn’t anything she could say or do that would encourage me to support her, since I trust her about as far as I can throw her. So probably not worth the effort.
According to exit polls, less than a fifth of Democratic voters said they would not support Clinton if she gets the nomination. The exit polls were conducted in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Oh, less than a fifth, that’s okay… wait, a fifth?!?
What people say when interviewed on camera right after doing something they feel strongly about is probably not the best gauge as to what they’ll do when alone in a voting booth with only a few choices left, none of them their dream candidate.
I totally agree. I just thought that the phrase “less than one fifth” was absurd. As if one-fifth wouldn’t be an absolute tremendous and devastating number of people.
Here is a Nate Silver 538 article from April 5, 2008–that supports your projection about who will or won’t vote for Hillary in 2016. I agree that in the end, the vast majority of Bernie supporters, given the choice of Trump or any other republican, will vote for Hillary-- just like the vast majority of Hillary supporters ended up voting for Barack Obama.
No general election polls today, but Rasmussen finds Obama up 56-33 in the North Carolina primary. The arguably more interesting finding is that 56% of Clinton voters report they are not likely to vote for Barack Obama in the general election. As Rasmussen reports, “A month ago, 45% of Clinton voters said they were not likely to vote for Obama against McCain.”
So should this trend be troubling for Obama?
It’s not good news, certainly. There are some Clinton supporters who won’t vote for Obama in the general election — and there are also some Obama supporters who won’t vote for Clinton in the general election. However, there is no evidence from this poll that their numbers are increasing.
Let’s do some simple math. A month ago, 40% of North Carolina voters supported Clinton in the primaries, according to Rasmussen, and 45% of those voters said they wouldn’t vote for Obama in the general election. That means that 18% of likely primary voters in North Carolina both intended to vote for Clinton in the primaries and intended to vote for McCain in the general election:
I think that people overestimate the extent to which PUMA and BoB are the same, and make the incredibly bald assumption, with no evidence, that these voters are responding to the same things.
I make no such assumption about what people are responding to. Frankly, I don’t think it matters what they are responding to.
If the options are to vote for the status quo or allow someone who wants to destroy 100 years worth of social progress, I’m betting the overwhelming majority of liberals will vote for the status quo.
I know the African-American woman in your linked video does not represent the vast majority of African-Americans. In the 2016 general election against Trump or whoever the republican nominee is–Hillary will win 90 to 95 percent of the African-American vote.
The Democratic Party has star power they will put on the campaign trail in all 50 states, that republicans cannot match. By the time President Obama hits the campaign circuit in his final and farewell tour, democratic presidential nominee Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, Michelle Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, former president Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and whoever Hillary’s VP choice is Tom Perez, Secretary of Labor would be a strategic and brilliant choice)–the Obama coalition (which includes Jewish voters who voted for President Obama in large numbers overall and specifically in Ohio and Florida)–will be amped up, fired-up and ready to go.
I am not the least worried about Bernie Sanders supporters turning out to vote. The overwhelming majority of democrats and independents who lean democrat will turn out to vote. This will be a large voter turnout in the 2016 general election, which will be great for democrats seeking office and bad news for republicans seeking to be elected to office.
The overwhelming majority of liberals who vote will vote for the status quo, but we already know that’s only about half of the ones who can vote. Sanders got a lot of support from people under 30, and people under 30 usually have very bad voter turnout. PUMA was people saying, “I’ve voted democrat for X decades but I’m going to break that habit and not vote this time.” and mostly it wasn’t true. BoB is saying, “I’ve never voted before and this one candidate has me excited enough to get involved.”
If Clinton hadn’t run, the PUMAs would have supported Obama to begin with.
If Sanders hadn’t run, the BoBs wouldn’t have shown up to begin with.
Now, because of this I think it’s fair to say that Clinton won’t exactly lose votes because of BoB voters but rather that she won’t enjoy a certain group of extra voters that Sanders would have. Still, I find it absolutely baffling when people act like Clinton is more electable.
Baring some unforseen event, the democratic presidential nomination portion of the 2016 election cycle is over. Bernie Sanders at this point sees the inevitable handwriting on the wall. Hillary Clinton in recent days on the campaign trail, has reached out to Bernie Sanders and his supporters. It isvtime to begin the long process of negotiation and reconciliation, which is needed to unify the Democratic Party going into the 2016 general election.
Even though Bernie has pledged to campaign on into June, the Clinton campaign needs to seriously begin the pivot to the general election. It is important for Hillary to be begin to define the flaws in the social, political and personal characteristics of Donald Trump–that will form the basis for the line of attack on Donald Trump, in the general election.
It is time for Hillary, Bernie and the Democratic Party to unite. The outcome of the 2016 democratic presidential nomination is inevitable at this point in time.
Let me begin by saying that I bear no ill will towards Mr. Sanders. Nothing that follows should be misconstrued as an attack on his policies, his track record, his electability in November or his character. I’m not a corporate media crony, or a plant from a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. I’m just a guy who believes in the predictive power of cold, hard data.
And the unsexy truth is that, barring some catastrophic news event, Sanders will not win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. In fact, most past candidates in Sanders’s position dropped out long before this point in the race, and those who stayed in made little pretense of winning. (The Sanders campaign, which announced Wednesday it was laying off a ton of staff, may be recognizing this.)
…And that is exactly the reason why Bernie shouldn’t drop out.
Do you honestly think that Hillary is going to pivot left when going up against Trump? That she is going to champion progressive values more when fighting a Republican than when fighting Bernie?
If anyone wants to pressure Clinton into making promises to secure the progressive wing of the party, now is the time to do it, and having Bernie stay in the race is the only leverage that the progressives have.
As soon as Bernie’s out of the race, all that Clinton has to do to win the progressives to is be a better choice than Donald Trump, which is like saying that an air conditioner just has to work well enough to keep the room cooler than a furnace at full blast would in order to get the snowperson vote.
If the snowpeople want any say in setting the thermostat over the next four years, it’s in their best interest to push their candidate right to the last possible moment.
